Still, the fire in the belly:
The Confessions of Ousmane Sembene

by Mamadou Niang

The meeting has been under way for well over two hours, and the seven participants do not seem exhausted after strings of passionate exchanges. The scene could have been ripped from a chapter of Ousmane Sembene’s fifth novel, God’s Bits of Wood, in which the women deliberate their plan of attack against the oppressive and brutal foreign railroad overlords of the Dakar-Niger line. It is also reminiscent of a scene in Guelwaar where Baye Ali, the village chief summons the Muslim elders, Kilife, to discuss the profanity of the burial of Pierre-Henri Thioune, a Christian, in a Muslim cemetery.

We are at Sembene’s quarters, located in a busy commercial street in downtown Dakar. He has converted a single family house into a spacious work space, allowing collaborators and strapped colleagues a place they can call office. A well kept flower garden sits in the middle of the courtyard, opposite a zinc-roofed conference area. Most of the filmmakers seated around the table, veteran Senegalese directors and screenwriters, are little known internationally. But they’re part of a group Sembene calls waa ker gee, a Ouolof [Wolof] expression meaning “the family.” Fifteen years ago, they formed the African Filmmakers Committee, a regional organization which includes more that twenty notable directors from neighboring countries. They’re discussing perennial issues — inadequate production resources and creative ways of addressing the failure of African governments to support the film community with innovative cultural policies.

Sembene Ousmane has just reached his seventy-fourth birthday, and, as he puts it, “I am an old youngster with the faith of an adolescent.” Perhaps he feels this way because his career did not start until he was well over forty. First, he was a novelist. Sembene’s urge to write was fueled by the rage against the oppressive nature of the colonial state and its dialectical relationship with injustice. He has been an activist since his days working in a Marseilles shipyard, an experience which inspired his first novel Le Docker Noir. Now the novelist-filmmaker is presiding over this strategic meeting of Senegalese filmmakers to chart solutions for the most enduring conundrum facing African filmmakers: how to show the films they make so that African audiences can see them. Like the protagonists in his films and his novels, Sembene takes on this mission with intensity and tenacity. The problem of distribution, reaching African audiences, has been a life-long struggle.

He took up the daunting task of filmmaking in a place with no equipment, no labs, and only with a handful of theaters, tightly controlled by European distributors and packed with Hollywood action films and Indian melodramas. After completing his first feature in 1963, Borom Sarret, Sembene stubbornly thought he could break their hold. He found some relief in making the rounds on a bicycle to remote villages where he could show the film to enthusiastic crowds after nightfall. These encounters convinced him that cinema has the potential to be an educational tool. Sembene has come to believe his generation has an immense role in the political process. Since his first film l’Empire Sonhrai, an epic of African resistance to colonialism set in Timbuktu, all of his tales have told the paradoxes bedeviling Senegalese society. According to Sembene, artistic work should inform Africans about the continuing transformation of post-colonial societies; they must be tools for empowerment and enlightenment.

The stories Sembene tells — be it satire (the quirks of the Senegalese political class and bureaucrats as in Xala) or scathing commentary of evangelism (Christian or Muslim, helped by African surrogates as in Ceddo) — have the necessary conspicuous political edge to challenge African audiences to own up to the unfinished business of de-colonization. They are told with pointed wit. His brilliant command of African oral narrative traditions elevates the most casual and routine anecdotes to soaring drama. He can endlessly recreate every day life with sequences of eloquent silence, giving his stories deadpan/ironic qualities which mirror the tangled lives of ordinary Senegalese citizens. He can recount the most shocking tale and give wretchedness a charming veneer.

Sembene’s cinematic gift and pioneering achievement have won him much praise at home in Africa and abroad. But the advent of a younger breed of filmmakers with original and adventurous talents has created new rivalries. He is derided by some for what they term “his elderly cockiness.” These attacks reveal more of the young filmmakers’ frustrations with Sembene’s omnipresent style of filmmaking, charisma, and international fame in comparison to their accomplishments. Sembene says coolly, “We’ve lost our sense of history in Africa; the last one to arrive always wants to lead.”

