Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In 2003, THE LONDON MAGAZINE Black Filmmaker presented a profile of the man with the pipe and posed the question: “Ousmane Sembène: The World’s Greatest Filmmaker?” In this particular context the question might seem affirmative, maybe provocative. For a white European or American audience it is certainly surprising as Ousmane Sembène’s films haven’t been around very much in many countries of the world since his debut »Borom Sarret« in 1963. This fact itself asks questions about how their distribution in the West was carried out. However, for an African audience the question of whether Sembène was the greatest filmmaker would sound purely rhetorical or close to ideological. Sembène is one of sub-Saharan Africa’s leading intellectual figures, who has apparently easily transformed classical postcolonial thinking towards a progressive position that continuously demands Africa’s real independence, while criticizing the achievements within the first two decades of independence as an actual “step backwards.” Outside of the African continent, especially in the United States and Great Britain, a growing and interconnected community has emerged that incorporates Sembène and his work in a predominant aesthetic, political, and academic discourse. These communities, mainly African American and African British, have made use of Sembène to build bridges between the mother continent and the Diaspora. Film theorists and curators—like Manthia Diawara, June Givanni, Frank N. Ukadike or Professor Samba Gadjigo (Sembène’s official biographer)—have been systematically promoting the (academic) reception of African films—particularly on the institutional level and in postcolonial studies—through festivals and conferences.

As a matter of fact, there is hardly any other film director worldwide whose reputation is similarly dependent on the composition of a national as well as continental audience. But there might be also only few artists who have consciously challenged these different receptions. So Sembène has often talked differently to African journalists (that is to say, more seriously and factually) than to European journalists. These differences are obviously due to the nature of the questions posed to him as well as the knowledge that the respective interviewer has about African heroes and everyday politics. But Sembène leaves no doubt that his films and their meaning change according to the spectator’s identity, positioning, and background. That has earned him accusations of being arrogant. Nor was he concerned with ingratiating himself or acting as a dogsbody for the entertainment industry. Rather, he claimed that in Africa cinema had something of the evening school about it. It had an important role to play in social development but it had to find the right site of struggle.

In France, where the African community is rather divided, it is the circles of the political left, although white, who dominate the presenta- tion and interpretation of Sembène’s films. In particular around the film journal CinémAction, founded in 1978 by Guy Hennebelle and edited by him until his death in 2003, a circle of film academics and journalists emerged (Albert Cervoni, Catherine Ruelle, Daniel Serceau, amongst others), who commented systematically and regularly on film productions from the African continent from the very beginning, having the colonial and neocolonial role of France always very much in mind. It was only later that Cahiers du Cinema joined in.

Within these circles Serge Daney played a crucial role. He was likely one of the very few film intellectuals in Europe who successfully refused, already in the 1970s, to position himself within the aesthetic versus political debate led by left cineastes, instead underlining the universalistic potential of cinema. Thus he formulated a vision of Ceddoas it could certainly not have been articulated in an interview situation and follows a perception of the film that Josie Fanon, for example, was far from being interested in:

»By habit and laziness, racism too, whites always thought that emancipated and decolonized black Africa would give birth to a dancing and singing cinema of liberation, which would put them to shame by confirming the idea that, no way around it, blacks dance better than they do. The result of this “division of labor” (logical thought/body language) is that the Western specialists of recent African cinema, too preoccupied with defending it through political solidarity or misguided charity, have failed to grasp its real value and originality: the oral tradition, storytelling. Are these “stories told otherwise?” Yes, but in a cinema that is literal (but not metaphorical), discontinuous (not homogenous) and verbal (not musical). This basis in speech, not music, is what already characterized the early films of Ousmane Sembène, Oumarou Ganda, and Mustapha Alassane, as well as those created in exile by Sidney Sokhona. The same is still true for the most recent—and most beautiful—film by Sembène, shot in 1977and entitled Ceddo.« And further on, he writes:

»Between the beginning and the end of the story told by »Ceddo«, what has changed is the status of speech. In the beginning, it is clear that we are in a world where no one lies, where all speech, having no other guarantor than the person who produces it, is speech of “honor.” When he films these people who will soon be reduced to silence, Sembène first insists on restoring their most precious possession: their speech. It’s an entirely political calculation. For what the defeat of the »Ceddo« signifies is that African speech will never again be perceived by whites (first Muslims, then Christians) as speech, but instead as babble, chatter, background noise “for poetic effect” or, worse, “palavers.” Now, what Sembène brings before us, beyond archeological concerns (which we are too ignorant of Africa to evaluate) is African speech in so far as it can also have the value of writing. Because one can also write with speech.« 1

Ousmane Sembène’s status in Africa cannot be overestimated. He is, and is seen as, many things in one. He was one of the great artists of African independence; his novels described this process from the perspective of the working class, whose consciousness-raising was for Sembène a crucial element in the emancipation from French colonialism. In 1946, Sembène participated as a young member of the worker’s union in the legendary strike of rail workers on the route between Dakar and Bamako. He later incorporated this crucial event in his novel God’s Bits of Wood. In the 1960s, he was one of the pioneers of African cinema, experimenting with documentary and fiction until he discovered the classical one-and-a-half to two-hour fiction movie as his favorite format. He published some film projects between book covers as well as in films, although twice he developed the film material first.

