Sembène at 100

A short conversation with the Senegalese filmmaker from 2004.

January 1 marked the hundredth anniversary of the birth of filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Here’s part of an interview (translated from French) I had with him in Chicago in 2004.

Across forty years, Senegalese writer-director Ousmane Sembène, in movies like Black Girl (1966) (about an exploited maid), and Faat Kine (2000) (about a 40-year-old single mother’s rise in business), Xala (1975) (a man with two wives and an angry daughter is cursed with impotence on his wedding day to his third wife), has made a career of sharply satirical dramas about the effects of African patriarchy on society.

Before turning to film in his forties, Sembène’s diverse career in Senegal and in France—working as union organizer, newspaper publisher, and novelist—converted him into an intent (and intense) political activist.

The director revered as the father of African cinema is also one of the great creators of women characters. Sembène’s stirring, sumptuous, even buoyant Moolaade debuted at Cannes 2004, getting exceptional reviews, and winning the Grand Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It makes for unlikely entertainment, this keenly empathetic, dramatically shapely polemic, a rousing Brechtian spectacle that feels like an oral history of a distinctly unpleasant topic: the still too-common practice of female genital mutilation, held to be required by Islam by many in thirty-nine African countries.

Set in a Burkina Faso village dotted with immense, man-tall anthills, and a mosque that resembles a hedgehog, four small girls resist “purification,” or going under the knife by strident women practitioners who had the same damage done to them years earlier. Fatoumata Coulibaly is magnificent as the woman who takes the girls into her home, offering them the “moolaade,” or traditional protection, against the patriarchs who run the town. This splendid portrait of a culture clash starts at the conflict between men and women and eddies outward to a conclusion that remains hopeful about the future.

In “Ousmane Sembène: The Life of a Revolutionary Artist,” Samba Gadjigo writes that “for Sembène, in both literature and film, the work of 'art' should not be a mere re-presentation of 'reality,' or 'une pancarte,' a political banner. In order to capture the imagination of the people they 'speak' to and for, those symbols first must be intelligible to them. They must stem from and reflect their cultural universe. At work in Sembène’s art is to project a genuine African film language that also entertains a dialogical relationship with other world cultures.”

We spoke on a brisk October afternoon during the 2004 Chicago International Film Festival. Sembène had begged off the night before, feeling travel-weary, but this afternoon, settled into an overstuffed hotel love seat, the 81-year-old director, whose then-current publicity photos showed him puffing on a pipe and decked in brightly colored ceremonial garb, was dressed in a faded denim jacket.

Moolaade feels timeless, like a vivid memory, but it also has the feeling of witness, of an oral history.

Of course, there’s an influence drawn from oral storytelling, but my aim, my purpose, is to have it be an atemporal film. Timeless. Because I think that timelessness is very important to Africa. Because excision, female genital mutilation, remains a reality. Even today it continues. We are doing everything we can to put an end to it. But it is very hard to accomplish.

Historically, has there been rebellion against the excision of the sort we see by the young girls in the story? Is this uncommon?

Each year we witness this, women standing up against it. And children are afraid of blood. That’s in all countries of the world. They don’t want to be wounded, to get cut or hurt. Each year, there are many little girls who run away from the operation, and sometimes who end up in the cities. Some of them also wind up being prostitutes, because they have left their families behind. [When it is banned, families] do it underground, in a clandestine way. That’s why I think that the fight to eradicate it is very, very difficult. But I think a film like mine can provoke discussions and the exchange of ideas, to show the very negative aspects. And the uselessness of it, actually! And that is a tradition that should be done away with.

You often use the phrase, “the heroism of modern life.”

I say that because in Africa, there is a lot of daily heroism. For instance, we have seen on television, issues about refugees. If you look at those refugees, there are more women than men. In the cities, it is also the women who carry the weight. They take of the education of the children, and they do that on a daily basis. Life is so harsh. People just get by day by day. As you know, the majority of Africans live on less than a dollar a day. For someone to go through that each day, and to keep her sense of honesty, I think that is something very heroic. To manage to feed your children? That is heroic. To find clean drinking water? Also heroic. (A longer version of the Q&A appeared in Cinema Scope 21.)