6 COLONIALISM

Black Girl Ousmene Sembène (1959) Senegal

Sembène, Ousmane. La Noire de-=Black Girl. New Yorker Films, [New York, N.Y.], ©1965

The Lumierès’ Actualities played in Dakar, Senegal at the turn of the century. George Méliès traveled to Dakar to make a film in the early 20th Century, but by 1935, The Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment censored film distribution in Africa and limited what European and American viewers saw about Africa.

Bantu relates to Central African people and their languages including Swahili. The British Colonial Film Unit distributed propaganda films about the post office and farming, but comedies were censored from distribution in Africa because they did not present whites as dignified.

French filmmakers, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, filmed a documentary in Africa called Les Staues Meurent Aussi (Statues also Die). The film contrasted African Art in museums to scenes of African life. It was finished in 1953 and was banned in Europe and the US because it was considered too controversial.

Before Colonialism in Africa, there were few written records. Many African languages were spoken rather than written. Cultural histories, mythologies and religious traditions were shared in song or poetry. Wisdom was recorded and conveyed orally. Colonial powers erased history by breaking up communities through slavery, resettlement, and the loss of language. Western narratives were substituted for traditional myths and ancestral stories. This was done by missionaries, in attempts at Christian and Muslim conversion, and through cultural hegemony and conquest. Today, nearly 50% of Africa is Muslim, 40% is Christian, only 10 percent of 1.2 Billion people in Africa practice indigenous religions.

Europeans and Americans saw Africa depicted in films like Tarzan, which was produced on a Hollywood lot and featured trained animals. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the writer of the Tarzan series, never set foot in Africa. He wrote the first Tarzan book in Chicago in 1912. The Tarzan story was first captured on film in 1918 and was the most influential depiction of Africa in the first half of the 20^th Century. Tarzan was the first film to gross $1 Million.

African cinema emerged with the Anti-Colonialist movements in Africa. Filmmaking was inherently political, designed to give Black Africans a voice. Ousmene Sembène saw Marker and Resnais’ film. Sembène was from Senegal, a country where French is the official language. He is one of the first Black African filmmakers to create films that were able to reach international audiences.

Senegal is a West African nation with a population of 16 Million on 76,000 square miles. The official language is French. Other francophone nations include: Cote D’Ivoire, Mali, and Cameroon.

Sembène served in the Senegalese Army then left to work as a fisherman, bricklayer, and mechanic in Marseilles. He wrote three novels before he began making films. Sembène’s first major success was Barom Sarret (The Waggoner) in 1963. It was filmed in Dakar and follows a man with a wagon, as he picks up and drops off passengers from the poorest areas of the city to the wealthy area inhabited by the French. The dialog and the internal monolog of the Wagon Driver were dubbed in French. All the sound in the film was recorded in a studio with actors to create a soundtrack for the 16 mm black and white film.

His film Ceddo, about the conversion of Africans to Islam in Late 18^th Century Senegal, came out in 1976. Sembène was Muslim. He addressed cultural colonialism and the surrender of Africa to foreign ideologies in his films. Ceddo was banned for eight years in Senegal.^[1]

Black Girl follows Douana, a Senegalese woman as she takes a job as a maid for a French family in Dakar. They take her to Antibes, in Southern France, where she expects to take care of the children. Instead, she is isolated, cooking, and cleaning for a French couple. She resents the way she is treated by the French, particularly the woman who employs her.

Sembène presents her story with some internal monolog in voice-over, but his direction style is removed so that audiences have to speculate and consider why Douana is unhappy. He presents the subtle but disturbing microaggressions of the French toward a citizen of one of their former colonies.

One of the goals of native filmmakers was to present through film what had been disguised, misrepresented, and erased by colonialism.  An interesting comparison can be made between Senegalese Filmmaker, Sembène, and Italian filmmaker, Gillo Pontecorvo. Both are making anti-imperialist films, but they choose different techniques for telling revolutionary stories.