Ousmane Sembene and Xala
“He is the only film maker in the world who can not be bought and sold.”
Note in Film Comment on Sembene
“On a moral level, I don’t think we (Africans) have anything to learn from Europe.”
Sembene
Born in 1923, Ousmane Sembene (Ooze-mahn Soem - Beneh) is said to be the “Father of African Cinema” – the notion of “fatherhood” is contested and, therefore, we should call him something else, perhaps the fons et origo (“fountain and origin”) of African filmmaking. Sembene proclaimed that his movies were not made for Americans or Europeans – “Europe” he said “is not my center.” Nonetheless, he is far better known and admired in places like Paris, London, New York City, and LA than in Africa. You are more likely to see one of his films screened in Berlin than in Dakar, the capital of Senegal where he lived, worked, and, 2007, died. And, in fact, several of his films on Senegalese subjects were banned in his home country and, indeed, across Africa – for instance, Emitai about resistance to the French during the colonial period was widely banned and Xala was screened in Senegal with many scenes cut, censorship intended to protect the regime of President Leopold Senghor from scathing satire in the film. (Ceddo also inspired a ban in Senegal, a subject that is complex and requires another essay.) After his death in 2007, Sembene’s films went into eclipse, partly due to the director’s refusal to authorize DVD or home video versions of the pictures – he wanted the movies to be seen on the big screen. However, with the centenary of Sembene’s birth in 2023, his pictures have enjoyed an art house revival and Criterion has recently issued a three disk set of some of the director’s most famous films, including Xala.
Sembene was born and raised in the southern part of Senegal, a coastal West African nation, then, a French colony. His father was a fisherman and Sembene, as a boy, worked in the fishing industry and the construction trades. As a boy, Sembene could speak French but not read the language – he claims that he wanted to “grow up to be a French boy.” (Sembene was prone to self-mythologizing – he has given multiple accounts of his early relationship with French; for instance, he claimed that food in Senegal came wrapped in old French newspapers which his father demanded that he read aloud to him.) He was sent to Islamic school, where he studied for a few years, presumably in Arabic, before being expelled on disciplinary grounds. (Senegal is 97% Sufi Muslim.) Sembene was drafted in 1944 (he was 21) and trained to serve in the Free French light infantry, the tirailleur force; his military service was in Niger. Sembene recalled later that his experience with White French soldiers was a “revelation” that “demystified” colonialism for him. In combat, he saw White troops panicked, cowardly and weeping. When a White soldier asked Sembene to write a letter home for him, he was dumbstruck – Sembene had previously thought that illiteracy was only a Black and African disease. In 1946, he went to Marseille, France where he was employed as a dock worker. When he was badly injured after about a year on the docks, he recuperated, using his time off work to learn to read French and, then, devouring contemporary French literature, including work by Camus. He joined the Communist party in 1950 after participating in noteworthy railroad strike earlier in 1947 - 1948. In the early fifties, he lived in Paris where he met Richard Wright, the Black American novelist and important writers from Jamaica and Haiti, artists in the Negritude school. He published his first novel Dock Worker in 1956, followed by an important novel in the vein of Zola and Camus God’s Bits of Wood, a book about the strike on the Niger to Dakar railroad line. During this time, he did various odd-jobs and worked as a line assembly-man and union organizer at the Citroen factory. All told, Sembene, who is considered an important figure in Senegalese literature, wrote six novels, four novellas, and a book of short stories.
