Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène: History in the Remaking

In an interview for a 1983 documentary, Ousmane Sembène responded to a question about whether his films were legible to European audiences by saying: “Why be a sunflower and turn toward the sun? I myself am the sun.” These words might read as a show of bombastic egotism from the Senegalese filmmaker—who arguably remains the most towering figure in the history of African cinema—but situated within the political landscape from which he emerged, his comments register as a cri de coeur from a continent refusing the ongoing subjugations of colonization. Throughout his four-decade film career, Sembène was committed to African autonomy, and this steadfast devotion led him to become a foundational contributor to the hard-won, dynamic flourishing of an independent cinematic tradition on his home continent.

Before Sembène’s time, cinema had largely functioned in Africa as an instrument of European oppression. The technology had been introduced there by Western colonial forces as one of many mechanisms of domination, regulation, and extraction, and the 1934 Laval Decree had effectively forbidden Africans living in French colonies from making films. It was only with the end of the colonial era, in the 1960s, that what had essentially been a tool of assimilationist propaganda was reshaped by the emergence of countercinematic practices, as African nation-states started subsidizing film production and filmmakers began to engage in collective organizing. Existing within a broader ecosystem of decolonization struggles, this initial surge of cultural production was mostly an effort to represent Africans more accurately, in contrast to the “bad” images and stereotypes that permeated white, Western audiovisual media. But this project soon became consciously political, once it found a more radical, oppositional objective—to use cinema in service of African liberation.

Sembène was in every way emblematic of this effort. Born in 1923 in the town of Ziguinchor, located in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, he had gained a wide range of work experience before he arrived at his cinematic vocation. As a teenager, he lived in Dakar, where he trained to be a mason and a mechanic while also nurturing a cinema-going habit. France’s 1940 defeat by Germany in World War II was soon reverberating throughout the colonies, and Sembène joined the ranks of young Africans drafted into the war in 1944. Not long after completing his service, he moved to Marseille, where he worked as a docker, became interested in Black American literature, and joined the French Communist party—a convergence of cultural  and political life that both deepened his consciousness and awakened his desire to express it.

In the fifties, Sembène explored his burgeoning artistic inclinations by dabbling in painting and beginning to write, publishing two novels before the end of the decade. Then, in the wake of Senegal’s declaration of independence from France in 1960 and the election of the poet and intellectual Léopold Sédar Senghor as the nation’s first president, he resolved to become a filmmaker. Following the cinephilia of his adolescence, and informed by his Marxist leanings, Sembène headed to the Soviet Union for training, and by the end of the sixties he had already made five films, including the feature Black Girl (1966), a piercing look at the brutalities of colonization through the story of a young Senegalese woman (M’Bissine Thérèse Diop) who goes to work as a nanny for a French couple.

Sembène entered what could fairly be called his most experimental and daring period in the 1970s. The three features he made in this decade—Emitaï (1971), Xala (1975), and Ceddo (1977)—represent the apex of his politically robust and aesthetically virtuosic filmography. By engaging with the past and intervening in the present, he approached history as something active and kinetic, in a constant process of being revisited, rewritten, and revived. In addition to being innovative works of historiography, these three films are also remarkable for their formal experimentation, breaking apart and remaking the cinematic codes of time and spatial cohesion. Moving from revolutionary drama to postcolonial satire to historical epic, Sembène developed a potent anticolonial discourse.

By revisiting what was then a relatively recent historical episode, Emitaï offers its audience a form of political education, propelled by an awareness of the need to recuperate Senegal’s inheritance of anticolonial struggle, which had been actively suppressed. During the colonial years, France had imposed its own version of history on the Senegalese population through its education system—a fundamental tactic of domination—and Sembène’s unambiguous depiction of racialized labor exploitation and resource extraction sets out to correct that account. This radical narrativizing was certainly still needed given that, after the formal end of colonial control, nominally independent states such as Senegal had begun to reformulate the preexisting architecture of oppression instead of eradicating it. The Martinican militant political thinker Frantz Fanon had correctly diagnosed the condition that would be a key target of Sembène’s campaign of demystification: the reality that many of Africa’s postindependence governments had become avenues for the continuation of colonial power. Erected by members of the growing local bourgeoisie, these new political structures betrayed the interests of the poor and working masses, as well as the very possibility of economic autonomy.

Sembène brings these same concerns into Xala, adapted from a satirical novel he published in 1973. In contrast to the epic seriousness of Emitaï (a film that is nonetheless not devoid of humor), Xala has characteristics of a raunchy comedy. The protagonist, a government official named El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye (Thierno Leye) who is embedded in the highest echelon of the Senegalese bourgeoisie, is suddenly stricken by a curse of impotence. Sembène uses the character’s affliction as a metaphor for the entire class, exposing the hypocrisy and ineffectiveness of those who, in taking advantage of the French incursion to amass wealth and gain a political foothold, failed their own people by flaccidly depending on colonial power to maintain a mirage of authority.

