Ababacar Samb-Makharam

Ababacar Samb-Makharam was born on the twenty-first of October 1934 at Dakar, French West Africa, the son of a Wolof Muslim family of the principal late-colonial Dakar community. He was raised in the Wolof-speaking Sufi Muslim community of central Dakar.

He completed his secondary education at the Lycée Van Vollenhoven at Dakar in 1955 — and travelled to Rome in 1955 to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia under the Italian neorealist masters Cesare Zavattini and Vittorio De Sica. He completed the Centro Sperimentale diploma in film direction in 1960.

He worked across the early 1960s as an assistant director and stage actor at Rome and Paris — including roles in the Italian neorealist circle of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the African theatrical productions of the principal Compagnie des Griots of Paris.

He directed his first short film, Et la neige n'était plus, in 1966 — a twenty-two-minute essay on a Senegalese student returning to Dakar after a long European residence. Et la neige n'était plus was selected for the Tours Festival of International Short Film of December 1966.

He returned to Dakar in 1966 — at the close of the principal Festival mondial des arts nègres of Dakar — and was named principal director of the Centre Cinématographique du Sénégal in 1966 alongside Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (placed in this archive). He held the Centre Cinématographique direction from 1966 to 1980.

He co-founded with Paulin Soumanou Vieyra and the principal Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (placed in this archive) the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers (FEPACI) at Algiers in October 1969 — at the Pan-African Cultural Festival of Algiers.

He directed Kodou in 1971 — a ninety-minute drama of a Wolof village girl's ritual scarification — selected for the Carthage Film Festival of October 1972.

He directed Jom in 1981 — a one-hundred-and-twenty-minute drama tracing the Wolof concept of jom, the principal Senegalese concept of honour and dignity, across three Senegalese historical moments. Jom was selected for the Cannes Film Festival of May 1981 and won the OAU Prize at the FESPACO of February 1983.

He held the principal FEPACI secretary-general position from 1979 to 1987 — and the principal Pan-African Festival of Cinema of Carthage jury presidency in October 1986.

He died at Dakar on the seventh of October 1987 of complications of a heart attack, at fifty-three.

He is honored here as the director of Jom and the co-founder of FEPACI.