Paulin Soumanou Vieyra

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra was born on 31 January 1925 in Porto-Novo, in French Dahomey (present-day Benin), into an Afro-Brazilian returnee family of the Aguda community. His Portuguese surname descended from a Yoruba great-grandfather who, enslaved and carried to Bahia, resettled in the old slave port of Porto-Novo after emancipation. His father was a Yoruba railway administrator; his mother, a merchant, came originally from Sierra Leone.

Taken to France as a child in 1935 to continue his schooling, Vieyra trained at the Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, becoming the first African admitted to that school and graduating in the mid-1950s. In 1955, with fellow students, he directed Afrique sur Seine, a short study of young Africans in Paris — a work long cited as the first film directed by Black Africans, made when colonial law still barred Africans from filming on the continent.

In 1960 he settled in Dakar, casting his life and craft with newly independent Senegal, where he married the Guadeloupean writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra. For fifteen years he led the Actualités Sénégalaises newsreel service, mentored a founding generation that included Ousmane Sembène and Djibril Diop Mambéty, and helped found the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) in 1969.

As historian he gave African cinema its first written memory, in Le Cinéma et l'Afrique and Le Cinéma africain des origines à 1973. He died on 4 November 1987. We honor Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, who opened the door of the image so that a continent could at last see itself.