January 1 2023 marked the centenary of the birth of Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese novelist and filmmaker hailed as the father of African cinema.
Over the course of five decades, Sembène published 10 books and directed 12 films across three distinct periods.
He has been celebrated for his beautifully crafted political works, which range in style from the psychological realism of Black Girl in 1966 to the biting satire of Xala (The Curse) in 1974.
Since his death in 2007, Sembène’s status as a pioneer has been further cemented.
But the sheer variety and richness of his work, his ability to reinvent himself as an artist, has often been overlooked.
On the occasion of his centenary, it’s worth looking at what made him such a remarkable creative presence.
Unlike many of his literary peers, Sembène did not come to writing via the colonial education system.
In fact, he left school early and was largely self-educated.
He was born into the minority Lebou community in the southern Senegalese region of Casamance.
His father was a fisherman. He later moved to the colonial capital of Dakar.
After serving in the French Army in the Second World War, he moved to France in 1946.
Employed as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1950s, he developed a love of literature through the library of the communist-affiliated trade union, the Confédération Générale du Travail.
His first novel, The Black Docker (1956), self-consciously explores the difficulties faced by a working-class black writer seeking to become a published author.
Sembène’s most celebrated novel, God’s Bits of Wood (1960), is a fictionalised account of the 1947-1948 railway strike in colonial French West Africa.
A sweeping epic, set across three different locations with a host of characters, the book illustrates Sembène’s Marxist, pan-Africanist vision of anticolonialism.
He believed the overthrow of colonial powers could best be achieved through alliances between workers across national and ethnic divides.
God’s Bits of Wood is often described as the classic Sembène text, politically committed and realist in style.
However, it proved to be the high water mark of his exploration of literary realism.
In 1960, he returned to Africa after more than a decade in Europe to tour a continent emerging from colonial domination.