Sembene was at the Gorki Studios in Moscow in 1962 where he studied film production and worked as an intern on Soviet movies. Sembene was 40 when he made his first short film, a twenty minute picture about a teamster operating a wagon, in 1963. When Senegal gained its independence, Sembene returned to his native country, then, under the regime of Leopold Senghor, also a poet and artist. (Sembene and Senghor had a complicated relationship and, frequently, clashed.) Sembene’s first 60 minute feature film, largely produced in Paris, is called La Noire de – (translated generally as Black Girl but meaning something like “the Black Girl of...”). The movie, about the casual mistreatment of a Senegalese woman employed by a French couple, was highly acclaimed. Sembene shot his next movie in Senegal, Mandabi, the first movie made in Africa to be shot in a vernacular tongue (as opposed to French the lingua franca of West Africa and the official language of Senegal). Mandabi’s dialogue is presented in Wolof, the principal language in Senegal. The film is about an unemployed Muslim with two wives and several children who struggles to cash a money-order received from a relative in Paris. (Sembene was an activist in the movement to produce news and literature in Wolof – he was one of the promoters, and publishers, of Kaddu, a newspaper printed in Wolof; the newspaper is featured in a couple of scenes in Xala.)
Emitai is Sembene’s next picture, released in 1971. The picture, combining comedy and tragedy of the direst kind, documents a rebellion against the French in a rural village in 1944. France was conscripting young men to fight for the Free French (with people also drafted to serve the Vichy regime which controlled most of the colony). A rice levy is imposed the village resulting in the women, culturally responsible for rice production (“rice is a woman’s wealth” as the proverb has it) concealing their harvest notwithstanding French reprisals. The movie is strongly feminist with surreal overtones. On the strength of Emitai, New Yorker films, an East Coast movie distribution enterprise, financed Xala released in 1975. By this point, Sembene was afflicted with what he calls “the mathematics of cinema” – that is, the difficulty of raising money to make and show movies in an impoverished African country. Xala was highly regarded and received rave reviews. Sembene took the picture on the road with him, traveling around in rural Senegal, projecting the movie on sheets or lime-plastered walls, and promoting the picture with the mostly illiterate peasants. (In some regards, Sembene’s activism recalls Dziga Vertov’s revolutionary films shown by the director to Russian peasants as part of the Kino-Eye movement after the Bolshevik revolution.) Admirers of Xala nominated Sembene for service on various juries and panels judging film competitions – he was on the Cannes, Berlin, and Moscow film festival jury panels.
Sembene made Ceddo in 1977, also a very highly regarded film. Ceddo is a period piece, set at some indistinct time in “17th or 18th centuries” as Sembene has explained. The movie, about Islam’s complicity in the slave trade, was controversial in Senegal and other majority Muslim countries and shown in censored form or, even, entirely suppressed. More than ten years passed before Sembene was able to release another picture 1988's Camp de Thiaroye, a movie about a 1944 rebellion of conscripts enlisted in the French army. During the Battle of France in 1940, more than 100,000 African from French colonies were captured by the Germans. The Germans sent the Africans back to prison camps in West Africa. In 1944, as a result of victories in Europe, the Africans were liberated. Disputes arose about their transport back to their home villages and, at the end of November 1944, a mutiny occurred at a camp housing liberated French tirailleurs near Dakar. French soldiers killed a disputed number of the mutineers, perhaps as many as 300, in a massacre that is seen as a precursor to political activity resulting in Senegal’s independence from France in 1960. As a young man, the first President of Senegal, Leopold Senghor wrote a celebrated poem about the slaughter and, of course, Sembene had been enlisted as a tirailleur (or light infantry) soldier. Camp de Thiaroye proved to very controversial and was suppressed both in France and Senegal – it must be good movie since it offended both the colonizers and the colonized. Senghor has a sort of sibling rivalry with Sembene, both of them artists who had begun their mature work in the fifties, and the relationship between the men was complex and often fraught with hostility. People who have seen Camp de Thiaroye describe it as despairing and nihilistic. The movie proved to be destructive to Sembene in several ways – in order to finance the film, Sembene misappropriated funds earmarked for the use of younger African filmmakers, including one of his own protegees, resulting in a backlash that again made it infeasible for him to produce his next movie. “I would sleep with the devil to make a film,” Sembene reportedly said. He fled Senegal for a couple of years, teaching on American campuses and encountering African-American filmmakers such as Spike Lee whom Sembene has influenced. The dust had settled by 1992 and Sembene returned to Senegal.
