He created an African film industry, Out of nothing! The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007). In 1963, with a used 16mm camera and leftover film stock gifts from Europe, Borom Sarret was born(The Wagon Driver), This is the first African movie made by a black African. Until the independence of French West Africa in 1960, French colonial authorities had made it illegal for Africans to make films of their own, so countries like Senegal had no film equipment, no professional actors, and no funding; Sembene ever the innovative one used friends and family to put the film together..
In 1966, Sembene made La Noire de … (Black Girl), the first feature film ever released by a sub-Saharan African director; it was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo and put him on the map, to me it is not about the award, its more about someone had the foresight to think out of the box, Film not only novel,it was a novelty then. He also championed women empowerment, anti corruption !Yet,the award made him a mainstay on the festival circuit. From there, his profile rose. With the politically charged epics Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), and Camp de Thiaroye(1987), he created some of the most beautiful films of all time, courtingand inviting both controversy and acclaim and ensuring that African cinema had a place on the world stage. Ceddo was so inflammatory it was banned in some African countries for its depiction of strife between Muslims and Christians. Thiaroye, about a colonial-era massacre of African troops by the French, was banned in France but won six awards at the 1987 Venice Film Festival. Sembene’s devastating final film, Moolade, about female genital mutilation, won the Un Certain Regard award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Sembene! It’s a documentary about the filmmaker’s eventful life — he grew up in a family of fishermen on the shores of the Casamance River in rural Senegal, living a life of what he termed “daily vagrancy.” Kicked out of school for insubordination, uninterested in fishing and wanting to see the world, he stowed away to France. While hustling as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1950s , he wrote his first novel, out of a desire to see the Africa that he knew depicted in literature. When he turned to cinema in the 1960s, it became a vital link for him between the oral cultures of his youth and the timely political issues of his day.
About his style, his films often start off in simple, fablelike ways, but they proceed to ask complex, troubling questions about identity and tribal, spiritual, and political allegiance. These are serious films about serious subjects, call it act house or what you will, but thanks to Sembene's poetic style of storytelling,Oh yea , he never wrote poetry, but his films were poetry in motion, they hover between realism, ritual, and myth. They are, all of them, utterly intoxicating.
But,Sembene is not only an icon because of the fact that he made great arts, Sembene’s Casamanse resembles our Anglophone wahala, there are people who are also fighting for the independence of The Casamance. Therefore, Sembene experience some of the things we are experiencing right now in Cameroon or going through for 52 years. The significance is huge, it calls on us once more to re-examine our identity. Are we Africans first or Anglophone or Francophone first, Is our problem with Francophone or Anglophone or is it about the human condition,Is it the system , will it have been better if the Anglophones have the majority and francophones the minority or self actualization the best option. Just like the people in Casamance will be asking themselves too. To me, the power to engage us to reflect about who we are is urgent, the struggle of the African woman, the fight against illicit bias and corruption, this is what the film Sembene offers.
I was introduced to Sembene by a priest curiously a French priest. He said Young man, what you have written smells cinematically of Sembene, I can feel his aroma all over the words you have written. The crust of my little story was, Let Africans be at the fore front of effecting Change in Africa. This put me at logger heads with my superiors(it still does today,Far from me thinking we can liberate ourselves alone ,but really this is my fight not yours, you can help me with weapons( like friends helped Sembene with 16mm Camera and that was his weapon), but don’t take part in my war, albeit my war is nonviolent.)So, this priest gifted me XALA, Sembene’s political Satire. However, what got me emphatically into PanAfricanism- I happened upon a novel: God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene, this was what crystallized my believe in creating a new Africa.The impact on me was overwhelmingly Strong. The fictional account of a 1947 railroad strike, the book “was the first fiction we read in which Africans were portrayed in a positive light, in which Africans had agency,” I could feel it. It was as if the call Sembene had made at the beginning of his career — to tell stories of the Africa he knew, to other Africans — had found its ideal response in me. So, Long before Black Panther shattered box office records or Hidden Figures was making waves, the was an African who had definitely portrayed us in the good. This book had characters like me and like the people my granny grew up with. It spoke to me directly. It changed my life.This account for my stance on Education Entertainment.
I want to continue in his foot step but I don’t want to be him. I just want to follow in his footsteps, in the footsteps of Cameroonian filmmakers like Jean Pierre Bekolo ,whose films have been banned here in Cameroon, yet he is Francophone!. Not only that, Sembene was a militant, a progressive thinker, someone in the trenches — not pontificating in the universities.This is why I strongly think, he is the filmmaker of the’ Street’, for the common man. We can’t have effective decolonization of the arts, when Eurocentric traditions of creating arts are like scientific truth.
‘I’m not here to cater to American academics or follow their traditions. If you want to struggle for Africa, the struggle is here.’” This is one of Sembene’s last words, so for me, if we really want to change Africa, it is here not there. Subtly, to really push forward we have to go backwards to gather momentum. Learn from the best we have got right here.
La Liberte Arts Group gladly welcomes the opportunity to be part of the celebration of this great World class film maker from Senegal in Africa.By learning his style and philosophy, we will continue to bring about effective change in aesthetics and genre of film making that can tell the African Story from an African perspective.
Join us on the 9 of June at 11 am at The Bamenda City Council Library hall. On the menu:The projection of the film SEMBENE, followed by discussions, Ok, Let me break it down, the one and only LEONETE will be our guest singer. You don’t want to miss this voice queen , Mottani the Spoken word artist will be in the building and many more. Time enough for is to start celebrating our own. What brand do u give your own?
Ambe Macmillian A.
No comments:
Post a Comment