The father of African film, Ousmane Sembene, who is in South Africa developing a new movie about the effects of colonialism on Africa, spoke to Bafana Khumalo
Many an African liberation fighter has made the journey to the land of the Russians, to learn the art of shooting. So has Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese novelist and director who is better known as the “father of African film”. Only his journey was to learn to shoot, using the camera not the Kalashnikov.
This journey earned him the skill to make one of the earliest films ever made by an African. Called Black Girl (Une Noire), it was produced in 1966 and is about the destruction of a young girl who leaves her home in Africa to work as a maid in Antibes, France. The Time Out Film Guide describes Sembene as having “contrived a masterful if not entirely flawless rendering of the key themes in Francophone African cinema”.
The film is only one of many he has made about the plight of the African in postcolonial Africa. These include Xala (1974) which tells, in a leisurely fashion, of a middle-aged Dakar businessman whose social standing begins to slip when he takes a third wife and finds that he has lost his touch in bed. Here Sembene aimed his potent camera at the Senegalese bourgeoisie who impotently ape the worst aspects of their colonial masters, particularly their corruption and extravagance.
“What you have to realise is that that [the time of his studies] was the Russian era and not the Soviet era,” says the short dark man talking through an interpreter. He was already in his forties when he decided to study the art of film-making. Although the bulk of the continent might have been preoccupied with matters of liberation Sembene feels that studying film was in line with the broader political agenda.
“The basis of human liberation struggles is culture,” he says, asking: “During the apartheid era, did people stop singing and dancing? They did not. They used their songs and dances as a way of advancing their liberation struggle.”
Sembene’s struggle was catalysed by viewing early ethnographic movies – produced by neo-anthropologists – which were “so good that even some of our people started to believe that tour dances were for savages”. In these early ethnographic studies “the best African women were those who were breastfeeding white babies while forgetting their own”.
A need was born in Sembene to explore how Africans could begin to possess all their forms of art. He started by writing novels, and when he felt he needed to reach a wider audience, he started exploring film as a way of telling stories. He doesn’t feel that his European training in any way diluted the potency of telling his stories from an African perspective. “We went to Europe to study but that didn’t change us,” he says of the experience.
His journey of African storytelling through film has led him to South African shores where he is attempting to raise funds for his next project, a film detailing the effects of colonialism on the African continent. “Instead of having European brokers I think it is better for me to come here to negotiate with our fellow brothers.”
While Sembene might feel that he is raising funds from fellow “African brothers” some within the country present the view that he may as well be in Europe, given who he is talking to. He was brought into the country by African Media Entertainment – a majority white-owned media conglomerate that owns among other things the MTN Sundome.
“They are African,” he says adamantly, “whether they like it or not they are African. He tells an anecdote of a white South African film-maker who presented his film at the most recent annual Fespaco film festival in Ougadougou. “When he came here they (Fespaco festival organisers) said to him, `Welcome, you are as African as the rest of us, we will not treat you differently.'” Sembene feels that “they (white South Africans) are a white ethnic group in Africa”, just one of many tribes.
Given that colonialism has been history for at least 40 years in most of Africa, isn’t a film about colonialism at this stage “harking back to the past” too much? That, after all, is the “simunye” consensus being manufactured throughout this country. “When white people were in power they had statues of their heroes everywhere. So should we,” he says. “We can forgive but we daren’t forget.”
For Sembene, attempting to tell the story of colonialism fits into the framework of the “African renaissance” which, he feels, “should be about us thinking about aspects of our past, especially those parts that have been weak. We should be coming up with ways of improving them.”
That is Sembene’s short-term plan. In the long term he hopes to see a South African equivalent of the Fespaco film festival. “When Fespaco started there was not a single Bekinabo film-maker, but now most of the films shown at the festival are by Bekinabo women. Just imagine what the impact of such a festival could be on the film-making ability of South Africa.”