Ousmane Sembene

Sembene’s chief importance in the international cinematic landscape is that he’s the first film artist from sub-Saharan Africa (Senegal, to be exact).  His La Noire De… (1966) appeared at a time when cinema was virtually non-existent there, and it remains the first feature-length film to originate from this part of the “dark” continent.

As a filmmaker of color, Sembene more or less bridged the gap between Oscar Micheaux and Melvin Van Peebles (and a little bit later, Spike Lee).  There were no other black filmmakers of importance coming of age at the same time.  But the cinema wasn’t Sembene’s first artistic love, literature was.  He was an accomplished novelist who published Le Docker Noir, his first work, in 1956.  However, Sembene found faults with the written word.  They often betrayed him, mainly because all of his early writing was in French; the native tongue of the Senegalese colonizers.  For an author who liked to call into question the acts of assimilation and the social strata of his environment, among other things, this linguistic hegemony was unacceptable.

Sembene longed to communicate with his people through his art using a language of their own derivation, which was Wolof.  One problem: Wolof is an oral form of communication that had no written component at that time.  Novelizations of Wolof life told in Wolof were an impossibility.  But then, a lot of artistic representations were impossible until the cinema came into existence.

In 1961, a scholarship from the USSR (no doubt partly due to the fact that Sembene had been a card-carrying member of the communist party since the previous decade) took Sembene to the Gorki Studios in Moscow.  He studied filmmaking under the tutelage of Mark Donskoi and Sergei Gerasimov, two well-respected filmmakers in their own right.  Sembene returned to Africa in 1963 and began making short films in local languages, and, in effect, writing the history of a national cinema at the same time.

Ousmane Sembene

Mandabi (1968) followed La Noire De…, and Xala (1975) came after that.  All of his films and novels are concerned with the need for social change, which makes his work political and polemical by default.  Hopefully, after his recent demise of a few years ago, we now realize and appreciate his importance in the history and development of an international art cinema.