Guelwaar (1994) is a satirical comedy about a Catholic and Muslim who die on the same day. A mix-up occurs between the corpses and the bodies are buried in the wrong cemeteries. Roger Ebert proclaimed this movie as one of the ten best in 1994 – like most of Sembene’s films it’s very hard to access and see. 2004's Faat Kine is about an unwed mother with several children struggling to feed her family in Dakar. Synopses of the movie make it sound like a neo-realist film similar to Mandabi but with a feminist slant. Sembene’s last picture, Moolade dramatizes a protest by rural women against the practice of female genital mutilation (sometimes euphemistically called “female circumcision”) a common practice in Senegal and West Africa (as of 2010 about 27% of the women in Senegal had endured this kind of mutilation.)
Sembene died in Dakar in 2007 at 84. He was buried in a shroud adorned with scripture from the Qu’ran. With the death of Sembene, the Senegalese film industry died as well. In the golden era, between 1970 and 1990, about five films were produced in Senegal each year. There were rivals to Sembene, most notably Djibril Diop Mambety, whose film 1973 Touki Bouki (“The Voyage of the Hyena”) is very high regarded. Mambety also experienced catastrophic funding problems. Between 2014 and the present, only five feature-length films have been produced in Senegal.
Xala
Ousmane Sembane’s novel from which his film derives was published in French in 1973. The film adaptation was made in 1974 and released under the auspices of New Yorker Films, a part producer of the picture, in 1975.
Study of the novel illumines some aspects of the movie that may be obscure to viewers in this country. Here are some details helpful to an understanding of the film:
Xala is pronounced “Ha-la” and means both impotence and curse. Senegalese believe that impotence is the result of someone casting a curse on its victim. In this case, Ouimi N’Doye. El Hadji’s second wife, is the prime suspect.
El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye is the name of the protagonist, said to be about 50 in the novel. The sobriquet “El Hadji” designates the hero as a person who has completed a successful Hadj or pilgrimage to Mecca – El Hadji enjoys the reputation of being a pious Muslim. In his youth, he was a firebrand trade unionist and active in the political struggle against the French colonizers.
Adja Awa Astou is El Hadji’s first wife. Her name “Adja” denotes that she also has completed a pilgrimage to Mecca, apparently with her husband. (The novel tells us that she made the pilgrimage after 18th year of marriage to El Hadji; El Hadji wedded his second wife after 20 years of marriage to Adja Awa Astou.) “Awa” is an honorific that means “first woman” or “first wife” – it’s an Arabic version of “Eve”. In the novel, we learn that Adja Awa Astou was raised as a Roman Catholic, part of the 2% of Senegal’s population that follows that creed. She is said to have six children with El Hadji.
Rama is El Hadji’s daughter with Adja Awa Astou. She is a University student and part of the movement to revive Wolof in Senegal. She’s associated with Kaddu, a Wolof language newspaper. There’s jealousy and tension between the two wives because El Hadji has given Rama a Fiat to drive, but not yet given a car to Mactar, Ouimi N’Doye’s eldest son.
Ouimi N’Doye is El Hadji’s second wife. In the novel, she reads movie magazines, dresses elaborately, and has five children with the protagonist. She generally is portrayed as speaking French. Both Ouimi N’Doye and Adja Awa Astou live relatively close to one another in an upscale neighborhood near the center of Dakar, a coastal port, Senegal’s capitol and a city with two million inhabitants. In the novel, the panicked El Hadji notes that she during her moome, she is sexually voracious and can not go two nights without having sexual intercourse, a prospect that terrifies him.
Prior to El Hadji’s third marriage, the protagonist has a moome or aye (words meaning marital schedule) in which he spent three nights with Adja Awa Astou and three nights with Ouimi N’Doye each week. Each wife has a separate villa in which she resides with her children and servants. The honeymoon involving N’Gone will interrupt the moome schedule for thirty days – that is, El Hadji is supposed to spend 30 days exclusively with N’Gone.
