09 June 2007

It is with deep sadness that we hear of the passing away of the great revolutionary trade unionist and artist Sembene Ousmane.

Sembene was born on 1 January 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal. He worked from a very young age in various manual jobs and taught himself to read and write in French. He published his first novel in 1956, “Le Docker Noir” (The Black Docker) drawing from his own experiences as a dock worker in Marseilles, France. Sembene’s major contribution to the development of African literature includes five novels, five collections of short stories. He was also a major film-maker; he directed numerous films, four shorts, nine features and four documentaries.

Sembene’s voracious reading included Marxist-Leninist classics, fiction and history. He also visited numerous public libraries, theatres, and attended seminars, educating himself. His comrade and friend Bernard Worms said of him, “Sembene was a well rounded intellectual and an exceptionally cultured humanist”. He participated in the protest movements against the colonial war in Vietnam (1953) and the Korean war (1950 – 1953) and supported the Algerian National Liberation Front in its struggle for independence from France (1954 -1962). He believed that friendship and solidarity should be the ties that bind the peoples of the world together.  He also worked selflessly to educate and liberate the community of mostly illiterate and “apolitical” African workers buffeted into the margins of French society.

Sembene was an informed social critic and provided the world with an alternative knowledge of Africa. He witnessed the masses of workers including women, exploited and silenced by the combined external forces of colonialism and the internal yoke of the African “tradition”. He was deeply aware of the urgent need for political and social change in Africa and, like Palestinian writer Edward Said, interrogated various issues of oppression and its impact. He used the medium of words and film to invest in Africa, and indeed the world. His love for Africa is evident in all his work.

A famous and popular novel of his is “God’s Bits of Wood”, a fictional recreation of a comprehensive African railroad workers strike against their French colonial bosses. That was followed by “Voltaique” or “Tribal Scars”, a collection of short stories. In one of the stories he shows how slave-hunters let go a young woman because of blemishes on her body and how the people then made it an integral part of their methods to resist slavery. “The news spread for leagues around…and over the years and centuries a diversity of scars appeared on the bodies of our ancestors – And this is how our ancestors came to have tribal scars. They refused to be slaves.”

He did not spare African rulers.  He remained critical of post-colonial Africa for failing to meet many of her peoples’ expectations, where injustice continues to prevail.

Sembene Ousmane is recognized as the Father of African cinema and has received countless awards and distinctions. Like with his books he also used the medium of film as a critical and an educational tool without compromising its aesthetics and the artistic impulse. His work promoted freedom and social justice and aspired to restoring pride and dignity to the African people. He was a founder member of FAPACI (Pan African Federation of Film Makers) 1969/1970. 

South Africa joins the rest of Africa and the world in paying our deepest respects to a great revolutionary artist, Sembene Ousmane.  

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