By Maidei Jenny Magirosa

“History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it also teaches us that, whatever may be the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent organised repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.” – Amilcar Cabral in Return to the Source 

NEGATIVE images of Africa have prevailed in Western movies, literature, art, history and popular media.
In the first part of this column, we explore the African response to the negative stereotyping of the continent and her people through the use of film.
In looking at African films made by Africans, we go no further than Senegal’s Sembene Ousmane’s films, novels and essays.
He wrote 10 books, mainly in French and most have been translated into English.
After Senegal became independent in 1960, Sembene Ousmane became a film maker because he was appalled by the lack of African literature in educating Africans about their culture and history.
Sembene holds the title today as the ‘father’ of African films.
He is one of the most outstanding French-speaking African writers in Francophone Africa.
Sembene was named the ‘father of African cinema’ because of his incredible ability to touch audiences in Africa.
Although his name does not feature as much in African literary circles, Ousmane’s voice and works are just as remarkable as those of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.
His first poem in Marseilles was published in 1956, at the age of 33. Since then, he produced five novels, five collections of short stories, directed numerous films, nine features and four documentaries.
We know a lot more about this remarkable man though hundreds of interviews and scholarly articles on his work in international journals. He was a committed Marxist whose novels and films focused mainly on the struggles of African people.
As an educational tool, Sembene saw cinema as ‘night school’.
In the late 1960s, he decided to make films in indigenous languages rather than French, thus introducing a major revolution in African films as channels of education for the less literate population.
Sembene wanted Africans to see Africa through African eyes and not Western or Arabic eyes.
Above all, Sembene’s goal in making African films was to help Africans to “understand that we need bread and shelter, but without culture there can be no development.”
Sembene Ousman was the son of a Senegalese fisherman, born in 1923 in Ziguinchor, on the Casamance River in southern Senegal which was a part of French West Africa.
Sembene’s views of resistance to French colonial thinking began at a very early age.
At the age of 14 he was expelled from a colonial school in Casamance for hitting back at a French teacher.
Instead of castigating him, Sembene’s father supported him.
Describing the incident, Sembene said: “After I slapped the school director on the face, my father said, ‘Did you make sure he bled?’” Sembene’s father was a strong supporter of economic independence.
He had vowed never to work for a white man so he taught Sembene how to be self sufficient as a fisherman.
Sembene grew up with a maternal and paternal grandmother and an Islamic uncle.
In an interview, Sembene once said: “I benefited from a synthesis of values – in the house, the compound, the country and Koranic and French schools.
“We conserved our own culture.
“We had nightly gatherings with tales.
“Now I call it my own theatre.”
After leaving French school in Dakar at the age of 14, Sembene became an apprentice mechanic and bricklayer.
He was already enjoying cinema.
He memorised the silent classics of Charlie Chaplin.
Like most colonial cinemas in African countries, there was racial discrimination in the sitting arrangement of the audiences.
Sembene wrote that whites sat at the back in armchairs and natives at the front.
Some of the natives brought their own stools.
In 1944, Sembene was forced to go on French call-up duties where he worked as a truck driver in Niger in a colonial infantry unit.
During this time, Sembene became aware that he was helping Nazi-occupied France fight for its liberation and yet the Africans in Senegal were colonised by the French.
Ironically, Sembene was able to discover that there was no difference between black and white people.
He wrote: “In the army we saw those who considered themselves our masters naked, in tears, some cowardly or ignorant.
“When a white soldier asked me to write a letter for him, it was a revelation – I thought all Europeans knew how to write.
“The war demystified the coloniser; the veil fell.”
He was demobbed in 1946 and joined a construction union in Dakar where he witnessed the general strike that paralysed the colonial economy for a month and helped begin the fight for independence.
He later wrote a book called God’s Bits of Wood based on the landmark railway workers’ strike of 1947-48 in French West Africa.
The French bosses tried to force the railway men back to work, but the women led a decisive resistance march.
Because of this epic novel, Sembene became a household name in 1960. The book was taught as a classic across Africa and later adapted for the stage in Dakar in 2002.
Sembene was concerned that it was mostly Europeans writing about Africa.
He desperately wanted Africa to speak for itself and felt that film was the best medium of speaking.
He got a scholarship to study film at the Gorky Studios in Moscow for a year.
Back in Senegal, Sembene was actively engaged in fighting for political and social change alongside many of his generation like Sékou Touré in Guinée, Patrice Lumumba in Belgian Congo, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Amilcar Cabral in Bissau Guinea.
For Sembene, the terrain of art and culture were important to the freedom and revival of African societies.
He was passionate about Africa’s past and the future.
Sembene was also driven by “the need to invest in Africa, to contribute to a better self-awareness of the past, present and future.”
For him, Africa became what Albert Camus called ‘Une valeur’, meaning “that which transcends one’s own life; that for which one is ready to give his/her life.”
In the 1960’s, Ousmane Sembène began his cinematic career riding a bicycle and carrying 35mm film cans from village to village doing makeshift screenings.
He was the screenwriter, producer, director and actor, often adapting his own fiction.
Sembene made a dozen features and documentaries exploring the lives of the poor and dispossessed under colonial rule.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer, co-directed the documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema in1994.
Ngugi commended that Sembene’s main concern was the “imperative of social and mental liberation of Africa decolonising itself if it’s to survive.”