Ababacar Samb-Makharam

Ababacar Samb-Makharam was born in Dakar on the twenty-first of October 1934. His road to the cinema ran through a navy training centre, a law clerk's desk, and then Paris — the drama school of the rue Blanche and the co-founding of the Griots, the African theatre troupe, acting under Roger Blin and in films like Tamango — before Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia made him a filmmaker between 1959 and 1962.

Home from 1964, he worked in Radio Sénégal and the schools' television and raised his own house, Baobab Films. His short Et la neige n'était plus (1965) — a student returns from Europe to a Dakar he must relearn — stands among the first Senegalese films, and took Best Short Film and Best African Short Director at Dakar's Festival mondial des arts nègres in 1966.

Kodou (1971), in which a girl flees the lip-tattooing rite and two worlds contend for her mind, won the Prix Georges-Sadoul. Jom, or the Story of a People (1981), shot in Wolof with German television's backing, made the Wolof word for dignity a cinema's whole thesis — the griot recounting the upright ones to a people on strike — and showed at Cannes' Critics' Week in 1982 and the Berlinale Forum after. Between his films he served the continent's whole cinema as Secretary-General of FEPACI, the pan-African federation of filmmakers, through the mid-1970s.

He died at Dakar on the seventh of October 1987, at fifty-two, among the pioneers of Senegalese and pan-African cinema. Honored be Ababacar Samb-Makharam, who filmed jom and lived by it.