In many ways, he is indeed the de facto ambassador of African cinema. His films are distributed throughout the world and studied in liberal arts departments everywhere. His media-genic charm takes him to places where African culture is celebrated. And in spite of criticism, his enormous legacy is the affirmation of his originality. Prominent among his peers, Ousmane Sembene showed Africans how to map their stories on celluloid and defined a film language to follow Borom Sarret. His independent spirit, and unwillingness to compromise principles — which have caused him many a crash landing — are moral criteria for many artists. In his own way, he is one of the last custodians of unfettered artistic integrity.

A Conversation

Mamadou Niang: I’m curious about the way you shuttle between the novel and filmmaking. It is not usual for writers, and it shouldn’t be easy for you who put almost all of your novels on the screen. How does Sembene “the writer” get to filmmaking, and how does Sembene “the filmmaker” get back to writing?
Ousmane Sembene: Well! I must confess it’s not always easy. A screenplay is a book written in telegraphic form, and the dialogues which have to respect a carefully planned timing. You cannot be verbose. You must resort to mimics, body language, eye contact, the movements of actors, etc... I think they are separate trades, but they’re not incompatible for me, I’m used to it since I’ve been doing it for over 30 years.

MN: Is it conceivable that the novelist filmmaker Sembene takes to the screen a novel or a screenplay written by some one else?
OS: No! I don’t think so. I could be interested in a book, and with the accord of the writer, develop a screenplay. but it would be an adaptation.

MN: There are directors who are not writers, they are not auteurs; They’re called in to direct some one else’s idea.
OS: People have different talents; Some have a visual intelligence, but lack the imaginative thinking that writing requires. But this separation has more to do with the parts of the world where ‘filmmaking’ is an industry. We’re talking about specialization here, where in Europe or in America you may have four persons working on a screenplay, before the studio even names ` a director. But that’s an enrichment; that’s a luxury. There are no written rules. Nothing is absolute in this business.

MN: So, then you could work in that context?
OS: Yes, one can be both a woodcutter and a sculptor at once.

MN: Of all your writing and films, has there been a time you would call a defining moment throughout your long career; It could also be a moment of fulfillment, of triumph?
OS: I’ve loved everything I’ve done at the moment I am doing it. It’s the next thing that obsesses me. I’m not in the habit of psychoanalyzing myself, but I’m taken totally by the task at hand. Once the work is completed, which I hope is of the highest quality I can deliver, then it belongs to the public. It’s no longer mine.

MN: But I bet you’ve had moments of great satisfaction.
OS: Oh yes! After I’ve put that final touch, it’s a satisfying feeling. Writing, or making a film is many, many months of adventure. It is a gratifying moment when you put the final dot, and sign the release for the publication of a novel; or when you finish mixing sound for a film and see the audience coming into the theater. See, I’m a craftsman, I’m not an artist. I take pleasure in the work I do, but it is a process, pruning, carving, trimming... writing, re-writing. It’s work that needs to be done well. Never a extraordinary jubilation, but always a happy feeling.

MN: I imagine that the filmmaker Sembene is more popular than the writer Sembene. Does it frustrates you that most people in Africa only know the filmmaker, or do you think that the public appreciates both equally?
OS: I am generally happy about the way my work is received. But I wished that our peoples in Africa spent more time reading, and then go to the movies. Reading and movies are both means of intellectual and cultural nourishment. I’ve always said that cinema in Africa is an evening class, a “continuing education” at this stage of its development in our societies. But we must make good films which address our struggles. There’s no point in making films to simply entertain or bore people with protest films about labor rallies. Our films must for an hour and a half or two entertain, but also inspire and make the headlines of conversations in the workplace, and in the homes.

Reading is a privilege. It’s a solitary project. People who read a lot, who strive for knowledge are persons of great mind. Other people’s thoughts help us better access our own. I wish my people were the biggest readers in mankind and the best moviegoers. I’ve always thought that reading and cinema should be considered in legislative debates involving quality of life and sustainable development issues. They play a major influence in how we live, and what we do. Beauty belongs to everyone. We all like things beautiful.