Yay Bineta is N’Gone’s Badyen, that is, Aunt and Godmother. N’Gone is the 20 year old girl who becomes El Hadji’s third wife. The Badyen is responsible for managing the engagement and marriage of her brother’s daughter. N’Gone’s parents are Mam Fatou (mother), a zealous opponent of polygamy, and Yay Bineta’s brother, Babacar, a kindly, if weak, man. According to the novel, N’Gone is a poor student that the family fears will become pregnant by one of her boyfriends. (It’s unclear whether she is the virgin that she has been promoted to be.) N’Gone is attractive and the family wants to get her married to a respectable husband before she ends up pregnant and a single mother. N’Gone and her family are portrayed as more suburban than El Hadji’s first two wives, living farther away from downtown Dakar.
The red cock – after El Hadji’s unsuccessful first night with N’Gone, Yay Bineta comes to the bedchamber with an old woman who is carrying a red cock. The red cock was traditionally beheaded between the thighs of the bride, apparently to create a bloody mess that obscured whether the woman was a virgin or not when married. Later, El Hadji is told to sacrifice a red cock to lift the curse of xala afflicting him.
Griots are professional troubadors central to West African culture. They form a closed caste (marrying within the profession). Griots are the repository of oral traditions and perform traditional ballads and songs, as well as innovating and improvising new material based on current events. In Xala, we see them at the wedding (which takes place at the villa provided by El Hadji for N’Gone) serving as heralds – they, more or less, announce guests. (In the film, Sembene sets up an opposition between the Dakar Star Band that plays American and European-style jazz and the griots who perform on the streets as buskers.) A griot’s song about injustice tracks El Hadji through the latter part of the film. A famous griot in this country is Papa Demba “Paco” Samb, born in Dakar but now living in Delaware. Griots typically accompany themselves by playing stringed instruments or playing “goblet-shaped” drums. Griot’s have considerable authority and, often, mediate or arbitrate disputes since they are thought to have access to applicable legal or common law precedents. (In an interview about the making of Ceddo, Sembene maintains that Africa is an oral culture and that his films reflect different styles of “orality” – meaning, I think, various types of rhetoric and narrative modes. Sembene’s meaning isn’t clear in the interview: he tends to adopt the vatic and rather aridly abstract diction of French literary theorists wqhen interviewed. It is clear that Sembene distrusts the Griot tradition since he notes that various African dictators have retained ballad specialists of this kind to compose “praise songs” for them – certainly, a state of affairs that has been the case from the very outset.)
Marabouts are Sufi religious leaders – in Senegal, they are highly organized and operate in a hierarchy. These figures lead congregations, provide instruction in Islamic scripture and traditions, and, often, engage in faith-based healing practices. Many are itinerant and survive on alms. The Muslim Brotherhood of Senegal is heavily Marabout in its orientation and, from time to time, these leaders have been involved in politics and political organizing to a significant degree. Their Sufi religious practices are syncretic with traditional African animism and their rituals often show influences from both Muslim and pre-Muslim religious practices.
Measures against Xala include offering a red cock to avert the curse, wearing an armband or belt (xattim) inscribed with verses from the Koran, and painting Koran verses on a piece of wood, then, washing off the paint, infusing it in tea, and drinking the liquid or rubbing it onto the flesh (the practice called saffara).
The fierce Ouimi N’Doye (the second wife) is angry for a reason. In the novel, Sembene says:
The thought that she was a second choice, an option, enraged her. The middle position giving her a kind of intermediate role was unbearable to a co-wife. The first wife implied a conscious choice, she was an elect. The second wife was purely optional. The third? Someone to be prized. When it came to the moome, the second wife was more like a door hinge. She had given a lot of thought to her position in the man’s marital cycle and realized that she was in disgrace...the advent of the third wife re-opened the wound of frustration suffered by all Muslim women of our country. She even thought momentarily of divorcing El Hadji...
