The endur­ing lega­cy of Ous­mane Sembèné

Mand­abi, the 1968 film by Ous­mane Sembèné, was the first to be made in colour in Sene­gal. It was sup­port­ed by the Nation­al Cen­tre for Cin­e­ma (CNC) in France, as the direc­tor was great­ly admired by the French Min­is­ter of Cul­tur­al affairs, André Mal­raux. Despite enjoy­ing such high-pro­file back­ing, many of the Sembèné’s films would be banned or cen­sored in France due to the blunt way in which they dealt with the scourge of colo­nial­ism in Africa. There was a view that, by focussing on slums, bureau­cra­cy and fail­ures of state, his work active­ly under­mined Senegal’s poten­tial for nation building.

Yet for all his artistry and endur­ing lega­cy as a film­mak­er, Sembèné con­sid­ered his films to be tools of his polit­i­cal agen­da. As his biog­ra­ph­er, doc­u­men­tar­i­an and friend Dr Sam­ba Gad­ji­go puts it, ​“He is not a film­mak­er who uses pol­i­tics, he is a politi­cian who uses filmmaking.”

Film­mak­ing was not his first medi­um, hav­ing first start­ed out in the 1950s as a cel­e­brat­ed nov­el­ist, but the Sene­galese pop­u­la­tion was, at that time, over 80 per cent illit­er­ate and it became appar­ent that nov­els had lim­it­ed scope to affect wide­spread change. ​“He is first a mil­i­tant and an activist. He tried lit­er­a­ture but it didn’t work. He pick­et­ed against the war in Alge­ria in the ​’50s. He pick­et­ed against the Kore­an War in 1953. He pick­et­ed against the war in Indo-Chi­na in 1954. But he realised that the most endur­ing way to describe the African strug­gle for self­hood and self-deter­mi­na­tion is through art.”

Mand­abi was not art for art’s sake, but a way for Sembèné to show that the lega­cy of colo­nial­ism in Sene­gal was bureau­cra­cy and cap­i­tal­ism – a space where men are defined, cor­rupt­ed and destroyed by their prox­im­i­ty to mon­ey. The film begins with a post­man deliv­er­ing a mon­ey order to a sim­ple house on the out­skirts of Dakar. He is met by the two wives of Ibrahi­ma Djieng. They are unable to process this poten­tial good news. ​“Please!” they beg the post­man. ​“Do not dash our hopes!” Word spreads fast about Djieng’s good for­tune and both well- and ill-inten­tioned peo­ple appear by his side to ​“help” him cash the mon­ey order. But rather than set­ting up a sim­ple con­flict of tra­di­tion ver­sus moder­ni­ty, the film presents Djieng’s world as a more com­pli­cat­ed one.

There are issues of gen­der hier­ar­chies, of class, of com­mu­ni­ty that are fur­ther com­pound­ed by the night­mar­ish lega­cy of colo­nial­ism. The whole film revolves around mon­ey, yet very lit­tle of it appears on screen, high­light­ing its ephemer­al nature and stress­ing that its val­ue and pow­er is lit­tle more than a social con­struct. The mon­ey order comes to sym­bol­ise not so much the free­dom of pros­per­i­ty, but the crip­pling weight of debt.

“Sene­gal: it’s often held up as a mod­el democ­ra­cy,” explains Pro­fes­sor David Mur­phy, author of ​‘Sembèné: Imag­in­ing Alter­na­tives in Film & Fic­tion’. ​“It has nev­er suf­fered a coup d’état but, in the late 1960s, it was effec­tive­ly a one-par­ty state, because the rul­ing social­ist par­ty had co-opt­ed the oppo­si­tion into gov­ern­ment. So, there is this vision of soci­ety where, yeah, we’ve got prob­lems, but we need to keep telling pos­i­tive sto­ries about things get­ting bet­ter. And Sembèné is just not for that, he felt that’s not the way you bring about effec­tive change.”

Mand­abi takes place eight years after Senegal’s inde­pen­dence, where Djieng and mil­lions like him have become for­eign­ers in their own coun­try. ​“He has pro­gres­sive­ly lost his cul­tur­al bear­ings and finds him­self in the wilder­ness.” Gad­ji­go explains. Djieng has only a basic grasp of French but is expect­ed to speak, read and write the lan­guage. He is required to have an ID card, a birth cer­tifi­cate and all these Euro­pean cre­ations that are forced upon the unsus­pect­ing African work­ing class.

It’s also worth not­ing that this was the first film to be made in the native African tongue of Wolof. The sig­nif­i­cance of this was huge as it meant the film could speak direct­ly to work­ing-class Africans, as Wolof was not just spo­ken in Sene­gal but in Gam­bia and Mau­ri­ta­nia too. As Gad­ji­go puts it, ​“To make a film in the native lan­guage, no sub­ti­tles, just talk­ing to them direct­ly in the metaphors they know, it was like putting them in front of a mirror.”

Mand­abi even­tu­al­ly returns us to the post­man who comes to rep­re­sent a glim­mer of hope for the future. Where Djieng and his wives despair, he reminds us that it is only through hon­esty and integri­ty that they can build a bet­ter future for Sene­gal. ​“The end­ing of the film is the most pro­gres­sive that Sembèné made. He projects the pos­si­bil­i­ty of change. Change that doesn’t come from the top to the bot­tom, but comes from the bot­tom and goes up,” says Gad­ji­go, ​“And for Sembèné that’s when the real think­ing starts.”

Mand­abi is released in UK cin­e­mas on 11 June via StudioCanal.