MN: Do you have the same expectations when you finish a novel, as when you wrap a film?
OS: No. Each work has a life of its own, and makes its own way to the public. Today, it looks like each work has its own audience.

MN: Is there a distinction between Sembene the filmmaker and Sembene the writer?
OS: Yes, they are different. But it’s like you want to separate the cold from the hot water you poured in the same sink. The two approaches are distinct, I am pursuing two different forms, but it’s the same “Sembene.”

Further, using multiple mediums, I felt was a necessity, I’ve always tried to explore how to make my work more accessible to people. How as an artist, a witness of my time, and member of my society, I can bring my contribution like the tailor, the shoemaker, like anyone else. And I always ask myself: why society needs artists? What do we need artists for?

MN: Why?
OS: I ask you... it’s an interesting question!

Here is a mass of people asking to be entertained, enlightened, educated and informed; they want to be given something to think about. And on top of that they ask for accountability, although we’re not elected. In my own situation, my people are very demanding of me, and of my work. Some times they even tell me what I should or should not do. On one hand, they have elected presidents, ministers, representatives, who should account for what they do, and on another hand, I am posted in their mind — an invisible official of a different sort, whom they wait for and ask what’s next? For them, the artist is the psychic who can see it, and bring light. That’s why we need artists.

MN: Which makes the artist’s role as equally important as the politician’s.
OS: We see what is not generally perceptible or that people are hiding. When people fight to get a law enacted, after they’ve won and think they got a good law passed, the artist’s role is to violate that certainty. We ought to go further, and that law, transformed under the artist’s vision, is no longer fitting. Artists are nonconformists. It is not to say that artists can be politicians; it is incompatible. An artist who practices politics is artistically dead. We may have democratic and political ideals, and we must, but shouldn’t get involved in militantism or party politics. Ideologies and religion are conformists.

MN: In their respective capacities, who play the most important role in society, the artist or the politician?
OS: I think the artist plays a larger role. An honest politician is only but an administrator, a facilitator. Period. The politician does not produce anything.

Let me tell you a folksy image: art helps people re-fuel their egos so they can better face their anguish and the iniquities of society. Men can face adversity and deal with injustice only when they’re fraught with their culture. When we talk about defending your country, we’re not talking geography. We’re talking about defending your mother, your father, your wife, your children, we’re talking about your heritage. You are performing an act of culture, safeguarding your dignity, your pride. Fighting for your independence is nothing but an act of culture. Politicians transform people into alimentary canals, evaluate them in tons of rice, corn, wheat, hospital beds and school desks. Culture does not answer to arithmetics. From birth to death, it’s within man, its guiding companion. It is not palpable, and art helps enlighten it.

MN: The politician you’re talking about, is he not the practitionner as we know it today... Couldn’t there be somewhere in the artist’s imagination a certain political practice which restores a dignified political action?
OS: All right, OK... It’s the perpetual fantasy. Descartes spoke of the city where the artist would be king, but I’m reminded of an Arab proverb: When a great king was asked, if he were to sacrifice someone, who would that be? His answer was the artist. Then he was asked, if he were to save someone, who would be the last person on earth? His answer was the artist.

MN: You wrote the novel Gulewaar after having made the film. This is a common practice in Hollywood, where a blockbuster is always turned into a check-out-counter item. Did you glance at Tinseltown?
OS: Oh, no. I am far from Hollywood... I like Guelwaar. Though the film came to me first, I also like the book. It’s not to say it is my favorite. But the book is richer, fuller than the film. With this book I tried to experiment an approach which could serve to teach students in screenplay writing at the school we want to set up in Dakar, to train and produce a number of writers. Screenplay is a difficult practice, a tedious process.

Now, Guelwaar is a based on a true story. Some one died, and relatives learned that his remains have been mixed up at the mortuary when they arrange for burial... Also true are the issues I dramatized, namely the issue of aid to African countries. I know many people who resent these forms of assistance. Officers and officials who beat people who can’t pay their taxes also exist. Conflicts between Muslims and Christians, although being swept under the rug, are rampant. To lace all this in an interesting story for film is different from putting it in a book. But the book enables me to get further. This case was an experiment, it’s not Hollywood, the West is not my point of reference. Sure, we learn from Europe, and we must, but only organization and technology. For the rest, I am the center of the universe; Africa is my universe. I need no lesson from the West, neither moral nor how to conduct my life.