Sembene’s wife
Ousmane Sembene’s wife appears in a documentary on the Ceddo disc in the new Criterion set of films by the director. The documentary shows Sembene in rural Senegal making the large-scale film Ceddo. It looks hot and there are lots of people to manage, none of them professional actors. At one point, the director of the documentary film (speaking in French) interviews a woman standing on the sidelines. The woman speaks in what seems to me to be halting French. Later, she is identified as Sembene’s wife. She is said to be an American, hence, her uncertain French.
It’s hard to track down her name. AI now clogs up the internet with false or misleading information. To one inquiry that I made, I was told by the officious, cheerful, and confident computer that Sembene was known to have two wives; his first wife was said to be Adja Awa Astou but the identity of his second wife (Sembene was polygamous the article claimed) was unknown. Obviously, the computer was mindlessly reporting the plot of Xala and not anything relevant to the director.
Roger Ebert’s website provides a review of a documentary made about Sembene (called, not surprisingly, Sembene!). That review mentions a woman named Carrie Moore as Sembene’s wife. He claimed that she was his muse and, then, apparently badly mistreated her – although the details of his abuse are not specified.
The young woman – I will call her “Ms. Moore” – is asked by the interlocutor if Ceddo will likely be a great success in America. The interviewer observes that “Sembene is very well-known in the United States.” Ms. Moore seems a bit dubious about this prospect. You see her biting her lip, as if to restrain herself from saying: “Well-known compared to whom?” She is asked if the movie will make money in America. Moore responds: “No one is interested in his movies in Africa. People want to see Hollywood pictures.” The interviewer asks: “But what about African-Americans in the US?” Moore replies: “People in the US like action films – westerns and gangster movies. African-Americans idealize Africa. They won’t be able to tolerate a picture that shows the truth about Africa.”
It is true that African popular cinema is dominated by violent American war movies (the Rambo series was particularly popular as well as American and Asian karate and martial arts pictures – Indian action films are also profitable.)
Pan-Africanism
In many interviews with Sembene, he advocates for Pan-African politics. In Xala, El Hadji’s eldest daughter espouses Pan-African ideas and is filmed against a poster showing the entire continent of Africa without delineation of national borders. Sembene argues that Africa has a distinctive culture and that this culture will be its defense against the First or developed World. This is a common perspective asserted by African artists, but one must question its validity. Indeed, if arguments about Africa as a whole were advanced by Colonial or Whites theorists, these ideas would be dismissed as essentialist and, probably, racist as well. The fact is that Africa is a very diverse place, fractured into various tribal groups speaking separate and distinct languages, and it is difficult to see how a north African Tuareg or Berber has much relationship with a Zulu or Bantu pygmy. Furthermore, modern Africa and, even, the continent in medieval times, shows a sharp distinction between urban dwellers and the more traditional agrarian farmers who live in rural villages. Again, it seems unpersuasive to make general arguments based on what perceptions of what Africans essentially want or need. In fact, Sembene’s arguments endorsing Pan-African ideas are undercut by his own films that depict an astonishing range of social and political environments. Nonetheless, the Pan-African paradigm in intrinsic to Sembene’s thought must be taken into account as an animating factor that inspires his work. This is particularly clear in Ceddo, the film Sembene made after completing Xala – Ceddo is a complicated political allegory in which Sembene attempts to epitomize two centuries of African culture, decisive with respect to the incursion of Islam into the Sahel and sub-Saharan parts of the continent and, also, characterized by the development of the slave trade; Ceddo links Islam and the slave trade is ways that made viewers uncomfortable and resulted in the film’s censorship and suppression. (In Senegal, Ceddo was ostensibly suppressed over a dispute about the spelling of the movie’s title – “ceddo” which means “strangers” or “rebels”, particularly with respect to non-Islamic animist Senegalese, is spelled with a single “d” in official Wolof orthography. However, for historical purposes,. Sembene insisted that an archaic spelling of the word be used: that “ceddo’ with two “d’s”. In general, official Wolof, one of the primary languages used in Senegal, does not double letters. Prime Minister Senghor construed Sembene’s title as disrespectful in broad terms – Sembene, Senghor thought, was undercutting the entire system of Wolof spelling, part of the curriculum in state-subsidized public schools. But, of course, no one really thought that the dispute had anything to do with spelling – Senghor and his ministers were concerned with the offense that the majority Muslim population would take to the film.) Ceddo is promoted as a universal history, a scenario that purports to describe and analyze the interactions between sub-Saharan African states and Islam in the pre-colonial era – a period when African polities had agency, but, nonetheless, developed commerce based on the slave-trade.
