Mandabi: Paper Trail

Born in Casamance—a diverse southwestern region of Senegal where Wolof is spoken alongside a mixture of other African and colonial languages—Sembène arrived at filmmaking through labor as well as literature. In other words, before Sembène had a life’s work, he worked: by sailing between Dakar and Ziguinchor (Casamance’s administrative hub), in military service during World War II, at a Paris Citroën factory, on the docks in the Marseille harbor, where he met other African migrant workers. In 1951, he suffered a back injury from an occupational accident in France and, during his recovery, read vigorously, switching to literature of a different measure than the comic books that he had devoured as an adolescent in Dakar. He used the library of the French Communist Party, which he had joined in 1950, reading about Marxism, anticolonialism, organizing strategies, internationalism, and Black struggle.

But in all that study, he did not see what he was looking for: the Black masses in Africa. He would begin to write about them himself. He wrote his first novel, Black Docker (1956), in Marseille, drawing on his own experiences as an African worker. The opening is imagistic, describing the twin hills, called the Mamelles, of Senegal’s Cap-Vert peninsula: “Mossy in some places, bare in others, their barrenness made them ridiculous. The savanna was broken up by knobbly, parasitic cacti. The baobabs looked neglected, like twigs shed from a broom.” A woman watches, her face “wet with tears,” as an ocean liner rounds these hills, a cloud passing in front of the sunset “filtering the reddish rays, tingeing the sky a deep rust.” Seeing the ship leave the continent behind, on the way to France, is an aesthetic and sensorial experience: a wet face, mossy hills, neglected baobabs, reddish rays, rusting sky.

These lingering descriptions reveal why Sembène not only preferred literature to films in general but also, as his biographer Samba Gadjigo notes, preferred his literature to his films. His literary representations of landscape reproduce with hyperprecision the way places make one feel, creating a rhythm that allows a subtle attention to the idea of Africa that is possible only in literature. One of his most lyrical novels, Ô pays, mon beau peuple! also traffics in thick, sometimes indulgent, descriptions that cumulatively offer a kind of manifesto of the senses: “The pungent smell of flower-covered liana was interspersed with lingering odors of hot oil and smoke . . . The front-row trees bent eagerly over the glaucous water, their branches and lianas interwoven in a dazzling chaos, a truly anarchic vegetal webwork.” In God’s Bits of Wood, perhaps Sembène’s best-known novel, this sensory focus expands to a panoramic mode that considers political action from multiple angles, recounting a historic railroad strike that took place in colonial French West Africa from October 1947 to March 1948. Notably, the women of Bamako in Mali, and of Thiès and Dakar in Senegal, join the struggle, playing an important part in Sembène’s account of African people as political agents.

“Mandabi must be understood as the crossroads in Sembène’s search for his true audience, plotting a contrast between a ‘traditional’ Africa and the bureaucracies of neocolonialism led by a new African elite.”

Published the same year that Senegal gained independence from France, God’s Bits of Wood shares its gender and anticolonial political concerns with Black Girl, which addresses the impact of imperialism through European contact. In a departure from Sembène’s earlier focus on the terror wielded by colonial powers, Mandabi is about oppression within Africa and the ways it is manifested in tradition, religion, and corruption. The horrors inflicted by the French colonial government still linger, of course, but they now have moved from the foreground to the background. Mandabi, then, must be understood as the crossroads in Sembène’s search for his true audience (who were also participants and collaborators), plotting a contrast between a “traditional” Africa and the bureaucracies of neocolonialism led by a new African elite.

Mandabi follows the patriarch Ibrahima Dieng (Makuredia Guey) as 
he tries to cash a money order sent to him by his nephew Abdou, who has been working in Paris as a street sweeper. The fidgety Ibrahima is unemployed, with two wives and seven children to feed, but he is preoccupied with keeping up appearances. On the surface, the title suggests that the film is about money. Who gets it? How do you access it? What does it do to people? Sembène described the film as Brechtian, invoking a performance practice that relies on defamiliarizing the familiar in order to bring out the hidden inequities of social life. As a satire, the film reveals a difficult, complex world full of suffering. Though the money order gives rise at first to the great hope that Ibrahima’s material suffering will be relieved, this vicissitude of fortune instead sets off disorder. At the post office and then the police department, Ibrahima is sent on a wild-goose chase to procure the documents necessary to collect the money. With no identity card, no driver’s license, and no draft card, he can’t cash the order. Mandabi depicts the infuriating experience of having one’s livelihood continually blocked by administra­tive details.