Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist (review)

Samba Gadjigo. Ousmane Sembene: The Making of a Militant Artist. Translated by Moustapha Diop. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. xxvi + 188 pp. Illustrations. Biographical chronology. Index. $50. Cloth. $19.95. Paper. Three years ago, Samba Gadjigo published his first volume on the life of Sembene Ousmane, Ousmane Sembene: Une conscience africaine (Editions Homnispheres). It has now appeared in English translation, Ousmane Sembene: The Making of a Militant Artist. Although a number of excellent studies of Sembene 's work have appeared, including Francoise Pfaffs important early Cinema of Sembene Ousmane: A Pioneer of African Film (Greenwood Press, 1984), and the more recent Ousmane Sembene: Imagining Alternatives in Film and Fiction (Africa World Press, 2003) by David Murphy, neither of these or the many other collections, articles, or books on Sembene 's work could be properly called a biography. In fact it is quite rare for a biography of an African author, much less a filmmaker, to appear in print, though many autobiographies have been written (most notably three by WoIe Soyinka). Sembene merits this attention for a few reasons. First, his written works occupy an important site in committed anticolonial and anti-neocolonial literature. He made the notion of struggle central in all of his work, including especially that of the poor, the underclass, represented at times by the lumpenproletariat, or more accurately street people - beggars, handicapped, the impoverished, victims of capitalist exploitation and theft. He gave us the vocabulary for discussing the left agenda in an African setting. He advocated for women before most women authors advocated for women ("Voltaique" and "La Noire de. . . " appeared in 1962, and Vehi dosane in 1966 - fourteen years before Manama Bâ's Une si longue lettre). He advocated for workers in his masterpiece, God's Bits of Wood (Heinemann, 1996), when writing about the working class as such was, as it remains, almost unheard of in African literature. He embodied the political resistance of the left for an African community whose dominant literary trends had focused more on racial pride and responding to colonial discourses - that is, on Negritude, an ideology he never found to be meaningful for the people whom he sought to represent - than on class solidarity. And yet it was not his writings that gave him pride of place in African letters: it was cinema. His early efforts were not entirely alone: Jean Rouch enabled Oumarou Ganda to develop an approach to film that differed significantly from Sembene's. However, it was the schools of filmmakers from Senegal, Burkina, and Mali that developed in the 1970s, first under the influence of Donskoy and Russian social realism, and then under the influence of the Africans themselves - Sembene, Cisse, Traore, Kabore, Ouedraogo - that became the dominant tendency. Above all it was Sembene who could be said to have launched this first generation, although all the others were quite distinct in their own styles and preoccupations. Honorific titles came to be attributed to Sembene, risking freezing him into the roles implied by the terms "Father of African Cinema" or "Griot." Yet he succeeded in maintaining his own distinctive style, even if his successes were at times uneven. Gadjigo 's study is truly a hagiographie text. It seeks to understand Sembene, not so as to offer a critique, but to explain away his flaws, and more important, to account for his considerable, unequaled accomplishment. Sembene comes to bear the burden here of Great Author, a mantle he would have been uncomfortable wearing. That said, this study accomplishes a number of feats. The subtitle "The Making of a Militant Artist" defines the scope of the biography: the period in Sembene's life before he became a filmmaker, including his early years growing up in the Casamance, his youth in Dakar, and then his early manhood in Marseilles. There is an attempt to account for his personality and the strengths he developed in his life from his experiences in each instance. …