Unlike Emitaï, Xala is set in Sembène’s time, allowing him to interrogate the protocols of history-making as they were operating in the present day. By taking aim at the Senghor government’s hollow claims that it was enacting an African socialism, he pushes back against the state-sanctioned narratives that, despite boasting of emancipatory objectives, ultimately secured the continued subordination of the Senegalese populace. The film poses urgent questions about the fate of the nation, challenging its foundations while identifying the obstacles impeding genuine decolonization.

Sembène’s retelling of history in Ceddo and elsewhere is rooted in oral traditions, which explains why he is frequently identified with the figure of the griot. Often occupying a lower social stratum in African society, griots are storytellers, musicians, and performers who narrate the history and social life of their communities. This cultural practice offered a model for politically conscious filmmakers like Sembène as they strove to develop an autonomous African cinema with its own genealogy and purpose. Because filmmaking practices and norms had largely been shaped by racist, colonialist ideologies, it was crucial for Sembène to revolutionize the medium by hybridizing it. As an artist with a sense of duty to his people, he melded cinema with precolonial expressive forms—a process literalized in Ceddo, which features many scenes of griots explaining the shifting dynamics of a power struggle in front of various community assemblies.

Understanding Sembène’s films as cinematized oral storytelling allows us to also appreciate the importance of sound in his work, as evidenced in his use of music, speech, and even silence. These sonic elements were not just narrative and stylistic tools for him—they had profoundly political implications. Throughout Emitaï, Xala, and Ceddo, chatter and rhetoric are primarily the province of men and are shown to be by turns ineffective and deceitful. Emitaï features repetitive episodes of interminable palaver, in which the Diola men are depicted sitting around the foot of a tree, giving voice to their problems and debating with or about their deities. Meanwhile, the women in the film remain mostly silent while they engage in agricultural labor and a stealth operation to hide their stores of rice from the French under cover of night.

In Ceddo, much of the story is related through speech, particularly via the imam’s verbalized scheming, while the conclusive action on which the community’s fate pivots is undertaken by the nearly silent princess. And in Xala, rhetoric is viewed as having the potential to be both fraudulent and emancipatory. The beginning of the film features a persuasive declaration of anticolonial liberation—“We must take back what is ours, what is ours by right”—spoken by a businessman participating in a Senegalese takeover of the French-established chamber of commerce. But those words are revealed to be impotent, and in what plays like a reversal of that opening scene, El Hadji, banished from the clique that heads the chamber, delivers a blistering speech that indicts the group’s corruption.

Sembène also wields music with political purpose and formal skill. One instance of this occurs in a disorienting passage in Ceddo that begins with a shot of a pitifully unpopular Catholic priest who has one disciple among the Ceddo, followed by a flash-forward to a dizzying view of the ceiling of Dakar’s Cathédrale Notre-Dame-des-Victoires in the present day. We then see an outdoor Catholic mass and hear a Diola choir singing the hymn “Alléluya Afrik,” a moment of syncretism further underscored by the presence of a samp (a staff used by griots to catalyze some form of discourse or exchange) in the ceremony. A similar juxtaposition of cultural traditions occurs in Xala. The wedding of El Hadji to his new bride is set to the jazzy music of Star Band de Dakar, suggesting that the protagonist has sold out to Western culture. In contrast, another scene depicts a destitute man sitting outside El Hadji’s office warehouse, plucking the strings of a xalam to play the film’s central musical motif, which Sembène wrote with the griot Samba Diabare Samb. With its Wolof lyrics and prominently featured West African instrumentation, the song offers a hint of anticolonial rebellion, anticipating the film’s rightfully vengeful conclusion.

Despite the playfulness and ingenuity of his filmmaking, including in his use of sound, Sembène is frequently underappreciated as an adventurous formal stylist. This is especially clear when comparing his critical reception to that of Djibril Diop Mambéty, a fellow Senegalese filmmaker known for his anarchic, experimental flamboyance—the enfant terrible against whom Sembène has often been cast as a staid social realist. This kind of binary thinking has a flattening effect on film history, as seen in the oppositions that are often drawn between Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. Such oversimplifications of Sembène’s aesthetic—as well as the honorific with which he has been labeled, “Father of African Cinema”—are, however efficient, too limiting. Sembène’s contributions to African cinema were more wide-ranging than has been suggested by these reductive categories and hyperboles of patriarchal singularity. A founding member of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI)—a collective committed to using film in service of political, cultural, and economic liberation—he was, if anything, one of the many uncles of African cinema. The need to accurately remember Sembène as part of an entire generation of cultural workers goes hand in hand with the importance of acknowledging how his cinema broke the mold of social realism, an aspect of his work that his three features from the seventies bring into sharp focus.