After his film »Guelwaar« (1992) Sembène waited eight more years before he produced two new productions within a few years. He is the “Oldest of the old” (L’Ancien des Anciens) amongst African filmmakers. His decision to favor films over literature was a reaction to the ongoing illiteracy on the continent. Sembène neither avoided a fight against the corrupt state nor an argument with poet-president Senghor whom Sembène considered nothing more than a good French man. No continent other than Africa has born or can present an artist who combines such an intellectual capacity with this form of political influence. And hardly any other artist from that continent had the opportunity to work on so many historical fractions. After formal independence from Europe, Sembène identified first the constructions of African elites and later the new dependency of African countries through development aid from the North as signifiers of evil. For Sembène these two problems are interlinked. In »Mandabi« (book 1966, film 1968) he portrays a poor man wandering around. The man has received a money transfer from Paris but is not able to exchange it into cash since he is not in possession of an ID. Ignorant officials leave him to deal with the problem on his own. This helplessness is no longer visible in »Guelwaar« (film 1992, book 1994). A village divided by religious conflict comes together to organize a transport of food aid, just to pour the grain in the dust. “If your neighbour’s house catches fire, you help him to extinguish. And you also help him to rebuild the house again,” Sembène comments. “But after that, you will have to work and earn money yourself again. And the neighbour will have to complete the rebuilding of his house on his own. But in Africa this does not happen. People rely on being helped here.... You have to realise that those who rule cannot rule without outside help. And the debts, which exist because of this situation, do no good at all. At the moment you can witness the re-colonization of francophone West Africa—a re-colonization by the most legal means you can imagine. Private French companies, for instance, begin to control the big cities’ water and energy supplies, communication and TV stations. And what is left? Nothing” (Wolpert).

Sembène entered the film business as an established novelist. He joined the French army in the Second World War and lived in France between 1948 and 1960 where he worked at Citroën and the docks of Marseille. He became familiar with Marxism, became a member of the KPF and started writing in 1956, first in French and later in Wolof, the language of Senegal’s majority. He published five novels and five short story anthologies. In 1961–62, he studied film in Moscow since he was not satisfied with publishing in Wolof. His potential to influence society through the written word was quite limited due to widespread illiteracy. It has been mentioned that the move towards film was therefore a compromise. But anyone who considers these films and their effectiveness can discover quite easily that Sembène entered the medium without compromise.

»Borom Sarret« (1963) was his debut film that gave hope to many. Sembène tells the story of a carretero who dashes around Dakar with his skinny horse, transporting what is there to transport, in a manner in which he strictly takes sides. At that time, the ideology of optimism was visible throughout the recently made independent/decolonized African countries. However, this movie, which was less than half an hour long, was not supposed to fit into the demands of the ruling class since ordinary people—the working class—could literally not buy anything for themselves from independence. At the end, the carretero is robbed of his cart and therefore his tools when a suit-wearing man persuades him to drive to a formerly European part of the city called Plateau, which he was not allowed to enter with his cart. While the rich man leaves him without paying, the police officer does the “dirty work.” The carretero will not be able to feed his family anymore. The perpetrators and victims are clearly identified.

At that time, filmmaking in the sub-Saharan context was risky and adventuresome. Although France was already prepared to establish and use francophone Africa through cultural imperialism as a sales market dumping ground, the practice was not yet working. Dakar was then a city in search, on departure toward something great. The genre-spreading “Festival Mondial des Art Nègres” brought a variety of artists from all over the world who left diverse traces, and suddenly the city on the peninsula became the capital of African culture. Musicians from the whole of West Africa played in its clubs; Star Band was themusical institution of the country that later went on to produce the really big combos like Baobab and Nr. One de Dakar, as well as the young Youssou N’Dour. Several activists already joined in the 1950s to make films and support each other. That is how Paulin Soumanou Vieyra’s Afrique sur Seine (1957) evolved, which is generally identified in film history books as the first sub-Saharan African movie. Besides Vieyra and Sembène, films were regularly produced throughout the 1960s by the likes of Aboubacar Samb-Makharam, Mahama Johnson Traore, and Djibril Diop Mambety. Mambety’s approach differed from that of Sembène. Mambety’s »Badou Boy« (1970) can be read as a replica of »Borom Sarret«. It also describes an odyssey through Dakar in which the main character, a teenager without a cent in his pocket, visits the same places as Sembène’s carretero. The boy’s gestures are reminiscent of Jacques Tati and he self-confidently appropriates these places where he is not supposed to belong such as the quarter of the rich. Between Sembène and Mambety there has been a subliminal rivalry that was never put in words: on one side Sembène with his realistic view on material conditions in his environment; on the other, a loud poetic attitude whereby Mambety, no less political, portrays the everyday concerns of Dakar. However, while the disciplined worker Sembène creates an oeuvre which continuously grows, Mambety withdrew, frustrated with cinema after »Touki Bouki«(1973). He only reappeared on screen in the 1990s with »Hyènes« (1992), an opulent adaptation of a Duerrenmatt piece, »The Visit«, and two lively forty-minute films, »Le Franc« (1995) and »La petite vendeuse du Soleil« (1998), dedicated to the strength of survival of the “petits gens.” Here again Mambety is pretty far from being analytical and is rather close to clownery and fairytales, but he is nevertheless amidst description of the harsh reality. Mambety and Sembène were the only protagonists of these days of the beginnings of African cinema who have been shown over the decades at the big festivals.

