GUESTS OF THE FESTIVAL 2008

EMILE ABOSSOLO M'BO	TELLA KPOMAHOU	MARIAME NDIAYE
KATY LENA NDIAYE	IRENE KULABAKO	LYDIA NGARUKO & ASTERIE MUKARWEBEYA
KADIJA LECLERE	GEORGE KABONGO	LUCIE THIERRY

Guido Convents gives his book 'AFRIKA VERBEELD' to Sembene Ousmane (Brussels, 2003) 

South of Senegal, 3 years after the region (Casamance) was brutally “pacified” by the French. He is not one for superstition and blind submission to authority and an incident at school, among other things, means that he receives a poor education. But he does get his love for the written word from a great-uncle, who opens the first French-speaking school. In 1938 he ends up in the “native” quarter of Dakar. For 5 years he works as a bricklayer for one of his uncles, who retains his wages. Sembène will always be proud of the buildings he helped erect; yet, on the other hand, his fight against injustice will always be directed towards the oppressive African family structure. In his free time the young Ousmane reads comic strips and goes to the cinema (for black people): lots of Westerns, as well as Chaplin, Leo McCarey, etc. One of the revelations to him is “Olympia” (Leni Riefenstahl, 1938 - 227’). This was a Nazi film made to mark the occasion of the Olympic On 9 June 2007, the most significant African filmmaker to date and world-renowned writer, Sembène Ousmane, died in Dakar. Officially he was born on 8 January 1923 in Ziguinchor, in the Games in Berlin in 1936, but, as Sembène has said elsewhere, and to me at the 1997 AFF, where he was a guest alongside another African cinema veteran, Med Hondo, he went to view the film 20 or 30 times just to see the 5 or 10 minutes in which, to Hitler’s dismay, Afro-American athlete Jesse Owens won 4 gold medals. 

It is in Dakar that Sembène first experiences being called a “dirty nigger” and “wog”. Racism deeply wounded his entire generation, without them ever quite coming to see the international power struggle from which it arose. In early 1944 Sembène is mobilised, and this takes him to Algeria and Morocco. In the desert of Nigeria, lost comrades are left to their fates, while on 1 December 1944 in Thiaroye, near Dakar, France slaughters a contingent of mutinous skirmishers just back from the war in Europe. He will go on to digest the war in “Emitaï” (1971) and in “Camp de Thiaroye” (1988), one of the most significant historical African films ever made. In these 2 films he goes out on a limb to show how nothing changed for Africans when General Charles de Gaulle took the place of Field Marshall Pétain. In contrast to his other comrades he leaves the colonial army after his regulatory 18 months. In 1946, back in Dakar, he breaks with religion. He begins to believe that he won’t find all the answers to his questions in his own country. 

In September 1946 he is in Marseille, where he gets an opportunity to work on the docks. This is extremely hard work and in this city he also experiences racism on a daily basis. He lives in a miserable African quarter, where the Africans turn inwards in despair or find their escape in alcohol. As one of the few who is able to read he finds his way to the libraries and educational evenings of the communist union, the CGT, which has a strong foothold in the docks. An insatiable hunger for knowledge from around the world is what drives him on. The absence of racism among his comrades in the CGT is an additional incentive. To start with, his ideas are humanist, but massive strikes break out when the American administration and the CIA focus on factionising the unions, as they do elsewhere in Europe. During these years war is also raging in Korea. It is only when he is in Marseille, throughout the resolute anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist strike movement of 1950 (and later the war in Indochina and Algeria), that Sembène truly comes to understand colonialism. In 1950 he joins the CGT and in the next year the PCF, and he becomes active in several African and anti-racist associations. In his view, there can be no salvation for African workers without unity with French workers, and even less without the liberation of Africa and all the workers of the world. He remains an internationalist until the end of his life. In 1951, following an industrial accident, he is forced to lay up for almost a year with a broken back, after which he becomes a switchman. In his exploration of world literature he notices that Africa does not have a place. He turns to black writers from the Antilles and America. Here too, he views himself first and foremost as a worker, and only as black after that: “Why should there automatically be unity between Africans and black Americans? My struggle is a class struggle and my solidarity is not one of race”. He sees most of the pioneers of French-speaking African literature and the Négritude as elitist. Sembène then writes his first novel, “Le Docker Noir” (1956). His third novel and literary masterpiece “Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu” (1960) is about the mass railway strike in Dakar-Nigeria in 1947-1948. 

By the late 1950s Sembène has met Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai in China, and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. In 1960, after Senegalese independence, he returns to his country of birth. He dispenses with his French nationality and leaves the PCF and other political and cultural associations. He remains a Marxist and states: “I am both an artist and a militant, but not a member of a political party; I militate through my art”. However, while on a trip through neighbouring countries, as far as Congo, he realises that writers have no real resonance with the people, who scurry to the cinema every evening. Now nearing the age of 40 he decides to make films, without giving up on his writing! In 1961-1962 he visits Moscow to learn the trade. Back in Africa he shoots “L’Empire Sonhraï” (1963), which is not distributed. In the same year he makes a short film, “Borom Saret”. With this, and even more so with his first full length film, “La Noire de...” (1966) Sembène earns the title of “father of African cinema” and “pioneer”, later “l’aîné des anciens”. These early films are so sharp and self-assured in their vision that they strike viewers in Africa and around the world dumb. Behind this lies Sembène’s motto of the 3 P’s: “Political, polemical and popular”. He believes that because of illiteracy, cinema is the best “evening school” in Africa. This is because he supports cinema that sets out make people aware of their true interests - that aims to give relaxation, but in the end, political cinema. Not “placards” or works that do nothing but complain, “I prefer to think of my films as mirrors of society”. But in his films it is always external and internal elements that get things going. Polemical? Recent studies by Mamadou Diouf and David Murphy show that one of the themes in Sembène’s work has been the fight against the official Senegalese discourse, i.e. that of Léopold Sédar Senghor (before he became president of Senegal). In “Mandabi/Le Mandat” (1968), his first colour film, spoken in Wolof, and in “Xala” (1974) Sembène turns against the black Senegalese neo-colonial class. In 1969 he is at the basis of what will later become the FESPACO, and of the FEPACI, the African association of filmmakers. 

In “Guelwaar” (1992), subtitled and distributed in Belgium by Jekino Distributie under the impetus of the AFF, he condemns the present African dependence on foreign food aid. Through his films he brought the African unity he had always been striving for closer to reality. “Moolaadé” (2004) was created almost entirely in Africa. In his films the subject of women was omnipresent. In “La Noire de...” (1966) he shows the impasse reached by a young African maid who follows her employers to France and in so doing cuts herself off from her roots; in his last film “Moolaadé”, in which he gives women the arguments to take their fates into their own hands and reject female circumcision, he shows the possibility of victories. Sembène visited Belgium again on the occasion of Africalia 2003, when Guido Convents of the AFF gave him the first copy of “Afrika Verbeeld”. Sembène was always discreet when talking of himself: “My work is of importance, I myself wish to remain anonymous, lost among the masses”. In 2007, Samba Gadjigo filled this gap with his biography, provisionally to 1956, OUSMANE SEMBENE, UNE CONSCIENCE AFRICAINE , published by Homnisphères. Sembène Ousmane wrote 5 novels, 5 collections of short stories and made twenty films (of which 9 were full length).