Xala (the film) and Xala (the movie)
In the film adapted from his novel, Sembene tightens the focus on El Hadji’s plight. He makes political criticism of Senghor’s regime explicit in the opening scenes. The visitor to Dakar from the country, come to the city to buy rice for his impoverished village, is a character that doesn’t appear in the novel version. Likewise, the scene involving the theft from the visitor, the thief’s conversion of the funds into a suit with cowboy hat, and, then, his replacement of El Hadji on the board of directors of the Chamber of Commerce are all amusing incidents that don’t appear in the source novel. The film amplifies the role of the crippled and deformed beggars in the plot and expressly equates them to the visitor’s impoverishment – the theme is that the kleptocracy diminishes everyone that it touches and, in effect, deforms Senegalese society. In the novel, the beggars make their appearance in the 102 page novel only in its last four pages. They are more prominent in the film and appear earlier in the narrative. The book has a rather abrupt ending. The beggars, without any foreshadowing, attack Adja Awa Astou’s villa, confronting El Hadji who is now insolvent, bankrupt, and under criminal indictment, spitting on him as shown in the film. In the book, a griot who is also a street beggar, challenges El Hadji from time to time, but the nature of the challenge isn’t specified – that is, we aren’t privy to the denunciatory lyrics displayed in the film. (This griot beggar is the ring-leader of the cripples in the final scene in both book and film.) Since the role of the crippled beggars in the film is much less prominent in the novel, the scene in which the deformed outcasts share a meal involving canned condensed milk doesn’t appear in the book.
The novel is written in an omniscient third person that provides Sembene access to the thoughts of Adja Awa Astou – we learn that she was raised Catholic, that her first name was originally “Renee”, and other details about her upbringing. Sembene also narrates the internal monologues of Oumi and Rama. In other words, Sembene, although writing in third person, is privy to the thoughts of some, but not all of his characters – generally the two first wives, Rama, and El Hadji’s loyal chauffeur and lieutenant, Modu as well as El Hadji. Omniscience is a bit of a cheat in the book since there is an aspect of the detective novel about the narrative: who is responsible for El Hadji’s xala? Access to the minds of the two wives, of course, could be used to exculpate them from causing the hero’s xala, but Sembene wants to maintain suspense on this issue and so doesn’t offer an explanation for the affliction until about three pages from the end of the book. At that point, Sembene (as in the movie) has the griot-beggar reveal that El Hadji misappropriated the wealth of his own kin and that his xala is a punishment for the misdeed upon which his fortune is based. (The identify of the griot-beggar is established only at the very end of both book and novel.)
In general terms, the film is more simplistic and much more strongly political – the aspect of allegory as to El Hadji’s crime and his punishment is much more strongly emphasized in the film. The movie has the aspect of a parable about African (Senegalese) kleptocrats imposing their own form of (neo-) colonialism on the people of the country. This idea is intrinsic to the novel but not pushed into the foreground.
In both film and movie, El Hadji’s entire enterprise is entangled with his sexual virility. When this is stripped away, everything in his life collapses.
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