The Burkinian director Idrissa Ouedraogo even commented in the 1990s that each African film made is a miracle since its individual story of production with all the organizational and financial problems is almost impossible to measure. But he said that at a time when European TV broadcasts had only just discovered “African” film and while more African films were being produced than ever before or after. The metaphor of the miracle obviously does not consider the Herculean effort that lies behind every African film—even today. Some of Sembène’s colleagues literally died of exhaustion. Aboubacar Samb-Makharam (1934–1987) or Djibril Diop-Mambety (1945–1998) are just two examples. Several filmmakers on the continent quit at one stage due to the fact that the conditions of production were too hard and sometimes even too humiliating.

»Mandabi« (1968), Sembène’s first long feature-film, was generated at a time when there wasn’t any real or reliable chance to think of a dimension of cinema between Sahara and South Africa. The FESPACO (Festival Panafricain du Cinema et de la Television de Ouagadougou) in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou, only took place for the first time one year later, annually awarding the best African film in alternation with the JCC (Les Journees Cinematrographiques de Carthage, since 1966) in Tunis. In »Mandabi«, Sembène portrays Senegalese bureaucracy as pure self-indulgence, no official understanding his job as something that should serve the people. For Sembène it signified that after independence the representatives of power may have changed, but not necessarily the circumstances within society.

»Emitai« (1971) was Ousmane Sembène’s first attempt to write African history in cinema in an African way. In 1942the French army wanted to force a male village population in the south-Senegalese Casamance to serve in the army—and thus serve a country to which the majority of the people there only nominally belonged. The women are the most radical in their attempt to resist the project by refusing to deliver rice to the army. Not for the first time—but for the first time articulated so clearly—Sembène is putting women in the main focus; not only as components but also as agents of power, struggle, and even war. This was poorly understood by the conservative societies on the continent. However, for Sembène, it was the beginning of a continuity that continued until his death in 2007.

»Xala« (1974) is a strong attack on the elites of their countries. The protagonist is as corrupt as his environment and has just found his third wife. Just before the wedding he is made deeply insecure by a curse, the »Xala«. He can no longer get an erection—and this happens just before he gets married to a young lady. The search for the reason behind the »Xala« transforms into an absurd comedy from which the protagonist cannot benefit. The fact that, of all possible people, it was the once-rejected beggar who turns out in the end to be responsible for the curse underlines Sembène’s visible understanding of class differences. Within his most productive decade, Sembène also produced his best film: »Ceddo« (1976). He turns the certainties on which Senegalese society was built upside down. Within the seventeenth century, Islamic and Christian crusades were indistinguishable in their unconditional attempt to convert people to their faith. Competition led the Imam to finally hand his rivals over to the slave traders. Sembène’s most impressive film also has the strongest score. Manu Dibango, who at that time had already reached his most creative period, delivers an Afrobeat-like soundtrack whose delayed beats unconditionally underline the victims’ pain within the religious power play.

Sembène never really had a productive relation to music. For a long time, music played a minor role in his films or was not present at all. With »Ceddo«he changed that policy. After Manu Dibango, other established stars of West African pop music such as Ismael Lo, Baaba Maal, Yandé Codou Sene, and Boncana Maiga were responsible for the score. Nevertheless this did not necessarily lead to something remarkable which seems to be due to Sembène’s indifference towards this medium. One exception was Ismael Lo’s composition for the massacre in Camp de Thiaroye, gloomy sounds dominated by a trumpet, in such a way that the memory of the image is inseparably linked to music, and vice versa. “I tried to figure out their life context, the context in which they were living. It is the trumpet that structures the day of the soldiers” (Pfaff). In »Camp de Thiaroye« there are actually more fusions within the sound collage, the precisely positioned singsong of different languages and dialects of the tirailleurs, signifying their education and also their origin in all the different colonized areas of West Africa, the swelling rattle of cutlery that leads into the protest march, the repeating melody of a harmonica that suggests tidbits of “Lili Marleen.” And the gramophone plays a further key role. “Diatta owns a gramophone. A recording on this dead apparatus contains all that music which one could play on it. The images contain textures of sound, which don’t need to be played to be heard. Later on, Albinoni will play from his hut and we will envision the image of the record player. Later on—when an African American GI visits Diatta—records will pass hands, and, while a piece of Charlie Parker is playing, names will be dropped: Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Marcus Garvey. But their naming only evokes the Harlem Renaissance, the ‘Black Atlantic’ (Gilroy) where these overtones are already created.”2 However, it took quite a few years before »Camp de Thiaroye« was produced. After »Ceddo«, Sembène focused on his favorite project, »Samory«, a film in two parts, altogether of three hours duration. It is a portrait of the Mandingo Chief who resisted the French as well as the English army and united West Africa. »Samory« Touré is known as the ancestor of former Guinean president Sekou Touré. The film was supposed to be Africa’s first big-budget production. Sembène gave nonstop interviews and even announced that he would retire once the project was finalized. But »Samory« did not materialize and thereupon has been a taboo issue. Many years of work on an unrealized film and possible exhaustion led to the gap of twelve years between »Ceddo« and »Camp de Thiaroye« — and this within Sembène’s most creative time.

