By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

SEMBENE OUSMANE, the Senegalese film director, experimented with stories told in film to help those who are less literate to understand visual images.
This way he helped shape the struggle for cultural liberation by using African film to express cultural identity in opposition to European colonial domination.
Sembene’s use of cinema brings knowledge to a wide global audience.
In writing the film scripts, Sembene drew inspiration from African oral tales and used types such as tricksters.
He therefore blended traditional African storytelling devices with experimental film language.
The films aim to educate.
Speaking about them, Sembene once said, “This isn’t just entertainment: I call it movie school… so my people can take responsibility and solve their own problems.”
In Black Girl, a film he made in 1966, Sembene presents the important role of cinema as a major instrument in raising political consciousness. It was Sembene Ousmane’s first feature film in which he explores the nature and effects of cultural domination through the subordination of a woman.
Sembene shows the oppression of women when they are condemned to take menial and domestic work because of their lack of training, education and social connections.
This remarkable film introduced Sembene to an international audience of writers and artistes attending the 1966 Festival Mondiale des Arts Nègres held in Dakar.
Black Girl is the story of a poor, young black Senegalese woman called ‘Diouana’.
She has fantasies of France as a paradise full of beautiful people, perfumes, nice clothes and adventure.
She is desperate to go there.
She walks over the bridge that connects the poor African section of Dakar to the wealthy prosperous area where she searches for work.
She moves from one door to the other and finds no work.
Then we see Diouana’s future French employer passing the group of African women sitting in the market square looking for work.
She wears dark glasses and leisurely looks at the women, inspecting them as if they were slaves for sale.
Diouana hangs back while the women all clamour to be hired by the French woman.
The white woman selects Diouana and she is overjoyed at getting the job.
The French couple then takes Diouana to Antibes in France on the promise that she will be a governor for their children.
Once Diouana gets to Paris, she is told to clean the tub.
Then she begins the work of a maid and this includes cooking, laundry, cleaning and babysitting.
Diouana does not get paid and she has no family or friends.
Daily she is confined to the house except when she goes shopping.
Using the voice-over monologue, we see Diouana’s misery and confusion at being confined to the kitchen and her bedroom.
She repeatedly asks, “Why am I here?”
She experiences intense pain, loss and alienation.
The French couple has their own domestic issues.
They have a tendency to overeat, drink too much and they fight.
The husband drinks and sleeps during the day leading Diouana to ask: “Is this living?”
The French woman is also oppressed.
She is a white woman who finds her domestic situation oppressive.
She therefore oppresses Diouana.
Living in the French Riviera, Diouana is not free.
Although Senegal, is supposedly free, she remains a maid bonded to work like a slave.
Diouana gradually casts away objects that associate her with Africa, like the mask.
She tries to find meaning through acquisition of material goods.
She has a strong attachment to wigs, shoes, jewellery and dresses.
She is expecting to find happiness in these consumer objects.
But there is none.
Diouna increasingly becomes silent and withdrawn.
One day, Diouna shows some resistance to her employer when she wears a pretty dress and high heels to do housework.
In doing this, she wants to express herself and feel different because there is no other place to dress up and be seen.
The French madam screams and orders her to dress appropriately. 
Daily cleaning in this confined space in a small apartment leads to depression and severe sadness.
Gradually, Diouna becomes silent in reaction to her oppression.
Worse still, Diouna has no contact with her family in Senegal.
For her, “France is the kitchen, the living room, the bathroom and my bedroom.”
In the end, Diouna cannot handle her situation.
She tragically commits suicide.
Sembene’s films remain challenging and educational.
The story of Diouna is simple, artistic and powerful, suffused with humanness, showing that there are post independence problems needing redress through cinema.
At the same time, the films are complex, raising many questions requiring answers for discussion and debate.
After seeing Black Girl, you are left wondering what it is you can do to change the situation that we as Africans find ourselves in.
Sembene’s films help to educate people to existing conditions while providing suggestions for new political and cultural alternatives.
He succeeds in using Black Girl to reveal the expectations of young Africans as they come into contact with European culture.
The film also shows how the new materialism dominates over the masses of African men and women.
Vulnerability to European culture, as Fanon has also shown, seriously affects young people in underdeveloped cultures:
“In an African country, where mental development is uneven, where the violent collision of two worlds has considerably shaken old traditions and thrown the universe of the perceptions out of focus, the impressionability and sensibility of the young Africans are at the mercy of the various assaults made upon them by the very nature of Western culture.”
Although Black Girl was made in 1966, it remains a constant reminder of our present day situation.
Black Girl was a movie created to educate people on their existing situations.
It helped lay the ground for new political and cultural alternatives.
In the end, it is a visually graphic film focusing on issues of race, poverty, deception, human trafficking, loss, alienation and the loneliness of living in the Diaspora.
Today, many Zimbabweans who left the country to work as domestic workers in America, England, Dubai and other places experience similar racism in these foreign places.
Black Girl remains one of the best mediums to help Africans see the problems brought by colonialism, economic and cultural dependency.