Buck on Film

Buck in the Stacks #4:

Ousmane Sembene, 1923-2007

An Interview with Dr. Samba Gadjigo

Dr. Gadjigo is a Professor of French at Mount Holyoke College whose expertise includes African cinema. He has just returned from Sembene's funeral in Senegal.

You specialize in Sembene's work. Can you tell us what studying him has been like?

My first contact with his work goes back 34 years ago, when God's Bits of Wood was introduced into Senegalese high school curriculum. Before that all literary reading was limited to the French classics. Needless to say, this was the first positive, galvanizing, and rehabilitating portrayal of Africa.

A portrayal based, not on race but on class; in sum, for the first time I saw, through fiction, actions that "created" events and were not just subjected to them. That was in 1972. I met Sembene in 1989, 17 years later when I came from the US to invite him to the five college consortium in Massachusetts. After that visit, in 1994 I started research on his life for a forthcoming biography; Ousmane Sembene: Un Destin African (July 17, 2007, from Paris). It has been the most exciting, the most challenging (no written archive, most of the work consisted in crisscrossing the world to interview contemporaries), and most rewarding experience for me.


What are the some of the remarkable qualities of Sembene's films?

They are all, in one way or the other, poetry in motion. They combine political commitment (a call to action), the search for a genuinely African aesthetic, and a desire for universal communication across cultures, languages, and races.


Africa is so large, and it's unfair to ask for a generalization of the spirit of African Film, but what can you tell us why Sembene has been referred to as the "father of African film"?

He has been referred to as the "father of African cinema" not because he was the first African to make a film (the first films were made in the fifties when he was still a dockworker in Marseilles) but because it was his 1966 Black Girl that put Africa on the map of world cinema.


If you were to create an introductory class on Sembene, what books/films would be on the syllabus?

I already taught a seminar on Sembene with all his available books and films but for an introductory course i would certainly use his first poems, his prose fiction from Docker Noir (1956) to God's Bits of Wood (1960). As for his films, Black Girl would be a good start, plus Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968).


Who, in your opinion, are the current filmmakers in Africa to keep an eye on?

African being what Clyde Taylor called "Last cinema" and all pioneers having now disappeared, I think this a critical moment during which an eye should be kept on all young filmmakers in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and, of course, Southern Africa.


If you can, please share some thoughts on attending Sembene's funeral

Attending Sembene's funeral was certainly very emotional and yet thought provoking for me. Yes, I was sad because I lost a friend but on the other hand, very quickly, I also realized that because of his body of work, Sembene will never die of a dead death; he only left his perishable body for eternity.