»Camp de Thiaroye« (1988) is a sort of continuation of »Emitai«. Similarly, it deals with a massacre for which the French army is responsible. After the end of the Second World War demobilized African soldiers that fought within the French army in Europe against Germany are being re-barracked. The soldiers are awaiting the promised pay and resist half-heartedly after it fails to come. Nevertheless, the French commanders are not satisfied with such an unresolved situation and order tanks to kill all the Africans. As in many other films by Sembène, »Camp de Thiaroye« is drastic in its representation. And it is unreconciling towards France. Not one French franc went into the production itself and Sembène realized an idea—which remains a dream for many African filmmakers until today—producing a film without any European money. »Camp de Thiaroye« is a Senegalese-Algerian-Tunisian co-production and is thus an example of financing within the south-south-axis. For his last two movies, »Faat-Kine« (2000) and »Moolaadé« (2004), Sembène also tried to find as many collaborators on the African continent as possible. This becomes particular visible in »Moolaadé«, a pan-African production, which involved technicians and actors from several West African countries. It was also the first film Sembène produced completely outside of Senegal.

In »Guelwaar« (1992) Sembène deals once more with the ambivalence between Islam and Christianity. The old fighter »Guelwaar« has died but has unfortunately been buried in the wrong grave. And while the family of the dead tries to find his corpse, Sembène’s story enters the web of corruption and nepotism that is primarily based on the act to embezzle international aid goods. In the end, the village is united again when people attack a truck full of grain from Europe. In this film Sembène goes further than previously: for the first time he focuses not on the representation of reality in Senegal itself or on rewriting history. Instead, in »Guelwaar« he encourages people to take over their own destiny: “Resist the aid that does not help you anyway!”

It took another period of eight years before Sembène’s next film entered theaters. He was well over seventy years of age and therefore no one would have been really surprised if he had just retired from cinema. Instead »Faat-Kine« (1999) opened a new chapter in Sembène’s work—his feminist era began. Faat-Kine runs a successful petrol station in Dakar, her husband has run away, and she is raising her two children with the help of her mother. Sembène creates the image of a manless society. It is not that men are not present, but rather that they have no role to play. They do not contribute to the well-being of society nor to the family. In the end, as soon as Faat-Kine celebrates her and her children’s success the men come skulking in like the undead in a zombie film by George A. Romero. During the promotion for this film Sembène didn’t tire of highlighting in interviews the importance of the work of women for the existence and development of African societies, and his view that it is men who have to change.

In »Moolaadé« (2005) he even radicalizes this creed. The day before the old women with their long knives visit the young girls, the mothers agree on a compact to resist this tradition in order to prevent their daughters from being circumcised. This dispute soon divides the whole village. While the women try to understand the different arguments and develop either this or the other position, thus positioning themselves either in favor of or against the rebels, the men quickly hide within the fortresses of tradition and religion. With »Moolaadé«, Sembène expresses distinctly his view that changes within Africa will only be achieved through the battles led by women. Therefore he calls them heroes of everyday life.

However, Sembène is too experienced to confine himself to only one kind of perception. Maybe one can identify his distinct feminism as a mirror he shows to African men. But towards the rest of the world, he showed more solidarity towards the male population of the African continent. “Nobody can deny that we have a lot of wars going on; brothers killing brothers; we have a lot of diseases and catastrophes,” he said in an interview. “But on the other hand, we have a majority of individuals, both men and women, who are struggling on a daily basis in a heroic way and the outcome of those struggle leaves no one in doubt. This is a struggle whose purpose is not to seize power, and I think the strength of our entire society rests on that struggle. And it is because of this struggle that the entire continent is still standing up”. (Bonnie Greer, Interview)

The assembled collection of interviews represents a mixture of texts published in European and North American film magazines, of academic conversations, and albeit too small, an exemplary sample of interviews carried out by African journalists. Many of the newspapers and magazines from the African continent, as well as publications within Europe that were made by Africans in exile and focused on a predominantly African audience, no longer exist and are poorly preservedin archives. But throughout the chronological and diverse composition of conversations, Sembène’s opinions and manner of speaking itself turns out to be a kind of oral history of African cinema and postcolonialpolitics. “African cinema is itself a matter of questions and questioning, an ongoing questioning that never merely accepts the supposed givens of African reality. ... To say that African cinema is a questioning cinemais also to say that it continually moves and changes.” That is how Teshome H. Gabriel puts it in his foreword to Frank Ukadike’s compilation Questioning African Cinema, where Sembène is conspicuously absent from the table of contents but very often and allusively present in the interviews with the other African filmmakers. (3) Ukadike finally took Sembène’s refusal in 2002 to do another interview as a “blessing in disguise” as his absence opened up more space for a new generation. He is certainly right that Sembène’s oeuvre has been extensively questioned like no other director from the continent. But having it assembled in such a dense way, even readers who might be quite familiar with Sembène’s speeches might see lots of new details, facts, contradictions, dreams, Marxist inclinations, observations, and more.

Two important elements of Sembène’s standards can be found across all of these interviews. He evaluates the role of France in the postcolonial process mercilessly. In spoken word he equates France with foreign aid and corruption in Senegal and other African countries. And in conversation with Bonnie Greer he calls the politicians of francophone Africa “alienated” and claims France is responsible for Africa’s dividedness and its not being politically and culturally united. Pan-Africanism is the secondconstant in Sembène’s speeches. He refers to George Padmore and W. E. B. Du Bois and demands the collaboration of African states on all levels under the aegis of abandonment of funds of the so-called aid from the North. Still in 1978, in conversation with Pierre Haffner, Sembène demon- strated a persistent optimism that in “Africa all is possible.” He related this sentence to the development of African cinema that has been sustained since then by a few brave protagonists, but the attitude accords quite precisely with the postcolonial optimism which Sembène never implicitly shared. Later on, Sembène will appear more and more pessimistic in the interviews. To his biographer Samba Gadjigo, he speaks about Africa as a continent of 800million voiceless people and states that, “in this century, a people who cannot speak of itself is bound to disappear.” So a whole continent would disappear if these people won’t find their own voice? “No! We cannot and we should not [allow that].” Sembène always saw himself in precisely this process, to communicate with people and to give them a voice to be part of things. That becomes most beautifully obvious in the interview with Samba Gadjigo when he says: “Culture is political, but it’s another type of politics. You’re not involved in culture to be chosen. You’re not involved in its politics to say ‘I am.’ In art, you are political, but you say ‘We are. We are’ and not ‘I am.’”

