Ousmane Sembène

Ousmane Sembène was born on the first of January 1923 in Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of what was then French-colonial Senegal. His formal schooling ended in 1936, when — by his own account, a young boy already chafing against colonial authority — he struck a French teacher who had struck him, and was expelled. He would carry that spirit of defiance for the rest of his life, teaching himself far more than any classroom had offered him.

As a young man he laboured as a fisherman, mason, and mechanic, was drafted into the French forces during the Second World War, and afterward settled in Marseille, where he worked the docks as a stevedore. There he read voraciously and rose within his trade union, and it was from the hold of that hard life that his first novel, Le Docker noir (The Black Docker), emerged in 1956. Largely self-taught in French, he went on to write Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God's Bits of Wood, 1960), widely held to be his masterpiece.

Convinced that film could reach the millions who could not read, he turned to cinema around 1960. His 1966 film La Noire de… (Black Girl) is regarded as the first feature film by a sub-Saharan African director. In Mandabi (1968) he filmed in his own Wolof language; in Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1988), and finally Moolaadé (2004) he indicted colonialism, corruption, and injustice while honouring the strength of ordinary Africans, above all women.

Ousmane Sembène died on the tenth of June 2007 in Dakar, remembered as the father of African cinema — a griot who gave his people their own image, and their own voice.