MN: When Pierre-Henri Thioune took the podium in Guelwaar, the movie, and in his language, Ouolof, addressed the rally, and denounced aid and its paralyzing consequences, which he said, “leads to permanent dependance,” his electrifying speech was so riveting and convincing that it was enough to get him killed. In the book, in French, I did not find the same compelling charisma. I felt the force and the quality of the delivery in his own language was lost in French. Do you not feel frustrated to not succeed at rendering in European languages the full drama of your characters?
OS: This is an obvious limitation. It is a problem of a cultural nature. I write first in Ouolof, then I translate into French. It’s a drawback for African writers practicing in European languages. I don’t have a solution to this dilemma, and we must adapt.

In Japan, I saw American actors speaking Japanese, quite amazing, considering that English, or American English is almost the universal lingua franca. You’re right, but if you’re in a different cultural universe you must reach out. You’re Ouolof, and your reaction is quite understandable, hearing your mother tongue from an eloquent speaker isn’t quite the same as reading the same words in French. In the book this section is in italics, it’s a moot warning, but we should not be purists by dwelling on these issues.

MN: But what about the larger question of national languages. We keep postponing the advent of our languages into officialdom. Yourself had the bitter experience of having your film kept from release in Senegal for 10 years, because the president who had strong French sensibilities didn’t like the way you spelled Ceddo. You also lead a roaring fight to establish curriculums in Ouolof. What has changed since?
OS: But that’s another matter! Ask the presidents. We are ready, but the authorities in command aren’t ready. We know what to do if legislation is enacted. But officials who lack vision aren’t hurried. But in the case of Senegal there’s another problem. Non-Ouolof populations do not like the idea of erecting Ouolof as the universal language, but the language is spoken by at least 80% of Senegalese. So the result is that we keep locking ourselves in the European logic, preferring the colonial language. I don’t understand why.

MN: Are your audiences abroad missing a lot because of the language barrier? `
OS: You’re deprived of many things when you’re not familiar with a culture. African cultures are not esoteric, but people don’t know them. If you dubbed a Chinese or a Japanese film even in Ouolof I would still miss a lots of things. I’m not well acquainted with Asian cultures.

MN: So does this impediment require you to make a special effort on the image work, to make it more expressive to compensate for language.
OS: Even the image has limitations. Literature is the best solution. Books are best translated than pictures. Subtitles do not give the substance of a film, which is inseparable from the dialogue. It’s a compression, but it’s the best of the existing possibilities. Dubbing is something else. I made Guelwaar in two versions, Ouolof and French. These are our contradictions, but it is best received this way. It’s interesting in a sense that we could sometime dub our films in various African languages — Swahili, Bambara, Ibo and so on. But here we’re dealing with technical matters, not artistic ones.

MN: And we are limited with technical matters?
OS: We are not limited. We lack cultural policies in our nations. We have no limitations, I refute the idea of an Africa that is limited. What we lack are visionary leaders, people who have coherent policies. Our leaders know nothing other than the politics of food rationing, sustenance. Period. But man doesn’t live on bread alone. Look at the continent, only artists are succeeding in organizing themselves. With the FESPACO and FEPACI we have formed the largest independent association in all of Africa. Artists who gather every two years, striving to establish a viable institution. And we are the most independent, and the most anarchist on the planet. And my role as the elder is to encourage everyone, especially the young, cause it’s tough. Weather they succeed of fail, it is important that they hang tight.

MN: Man doesn’t live on bread alone, but is there enough bread around? With the astounding finances required to make a film in a continent beset by shortages of all kinds, isn’t it an incongruity?
OS: Africans are not miserable! We have bad leaders; the elite class, intellectuals, people in government, they’re the wicked. They’re the ones who beg, bow down and keep humiliating us. Africans do not panhandle to the West. What they call crisis are not crisis, it’s like the normal evolutionary process of a developing human body. It’s illness of infancy... What is thirty years of independence compared to 100 years of colonization, and centuries of slavery?