Most of the interviews deal with the issues his films address and the reception of the films from all sorts of angles, or with Sembène’s biography. But hardly anyone talks to Sembène about his work with actors, the development of his scripts, the adoption of music, the meaning of a certain montage, or the collaboration with a seasoned team. The number of texts that are taken from film magazines and journals is small, a fact that just serves to further indicate that African cinema has not yet arrived within the consciousness of the West, although Sembène worked for that his whole life.

ANNETT BUSCH / MAX ANNAS

Notes
1. Serge Daney, “Ceddo(O. Sembène),” Cahiers du Cinéma, October 1979, p. 53. English
translation at http://home.earthlink.net/%7Esteevee/Daney_ceddo.html.
2. Marie-Hélène Gutberlet, Auf Reisen: Afrikanisches Kino, Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 2004.
3. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

You Look at Us as If We Were Insects (1965)

A Historic Confrontation in 1965 between Jean Rouch and Ousmane Sembène:
“You Look at Us as If We Were Insects”
ALBERT CERVONI / 1965

DURING THE COURSE of a confrontation considered today as
“historic” between Jean Rouch and Ousmane Sembène, taken down by
Albert Cervoni, some formulations were pronounced that since then
have become classics with regard to direct cinema, ethnology, and
African cinema. We’ve reproduced large excerpts of this original
interview. This has allowed us to reestablish some of the formulations
in their original precision. Since then, Sembène has refused to make
any commentary on Rouch’s cinema.

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From CinémAction81(1996). Translated from the French by Muna El Fituri.

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For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, But ... (1969)

Ousmane Sembène: For Me, the Cinema Is an Instrument of Political Action, But ...
GUY HENNEBELLE / 1969

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE could be described, especially since Le
Mandat, as one of the foremost figures in African cinema. We caught up
with him in 1969.
GH: How did you come to work in cinema?
OS: At least you can say that I did not enter the profession by the
large door. I was born in Zinguinchor, in Senegal, in 1923, in a family
which was not rich. I practiced thirty-six trades. I was a fisher, mason,
mechanic, and then a docker on the port of Marseilles for nearly six years.
I was involved in an important trade-union activity there. I also started
writing my first books there: Black Dockerin 1957; Oh Country, My Beautiful
Peoplein the same year; God’s Bits of Woodin 1960; Voltaiquein 1962;
L’Harmattanin 1964; and Vehi-Ciosanein 1965, for which I got first prize
in the Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar. And finally I wrote Le Mandatin
1966, which I made into a film.

(From L’Afrique Littéraire et Artistique, no. 7(1969). Translated from the French by Anna
Rimpl. Reprinted by permission by Monique Martineau Hennebelle.)

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We Are Governed in Black Africa by Colonialism’s Disabled Children (1971)

We Are Governed in Black Africa by Colonialism’s Disabled Children
GUY HENNEBELLE / 1971

THE SENEGALESE DI RECTOR OusmaneSembène, often
called “the pope of the African Cinema,” presented his third long film
Emitai(in color) during the last Moscow Festival. Here he is talking to us
before the preview of this film which illustrates the period of the
anticolonial resistance around 1942in Casamance (a region near
Guinea-Buissau).

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From Les Lettres Françaises, no. 1404(1971). Translated from the French by Julien Enoka-
Ayemba. Reprinted by permission of Monique Martineau Hennebelle and Corlet Editions
Diffusion S.A.R.L.

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Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People (1972)

Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People
HAROLD D. WEAVER / 1972

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE is the director of Mandabi(The Money
Order), the first African feature film to be theatrically exhibited in the
United States. French critic Guy Hennebelle characterizes Sembène as
“the pope of African cinema” and “the father of Senegalese cinema.” He
describes Sembène as a filmmaker who “pursues his own way while
zig-zagging between the contradictions of the Senegalese regime, French
neo-colonialism, and the cactuses on the desert of African cinema.” The
following interview was done by Harold D. Weaver, Jr., former Chairman
of the Department of African Studies at Rutgers University, and was
translated by Carrie Moore. It took place in 1972on the occasion of
Sembène’s participation in the 15th Annual Meeting of the African
Studies Association.

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From TheCineaste Interviews, edited by Dan Georgakas (Chicago: Lake View Press, 1983).
Reprinted by permission of Harold D. Weaver.

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Ousmane Sembène Interviewed in Munich (1972)

Ousmane Sembène Interviewed in Munich
MARIE KADOUR / 1972

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE was chosen, with nine other filmmakers
(three Asians, six Europeans), to create a documentary, in color, on the
Olympic games of Munich. Financed by a German corporation, the film
will come out in the first quarter of 1973. Ousmane Sembène is currently
finishing the editing of his sequences devoted to the African participation
at Munich. With his specific mixture of dry and frank humor, Ousmane
Sembène—in his turtleneck and faded jeans, with his short pipe, which
he is tapping nervously—agreed to answer some questions posed by
Marie Kadour.