To understand the source of Sembène’s formal inventiveness, we must first recognize the many ways in which he was antiauthoritarian to the bone—often with respect to the government under Senghor. Though the history of Sembène and Senghor’s relationship is ultimately more complex than can be properly addressed here, the former’s Marxism did cause undeniable friction with the values of the president, who was connected with Senegal’s Frenchified elite and whose interpretation of Négritude—a mostly literary movement of Black consciousness that Senghor founded with Martinican writer and statesman Aimé Césaire and Guianese poet Léon-Gontran Damas—is seen by some as racially essentialist. Senghor’s bourgeois worldview clashed with Sembène’s polemical character and commitment to working-class solidarity, traits that were influenced by ideologies that originated outside of Africa and would therefore have been viewed by Senghor as a betrayal of authentic Africanity.

Sembène’s many clashes with authority led to the suppression of his work. Emitaï was banned in France for its frank portrayal of the brutality of colonization, and its distribution was suppressed in African countries that had been former French colonies. The president of the chamber of commerce in Xala is a mocking allusion to Senghor, who would go on to be the subject of an even more obvious caricature in the filmmaker’s 1981 novel The Last of the Empire.

Sembène’s antagonism toward Senghor was also a response to the president’s alienation from Wolof and his allegiance to French, which he made Senegal’s official language even though Wolof was spoken by the majority of the country’s population. The government also held a position on the standardization of Wolof, and Ceddo was banned for eight years because the state dictated the title should be spelled with only one d. Despite what might seem like a trivial discrepancy, it makes sense that Sembène refused to capitulate to this requirement, given the dispute’s roots in a far broader issue of linguistic paternalism.

The director had already demonstrated his devotion to Wolof as part and parcel of his vision of anticolonial independence, reflected not only in the linguistic choices of his films but also in his involvement in founding Kaddu, the first Wolof-language monthly, in 1971. His seventies films had been preceded by Mandabi (1968), a cultural watershed that is often heralded as the first feature film shot in an African language. Sembène’s attention to the politics of language is emphasized in Xala by a character who delivers a copy of Kaddu to El Hadji’s secretary with a rousing message that the paper is written in their native tongue and that they must love it and themselves.

In his vision of anticolonial history, Sembène hailed the masses rather than singular leaders. This is evident in the powerful resistance of the community of outsiders in Ceddo and in the way Emitaï locates revolutionary and transformative potential in the collective. In Xala, many of the impoverished people with whom El Hadji clashes have severe disabilities, and Sembène’s attention to their gestures of shared survival is at times painfully moving, infusing the otherwise merciless film with occasional tenderness.

This focus on solidarity is inseparable from the feminist themes that run through Sembène’s work. This thread is obvious in Emitaï and Ceddo, and while women are not agents of historical change in Xala as they are in those films, they do play a significant role as custodians of custom. El Hadji’s daughter, Rama (Miriam Niang), complicates the binary between the precolonial and the postcolonial. She is attentive to traditional values, insisting on speaking Wolof in defiance of her father’s wish to speak only French, and defending her mother’s privileged status as the first of El Hadji’s three wives. At the same time, Rama signals a decolonial horizon by refusing to drink imported Evian water—which her father calls his favorite drink and, in a truly obscene display, uses to wash his Mercedes—and has posters of the revolutionary Pan-Africanist Amílcar Cabral and a borderless map of the African continent that contrasts with the colonially divided one that appears in an earlier scene at the chamber of commerce.

Sembène’s defiance of all forms of authority is expressed in his rejection of Western-coded realism. In visually striking fashion, Emitaï dips into the divine and the supernatural. After the most outspoken and combative of the Diola men is killed, masked and costumed figures appear in a brief ceremonial choreography overlaid with a heady wash of red. Then, one of the Diola men suddenly disappears, and, with a clap of thunder, another is seemingly resurrected.

Xala reveals Sembène as a maestro of intricate, dense montage, a technique that bears the influence of his training in the Soviet Union. Throughout the film, he uses it to great effect to augment the symbolic dance of contrasts between Western and African objects, between the luxury of the bourgeoisie and the abjection of the lower classes. Through a prismatic examination of different forms of fetishism, both the local marabout and the European technocracy are shown as relying on talismanic objects—ranging from the former’s walking stick to the latter’s briefcases—and faith that exceeds the boundaries of apprehensible reality. The elements of superstition and obsession with objects in Xala, as well as Sembène’s unequivocal acceptance of the supernatural curse at the center of the story, challenge the image of him as a social realist and indicate that, even though he was an atheist, he was open to a plurality of beliefs.

Sembène championed the recognition and preservation of a rich and varied cultural inheritance, and though he does not romanticize precolonial Africa or depict it as idyllic or free of hierarchy, he exposes the ways that colonialism disturbed a certain equilibrium among Africa’s diverse communities. Through his heterodox musical choices and application of oral-storytelling techniques, he foregrounded Indigenous beliefs and collective memory as the foundations for an emancipatory Pan-Africanist vision. Intent on being intelligible to an expansive African public, he made films that adapted vernacular forms while sidestepping simplistic oppositions between “tradition” and “modernity.” His mission was one of political education; he took on the responsibilities of consciousness-raising and saw cinema as a tool that could demystify people’s material reality so they might alter it. For Sembène, cinema was night school for the masses and becoming an artist was a call to arms.

Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène: History in the Remaking

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