African cinema is left with the permanence of greatness following the passing of Ousmane Sembène, le père du cinéma africain, the trinity of African film. The Senegalese director, producer, and writer passed away at age 84 on Friday, June 9 in Dakar, Senegal leaving his legacy Black Girl (1966), the first feature film by an African director, and birthing a visual aesthetic for African identity and values while continually challenging colonial, then post-colonial leadership on paper and film.
As a pioneer of African cinema, Sembène (or Sembène Ousmane in French publications) carried the forceful voice of African society, self-identity and reflection from novels to film. Sembène captured Africa's oral tradition, and extended it beyond the reach of the cultural literati to the common people using color, motion, and sound.
Xala (1974) first a novel, then one of Sembène's most acknowledged films, explores the varying effects of a post-colonial Senegal through the story of an impotent Senegalese bourgeoisie businessman (xala in Wolof). Though most notable for his cinematic masterpieces, Sembène's early literary works carry a forceful voice for African society and social ills found in the works of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. The Black Docker and God's Bits of Wood, his earlier works, challenge colonial motives and oppression--economic and racial. After publishing Oh Country, My Beautiful People, Sembène served as a guest of the Cuban, Chinese, and Russian governments, where he was afforded the opportunity to study film at Gorki Studios in Moscow.
Sembène, the son of a fisherman from Casamance, was expelled from school at the 13, but through self-education became a writer and union organizer while working as a docker in Marseilles, his home until 1960. Living in France, Sembène read about, learned from, and exchanged with fellow artists such as Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ricardo Neftali Reyes (Pablo Neruda), all of whom influenced his political views and art.
In 2004, Sembène's final film Moolaadé (2004), a film addressing female genital mutilation, won awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the FESPACO Film Festival in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, a festival that Sembène helped create in 1969. Five novels, 5 collections of short stories, and 17 films and documentaries later, le père du cinéma leaves African cinema and literature with a coarse optimism for post-colonial Africa that speaks to and for the people and challenges leadership to be accountable.