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From Afrique-Asie(1972). Translated from the French by Annett Busch. Reprinted by
permission of Afrique-Asie.

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Ousmane Sembène: An Interview (1972)

Ousmane Sembène: An Interview
GERALD PEARY AND PATRICK MC GILLIGAN / 1972

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE is a slight but sturdy Senegalese, a
charming and provocative conversationalist, a committed revo-
lutionary. He is also a Third World film-maker of major force and
accomplishment, whose international reputation as Africa’s most
important director is based remarkably on a total output of only five
films, though he was previously well known as a novelist.
As a leading spokesman of sub-Sahara’s black artistry, Sembène has
travelled the world personally, projecting his films and spreading his
basic message of pride and confidence in the heritage and culture of
Africa’s native peoples.

-----

From Film Quarterly(Spring 1973). Reprinted by permission of Gerald Peary and Patrick
McGilligan.

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African Cinema Is Not a Cinema of Folklore (1973)

African Cinema Is Not a Cinema of Folklore
SIRADIOU DIALLO / 1973

JEUNE AFRIQUE: With six short films and three feature films in ten years,
you have become a celebrity of African cinema. But you are still a misunderstood
celebrity. Are you an adventurer, a rebel artist, or simply an iconoclast?
SEMBÈNE OUSMANE: It is hard to say what I am. They can say what
they want about me. It doesn’t bother me. I exist, I’m here, and I can’t
be rubbed off. Dead or alive, I exist and I will exist. As for my personal
life, the course of my life or my way of expressing myself is something
else and I shan’t discuss it.

-----

From Jeune Afrique, no. 27(January 1973). Translated from the French by Arianna Bove.
Reprinted by permission of Jeune Afrique.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1975)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène
MICHAEL DEMBROW AND KLAUS TROLLER / 1975

DEMBROW/TROLLER: How does the process of creation occur for you?
SEMBÈNE: It is very difficult to explain the question of creation, in
that I myself don’t believe in what one might call a formal manner of
inspiration. I think that if I must create something I pose questions
somehow or other at my level—why this subject and not another, why
I should do this and not something else, what is the objective, what
aspect of human beings do I want to reveal, in a general setting. If it is a
personal film, I concern myself further with knowing if the problem I’m
raising would interest everyone, and how to go about making it of
interest to others.
And there, I think that for me it is at that moment that the work of
investigating the very level of human beings, of the nature of this
subject with individuals, with other subjects, begins. I don’t know if
I’m making myself understood; creation is never detached from the
social context of the man himself.

-----

From Michael Dembrow’s website,
Transcribed by Kiki Dembrow. Translated by Michael Dembrow. Reprinted by permission
of Michael Dembrow.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1976)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène
NOUREDDINE GHALI / 1976

GHALI: Did the village where the action takes place in Emitaireally exist?
SEMBÈNE: It is a Senegalese village which was destroyed by the colonial
army, but which still exists. We keep these villages like relics of our
history. I was relatively young in 1942, not yet in the army, when the
Diola massacre took place. Later, while making a film and being concerned
somewhat with history and the heroism of everyday life, I thought a
start might be made on something more contemporary.
It is true that people are always talking about the great African resistance
fighters, but often people do not know what they were really like and
how certain countries and certain tribes resisted. The independence
movement was not born like that; it was born in different contexts. If
this movement was born from what is called the ideology of “negritude,”
I am unaware of it, because I was living with my people, in the same
conditions as my people.

------

From Film and Politics in the Third World, edited by John D. H. Downing (New York:
Praeger, 1987). Translated by John D. H. Downing. First published in Cinéma76, #208
(April 1976).

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Sembène Ousmane in Kinshasa (1977)

Sembène Ousmane in Kinshasa
PIERRE HAFFNER / 1977

SEMBÈNE OUSMANE gave this interviewat the Intercontinental
Hotel in Kinshasa on November 13, 1977. Sembène had stayed in
Kin-la-belle (the capital of Zaire was still called that at the time) from
October 30and was going to leave on the following day. He presented
all of his cinematographic work up to Ceddo—which actually celebrated its
premiere in the continent—and talked with students, senior officials,
writers, filmmakers, priests, and ordinary people from the Popular
Movement of the Revolution; at every opportunity, he opened up with
extraordinary and generous honesty. For me, the most difficult thing
was to arrange this talk: despite our complicity for the previous fifteen
days and our fifteen walks through the “cité” kinois (which is what the
popular districts are known as), Sembène pretended to have resolved
once and for all to avoid answering these questionnaires with his
incurable and often tiring curiosity ... It would be inappropriate to
pride myself with overcoming the resistance of a friend, so I simply
want to share with the reader the privilege of having constrained for
this long the man who dedicates all of the power of his love and work
to the transformation of this “bitch that is Africa” (in L’Harmattan)

-------

From Recherche, Padagogie et Culture, no. 37(1978). Translated from the French by Anna
Rimpl and Annett Busch. Reprinted by permission by Claude Haffner.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1978)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène
ROLF RICHTER / 1978

WE HAD THE CHANCE to meet and talk to Ousmane Sembène
in Moscow, as we attended the press conference for of his movie Ceddo
and were permitted to read the director’s notes on it. We provided this
information for the film und television industry.

--------

From Film und Fernsehen, vol. 6, no. 2(1978). Translated from the German by Gabi Schneider.
Reprinted by permission of Erika Richter.

