This most intrepid of directors still takes his movies out to the villages of his native Senegal, and would probably prefer to do that rather than visit London to receive the accolades due to him during the African cinema season at the Barbican centre.
For Sembene, who is also a distinguished writer, ”Africa is the centre of the world” — not the West. Yet it is not a continent that has always been kind to its own filmmakers. The films most Africans like to see are those that hail from Hong Kong or Bollywood, India.
Besides — as a committed Marxist in a post-colonial world that too often either duplicates some of the worst attributes of colonial times or of the capitalism of the West — he has never had an easy relationship with his own government.
And in Xala, one of his best films, he shows how Africans aping the West can make total fools of themselves. Only an African could have made this film, which drew the wrath of the same officialdom he lampooned by showing them washing their new Mercedes with mineral water. It suffered a dozen cuts when it was shown in Dakar.
During the 1960s and 70s, in particular, he was totally opposed to the state ideology of Senegal’s famous poet-president Leopold Sedar Senghor, who espoused the cause of ”negritude”, which suggested black and white civilisations were complementary but essentially different in nature.
Sembene’s Marxism decreed that the only way forward was not to mystify the African as someone no one else could understand — but to persuade Africans that, for them, Communism was the only way out. This may seem a forlorn hope now, but Sembene doesn’t see it that way, even though Senegal is primarily a Muslim country and he is not a believer.
But then he was never a member of the educated Muslim elite, from whose ranks so many African artists have come. He is a self-educated man whose interest in the arts was born in France — where he worked as a docker and a trade union official in Marseilles, which then had a large black community — then in Moscow, where he learned filmmaking.
Sembene is the author of 10 books, many of which have been translated into English — notably Black Docker and God’s Bits of Wood — and he has made 11 films, most of them shown at Western film festivals.
If he is not the father of the African cinema, he was the first to make a full-length feature in an African language (Mandabi, in 1968, uses Wolof ) and, earlier, made one of the first films by an African from south of the Sahara (Borom Sarret in 1963). His latest, Faat Kine, about a 40-something, single mother running a petrol station in Dakar, is his first in eight years.
All his work attempts to reinterpret African history and culture in a way that combines his political awareness with a deep concern for the position of women in African society. ”If you don’t consider African women, you’ll get nowhere,” he once said.
He suggests that Africa can no longer blame everything on the West, but has to assume responsibility for its own economic survival. In the end Africa has to unite to prosper, and has to gain the political will to do so.
But his films are never tracts and are often very funny. Mandabi, or The Money Order, has an unemployed man trapped in Dakar trying to cash a draft sent to him from France by a hard-working relative.
Being illiterate, he can’t, and is exploited by the French-educated elite who are oppressing their own people. Few funnier portraits of a bureaucratic society have been made, and none in Africa. Perhaps his most praised film is Ceddo, once banned in Senegal. This has the inhabitants of an 18th-century village faced with an imam from the north, who uses the local chief as his puppet in an attempt to convert the inhabitants to Islam.
The locals, the Ceddo, don’t want to be converted, and kidnap the chief’s daughter before they are defeated. But the woman returns to kill the imam, asserting an African culture that is essentially different to his.
The film is not only a powerful allegory, but a daringly imaginative narrative deeply imbued with an African sensibility. Even so, it has some wry comments — including the moment when a villager says of the imam: ”A man who wears trousers full of fat should not approach the fire.”
Despite his difficulties with the Senegalese authorities, Sembene seems to have no intention of softening his work. ”In some other African countries I’d be in prison by now.
”But in my own country the people love me too much.” — Â