adminnephew of an Islamic scholar, but his two grandmothers were his main influence. Expelled from a colonial school for striking a French teacher, he was sent to his father’s family in Dakar, where he worked at myriad jobs, while reading and going to the cinema each evening.
In 1944, as a French citizen, he was called up, serving in France and Niger. On demobilisation, with high unemployment in postwar Dakar, he stowed away to Marseille, where he worked as a docker for 10 years until 1960, when Senegal became independent.
He wrote his first novel, Le Docker Noir, in 1956, based on a Marseille strike in which he was involved, followed by Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (God’s Bits of Wood) in 1960, a moving story of the 1947 strike against the French along the Dakar-Niger railway (in which he had also participated); the book was also the first to formulate women as active agents in liberation and the historical process.
He returned to Senegal with an ambition to make films reach rural areas, often illiterate, public and was offered a scholarship to the Gorky film institute in Moscow, where he studied under Marc Donskoy. His career began with two short films that reflected his preoccupations: in Borom Sarett (1963), a taxi driver has his cart confiscated for entering an expensive housing estate previously occupied by the French and now by the new African bourgeoisie. The second film, Niaye (1964), was a denunciation of the hypocrisy of traditional African chiefs. Sembène’s first feature, La Noire de . . . (Black Girl) in 1966, shot in black and white, is a searing account of the isolation of a young black domestic servant working in Antibes and the first African feature produced and directed by an African.
“For us, African film-makers, it was then necessary to become political, to become involved in a struggle against all the ills of man’s cupidity, envy, individualism, the nouveau-riche mentality, and all the things we have inherited from the colonial and neo-colonial systems,” Sembène stated.
This was followed, in 1968, by the international success Mandabi (The Money Order) based on his novel Le Mandat (1966) which looks at the effects of post-colonial Africa on the lives of ordinary people. Shot in two versions — French and Wolof, the majority language of Senegal — it won a special jury prize in Venice. Sembène’s joint careers in film and literature were always aimed at the Senegalese public (“Africa is my audience, the west and the rest are markets”) and have consistently been informed by his politics and his understanding of the contradictions of a rapidly transforming continent.
Emitai (1971) confronts French military conscription in Senegal, while Xala (1974), based on his novel written in 1973, uses xala, the ancient Senegalese curse, to render a smug Westernised black bourgeois businessman impotent on the day of his wedding to his third wife. It is a metaphor for the embrace of western methods and values.
In Ceddo (1976) Sembène plays out a confrontation between African traditions and Christian and Muslim attempts to impose themselves. The film was banned by the Senegal government for some years, supposedly because “ceddo” was misspelled, but probably because of its reference to African collusion in the provision of slaves to the West.
Perhaps his greatest film is Camp de Thiaroye (1988), based on an actual event. Senegalese soldiers returning from the war in Europe, where they had been kept in German prisoner-of-war camps, are based in a transit camp while waiting for their demobilisation, but when the time comes their severance pay is drastically cut and the soldiers revolt.
In Guelwaar (1992) a radical Catholic priest is erroneously buried in a Muslim cemetery and mayhem inevitably follows. In L’Héroïsme au Quotidien (1999) Sembène fully confronts the heroism of African women and their need to break out of their subjugation. Sembène’s themes — colonialism, tradition, capitalism, patriarchy, religion — all reduced to his portrayal of power and its use and abuse, whether by whites or blacks.
According to the film historian Laura Mulvey, Sembène was committed “to promoting and transforming traditional culture, to using the cultural developments of Western society in the interests of Africa. Sembène is more interested in finding a dialectical relationship between the two cultures than in an uncritical nostalgia for pre-colonial pure African-ness.”
Largely self-taught, Sembène was a prolific writer and director. He toured Senegal with his films. He was married and divorced twice, and had three sons. — The Guardian
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