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In the Name of Tolerance: A Meeting with Ousmane Sembène (1979)

In the Name of Tolerance: A Meeting with Ousmane Sembène
JOSIE FANON / 1979

THE LAST FI LM BY OUSMANE SEMBÈNE, Ceddo, has
recently been screened for the first time in the movie theaters of Paris.
The Senegalese have been waiting for the release for more than three
years. Ceddohas been a victim of a de facto interdiction, the object of a
bad linguistic quarrel provoked by the government of President Senghor;
the film is therefore not accessible to those to whom the filmmaker had
emphatically devoted it to. However, based on the tempered and
controversial reactions to it, one can predict that the film will evoke
such passionate responses between the Africans who have seen it in Paris
that it will be finally distributed also in Senegal.
In Ceddo, a historical movie, history has been mistreated to some
degree, Sembène Ousmane sacrificing it to symbolism and allegory,
shortening several historic eras to one single anecdote. Are we in the
sixteenth or seventeenth century? That’s the first objection historians
will necessarily make. Moreover, as the film deals with the penetration
of Islamic religion in West Africa, one should have the right to ask the
filmmaker: which interpretation of the role of the Islam do you want to
give? A historical subject, of course, but also a current one. Sembène
Ousmane talks to Demain l’Afriqueabout all of these issues and addresses
first the motives behind the interdiction of the film.

-------

From Demain l’Afrique, no. 32(1979). Translated from the French by Annett Busch. Reprinted
by permission of Olivier Fanon.

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Samori: The Last Grand Oeuvre of Sembène Ousmane (1986)

Samori: The Last Grand Oeuvre of Sembène Ousmane
ALIOUNE TOURÉ DIA / 1986

BINGO: When can we see the first scenes of your film about Almamy
Samori Touré?
SEMBÈNE OUSMANE: Next year, we hope, depending on funds that
begin to come in. Considering the ambition and the scale of film, we
solicited contributions from all of the states, knowing that the states of
West Africa were part of the Malinké territory. We have Gabon, where
historically many things concerning Almamy happened (his exile).
I contacted President Bongo to ask if we could shoot in Gabon. He gave
his agreement. We also have promises from Cameroun and Congo. And
I have to admit that it is thanks to the support of President Abdou Diouf
that the film can be realized. It was President Abdou Diouf himself who
wrote to the heads of state.

--------

From Bingo(1986). Translated from the French by Arianna Bove.

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I Am Tired, My Desire Is to Leave (1986)

I Am Tired, My Desire Is to Leave
MEISSA DIOP / 1986

THE EVENT HAS BEEN EAGERLY awaited for over ten
years—since 1977, when Ousmane Sembène finalized the shooting of
Ceddo. A long time torch carrier for Senegalese and even African cinema,
the man is certainly no longer the monument that he once was. The
emergence of other directors and films with a more contemporary and
different take on African life has affected his popularity and so has the
criticism from a new generation film critics from which he has not been
spared. Their opinions are reflected in the answer given by a man of
culture to the question of who is the best Senegalese cineaste: “Sembène,
unfortunately ...”
At a gala evening on December 22, in anticipation of the screening of
Camp of Thiaroye, a film for which the polemics surrounding its production
sufficed for publicity, Sembène speaks about it, as well as about
Senegalese and African cinema and about his projects.

---------

From Wal Fadjri, no. 141(1988). Translated from the French by Anna Rimpl.

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The Language of Real Life (1989)

The Language of Real Life
KWATE NEE OWOO / 1989

KWATE NEE OWOO: How are you able to reproduce the language of real life
working with non-professional actors?
OUSMANE SEMBÈNE: If you are working with actors who are not
professionals, and you are trying to reproduce the language of real life,
you have to take special care with gestures and movement, to be careful
not to destroy anything of the original atmosphere, nor destroying
anything of their personality. Africans talk a lot. That doesn’t mean that
what they say doesn’t make sense, but they do talk a lot. For instance
I personally can speak/understand Wolof, Bambara, Malanke. Take for
example the question of greeting. People will greet each other and go
into some other matter, and in the middle of the other matter they would
suddenly start greeting each other out of the blue.

------

From Framework, vol. 36(1989), and Framework, vol. 49, no. 1(Fall 2007). Reprinted by
permission of Framework.

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If I Were a Woman, I’d Never Marry an African (1992)

If I Were a Woman, I’d Never Marry an African
FÍRINNENÍ CHRÉACHÁIN / 1992

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE is one of francophone Africa’s greatest
artists to date. Born in Senegal in 1923, he was expelled from school at
fourteen and worked successively on construction sites in Dakar, in the
French army in the Second World War, and as a docker in Marseilles,
where he continued his education in trade union night-schools. His first
novel appeared in 1956, and his great literary masterpiece, God’s Bits of
Wood, in 1960.

-------

From African Affairs, vol. 91, no. 363(1992). Reprinted by permission of African Affairs.

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Ousmane Sembène (1992)

Ousmane Sembène
JAMES A. JONES / 1992

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE is an internationally famous author and
filmmakerfrom Senegal. Among his works is his second book, Les Bouts
de Bois de Dieu(God’s Bits of Wood), a novel about the 1947–1948
railroad strike in French West Africa. From other interviews and archival
research, I was already aware at the time of this interview that Sembène’s
novel about the strike actually synthesized events from the 1938and
1947strikes, and manufactured the “women’s march to Dakar.” However,
I was interested in Mr. Sembène’s ideas about the significance of the 1947
strike and how people perceived different aspects of the railroad.
This interview took place in Mr. Sembène’s office in Dakar. He had
no warning because I just dropped in at the suggestion of Mr. Kassé of
the University of Dakar. However, while I talked to his secretary, he
opened his morning mail, and then invited me into his office which
was papered with posters from his movies and color prints of images
from the colonial period.

