A self-taught Marseille dock worker became the father of African film
Ousmane Sembène taught himself to read and write French while unloading ships in Marseille. His novels made his name, but he wanted to reach people who didn't read, so he turned to cinema, which he called the people's night school, and made the first feature by a sub-Saharan African director.
Sembène grew up in Ziguinchor, Casamance, the son of a Lebou fisherman, raised largely by his maternal grandmother. Through his mother's Serer relatives he served at the Tuur festival, where he had a habit of drinking the curdled milk meant for the ancestral spirits. He spoke Wolof, picked up Arabic at a madrasa and French at school until a clash with the principal in 1936. Seasickness made fishing miserable, and at fifteen he left for manual work in Dakar.
Drafted into the Senegalese Tirailleurs in 1944, he later served with the Free French. Back home he joined the long railway strike of 1947, then stowed away to France, working at Citroën in Paris and on the Marseille docks, where he joined the CGT union and the Communist party and helped lead a strike against arms shipments for France's war in Vietnam. His first novel, The Black Docker (1956), drew on that life. His third, God's Bits of Wood (1960), retold the Dakar-Niger rail strike through nearly fifty characters with the community as its only true hero.
After a year at Moscow's Gorky Film Studio under Mark Donskoy, he shot the short Borom Sarret in 1963. La Noire de..., adapted from one of his own stories in 1966, ran only an hour yet won the Prix Jean Vigo. With Mandabi in 1968 he realised his dream of filming in Wolof, and he appears in it as the post office letter writer.
His themes were colonial history, the failures of religion, the new African elite and the strength of women. Senegal heavily censored his 1977 film Ceddo; he handed out fliers describing the cut scenes and released it uncut abroad. His last film, Moolaadé in 2004, confronted female genital cutting and won prizes at Cannes and FESPACO. He died at home in Dakar on 9 June 2007, aged 84.
Source: Ousmane Sembène