MN: In a great number of African films one can see the influence of theater, African theater, is it an esthetic choice or simply the evolution of a form of artistic expression?
OS: We must be very careful on this. Francophone countries in Africa have a mediocre theater, there is not really a culture of theater in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, etc... But theater found fertile grounds in English speaking countries. Nigeria has a prolific theater tradition. Under apartheid, South Africans found theater and music their most forceful means of artistic expression; there it is a vital art form. In these countries, including Ghana, cinema is a natural extension of the art form.

MN: After thirty years of filmmaking on the continent, with more than 100 films produced, can we say that the African filmmaker can pretend of having a career in films?
OS: No. Too soon, I can’t even myself speak of a career. Thirty years is nothing. Filmmaking needs an industry, and our structures are too precarious. The desire, the material, the artistic possibilities are abundant, but we severely lack the necessary tools. We do not control the means and the medium. They’re in the hands of whites. Egypt has a film industry. South Africa is on its way to building one. But, for the most part, we depend on Europe. But this too will change. We’ve begun collecting equipment and building outfits in Ouaga... It will happen.

MN: Despite the help of white Europeans?
OS: Listen! Let me tell you something. In war, wherever you get the gun, what matters is that you know how to point it towards the enemy and shoot. Is that clear?

MN: But the aid that you castigate... It’s easy for Ousmane Sembene, who’s already established a solid international reputation, to speak like this.
OS: It’s crazy how they plug it into our heads. But that’s not aid. These are contractual arrangements. We are bound by agreements. When we make a film with French and European agencies, they get a piece. They have their rights when the picture is completed, and they use it to their own ends, in addition to cataloguing it in their libraries as if their own. On another hand, when I make a film with their participation, I contribute to the development of their film industry by hiring their men and women. They don’t help me! Nobody helps me! I’m not a beggar.

MN: Does European money influence the artistic creation of African filmmakers?
OS: It depends on the individual. I have the final cut on my works, and I don’t want to talk about others.

MN: International aid is a major theme in Guelwaar...How corrosive is it to your judgment?
OS: It’s terrible, worse... It’s like feeding a person everyday with sweets or honey. Go ask the doctor what it does to the body. I think that as Kocch Barma says, “If you want to kill a good and noble person, give him all he needs, whenever he needs it.” He’ll end up losing all senses of real life, not being able to accomplish anything for himself. It deters effort; the desire to find for one’s own is lost; he is a monster among us; all he says is thanks, thanks and thanks. Kocch Barma has denounced this before my parent’s time. There are people in real need, but society, if organized, could and should take care of them. You must help your neighbor whose house was destroyed by fire; but foreign aid from western donor nations, disguised under the name of “International Cooperation” must stop. How many millions of dollars the US has handed Africa for thirty-five years, and where is the money? Where are the results of those investments? No roads, no hospitals, no schools, no universities... But yes, a corrupt bourgeois elite getting richer and never has enough.

MN: You’re also a harsh critic of the grieving brain drain afflicting Africa. The exodus of the educated to Europe and America...
OS: There are different kinds of exodus. “When the goat doesn’t find enough to browse on the grass, she’ll break the cord and gets away”: It’s a saying from our ancestors. They knew then...

But Barthelemy the westernized, in Guelwaar, arriving from Paris to just bury his father, and looking down on every thing African. In his confrontations with the officer you show the worst of a colonized mind. Barthelemy has deserted. He has nothing to do with those who left for lack of space to develop themselves. He refuses to face the struggle with a characteristic selfishness. Leaving to gentler lands with a diploma, which his people helped pay for during his first ten years of education. And these people return only to exploit their folks.