-------

From James A. Jones’s website, http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his311/archives/intervus/
Sembene.htm. Reprinted by permission of James A. Jones.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène (1992)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène
FRANÇOISE PFAFF / 1992

HI S CASUAL I NTERVI EW-TALK about this and that with
Ousmane Sembènewas conducted by Françoise Pfaff on July 10, 1992,
during the festival of African cinema in Toronto, Canada.

-------

Previously unpublished. Translated from the French by Anna Schrade. Printed by permission
of Françoise Pfaff.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène about Guelwaar (1995)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène about Guelwaar
BERND WOLPERT / 1995

BW: The story that you tell in Guelwaarstarts with an administration error.
Was this incident based on an actual event or was it completely invented by
your (artistic) imagination?
OS: It really happened. Only recently did I hear that something similar
happened again. The dead bodies of two women with the same name,
of the same age and from two villages only ten miles apart, were
mistaken for each other. One of the two women had already been buried
when the parents of the other woman noticed the error as they came to
pick up the body. They therefore decided not to bring the body into their
own village, but their daughter had already been buried. Thus, the two
women were buried in graves next to each other

----

From EZEF, http://www.gep.de/ezef/Guelwaar-2006.pdf. Translated from the German by
Gabi Schneider. Reprinted by permission.

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Ousmane Sembène (1995)

Ousmane Sembène
DAVID MURPHY / 1995

MURPHY: Your first novel, Black Docker, deals with the African community
in Marseilles during the 1950s. The Jamaican writer, Claude McKay, also deals
with the black community in Marseilles during an earlier period, the 1920s,
in his novel, Banjo. Had you read this book before writing Black Docker?
SEMBÈNE: No, I hadn’t read it. I still haven’t read it either. I don’t think
it was available during the colonial period. I know people have written
comparisons of the two books but I myself haven’t read it.

-----

Interview conducted 30November 1995. From Sembène: Imagining Alternatives in Film and
Fictionby David Murphy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003). Reprinted by permission
by David Murphy.

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Still the Fire in the Belly: The Confessions of Ousmane Sembène (2000)

Still the Fire in the Belly: The Confessions of Ousmane Sembène
MAMADOU NIANG / 2000

MAMADOUNIANG: I’m curious about the way you shuttle between the
novel and filmmaking. It is not usual for writers, and it shouldn’t be easy for
you who put almost all of your novels on the screen. How does Sembène “the
writer” get to filmmaking, and how does Sembène “the filmmaker” get back
to writing?
OUSMANE SEMBÈNE: Well! I must confess it’s not always easy.
A screenplay is a book written in telegraphic form, and the dialogues have
to respect a carefully planned timing. You cannot be verbose. You must
resort to mimics, body language, eye contact, the movements of actors,
etc.... I think they are separate trades, but they’re not incompatible for
me, I’m used to it since I’ve been doing it for over thirty years.

-------

From the African Film Festival’s 2001website, http://www.africanfilmny.org/network/
news/Fniang.html. Reprinted by permission of Mamadou Niang.

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Interview with Ousmane Sembène (2004)

Interview with Ousmane Sembène
SAMBA GADJIGO / 2004

AFTER MORE THAN THREE YEARS OF WORK, Ousmane
Sembène has just completed the final touches on his feature film Moolaadé.
This film, selected for the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard section)
will be presented to the press on May 14, then to the general public on
May 15. A few hours after the completion of the film, on April 11,
Mr. Sembène granted me this interview that I conducted in Rabat.

-------

From Rabat(April 11, 2004). Reprinted by permission of Samba Gadjigo.

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The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane Sembène (2004)

The Power of Female Solidarity: An Interview with Ousmane
Sembène
JARED RAPFOGEL AND RICHARD PORTON / 2004

IN A CAREER STRETCHING from 1966’s Black Girlto his most
recent film, Moolaadé, the eighty-one-year-old Senegalese director
Ousmane Sembène has established himself not only as one of the giants
of African cinema but as one of the world’s great political filmmakers.
Trained as a dockworker until being drafted into the French army during
World War II, and later a trade-union activist in Marseilles, Sembène
began his career as a novelist (his many books include Le docker noirand
God’s Bits of Wood), before turning to film in 1966with the short Borom
Sarret. This was followed by the feature, Le Noire de... (Black Girl, 1966),
a portrait of a young Senegalese woman working as a domestic in the
home of a middle-class French family. Sembène has since made eight
feature films, which have ranged widely in terms of setting and period,
from urban to rural and from the nineteenth century to World War II to
the present day, but his political commitment, acute social observation,
and cinematic sophistication have remained constant.

-----

From Cineaste(Winter 2004). Reprinted by permission.

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Ousmane Sembène (2005)

Ousmane Sembène / 2005
BONNIE GREER

OUSMANE SEMBÈNE, the Senegalese-born “father of African
cinema,” talked to Bonnie Greer about film-making in Africa, his European
experiences and why Live 8 is fake, before receiving the fellowship of
the BFI. Here’s a full transcript.

-----

From The Guardian(June 5, 2005). Reprinted by permission of Bonnie Greer.

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