MN: You must be including in your schedule a great number of public appearances, to attend speaking engagements and talk about culture and film in Africa. You have become a de facto ambassador of African culture.
OS: I think we must go back further. I think for us in Africa and in the Third World, artists are cultural ambassadors. It’s a new Africa that’s being created, in a slow and difficult birth. People throughout the world know only the pictures of misery and suffering that are distilled on television by non-Africans. Those are real and serious, but there is another side of Africa — the Africa which is struggling every day and winning, the Africa fighting to reassemble an illustrious past that was stolen, an Africa not losing faith. Our Africa is not the one represented by our leaders, it is not a bum begging around are they make the rest of the world believe. And we must get out and show them. Yes, we are self-appointed emissaries with the desire to represent the best, the worst, the great, and the meager of Africa. For me, it’s a duty and a cultural tradition.

MN: Twenty-six years ago, you embarrassed African Americans when you came the first time to the US to show your films. They did not expect to see, told by an African, stories of African kings and chiefs who participated in the slave trade or tales of corrupt head-of-states and dictators who oppress their own people. Do audiences you now meet have a better appreciation of your work?
OS: They have changed. A generation ago, they thought that there was an abstract African ideal to believe in, to help alleviate the denials they suffered in America. But I didn’t come to talk about an ideal Africa, to present a model nation. And I think they understood that to love Africa, one must understand it. Knowing that many things in our history were not pretty, that Africans have been accomplices, partners in the slave trade.

MN: And which Africa, the one before that period, or colonial Africa?
OS: I believe we have been able to establish a dialogue, and they understood that I am interested in exchanges and confrontations that help define a project for my society. I have seen the arrival of a new wave of African American filmmakers and directors, I’m happy about that, and a have a number of friends among them.

MN: In two of your most recent works, Guelwaar and Niwam, the heroes, the most compelling characters are corpses, dead bodies. What’s behind these metaphors?
OS: Death is a problem only for the living. Those stories are real happenstance. They’re both true stories. But I am more interested in the living and how they endure — how they will continue to build their future. The dead help strengthen and unite. Guelwaar is an unknown local hero whose death becomes a national tragedy and made him a hero post-mortem. In Niwam, we don’t know the dead — an infant — but know everything about his father. Birago Diop, the storyteller, once wrote that “the dead are not dead...” In my films, men fight and resist, death doesn’t stop the struggle, the course of history. Now, what’s happening in Liberia, Rwanda, Casamance is death by politics; they’re assassinations.

MN: You’ve become a target of a certain class of younger filmmakers, what do they chide you about?
OS: In Africa, we’ve lost our sense of history, the last to arrive always thinks he is first. But in our context this is exacerbated by neo-colonial elements. France, especially the French left, has always elected and adopted an African artist one at a time to be exhibited as a figurehead and as the best among the rest of us. But as far as I am concerned I prefer to remain the unifier. I find it legitimate that who do not all have the same preoccupations, but I don’t have to justify or explain anything. Life is like a river, it ebbs and it flows.

MN: In Guelwaar, once again, as in Ceddo, Emitai, and in most of your twelve films you display a genuine respect for female strength. Nogoye Marie is elevated as a symbol of endurance and wisdom.
OS: If we do not praise and dignify our women’s heroism, which I see as pre-eminent, Africa is not going to be liberated. Let’s be clear about this: If we do not accord women their rightful place, there will be no liberation. Women work a whole lot more than men do, and if work was in and of itself liberating, women who farm fields daily would have long been liberated. Women’s emancipation doesn’t only depend on labor. If we do not wake up and appreciate justly the role of women and share responsibilities we will lose. But I think there’s a gender revolution going on in Africa anyway, and we will have to conform.

MN: Given all these considerate, if not flattering remarks about women, how come you haven’t met any to make do with. You’ve been a single for a long time!
OS: [laughs] I’m no model. I’m married with the creative process. I have female friends and they understand the life I live, that I want to stay independent. I like my freedom — freedom to wake up whenever I please, to go to bed whenever I please, and to write as late as I please in total tranquility. I tell my friends, an artist is not a good husband — he may be an excellent lover.

I have not succeeded in bridging the incompatibility between living with a partner and the nature of my work which has no timetable. But I wish that what would be remembered of me would be about my contribution to my community. Society isn’t always right, and all I do is to just sail along with society.