Ousmane Sembène

Ousmane Sembène was born in Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of French-colonial Senegal, on the first of January 1923. He left school at the equivalent of eighth grade after striking a French headmaster who had insulted him, worked as a fisherman and bricklayer through his teens, served as a French colonial conscript in the Free French Forces from 1942 to 1946 (he saw action in Italy and Germany), and worked as a longshoreman in the port of Marseille from 1946 to 1956.

He wrote his first novel, Le Docker noir, while organizing dockworkers in Marseille. His subsequent fiction — God's Bits of Wood (1960), on the 1947-48 Dakar-Niger railway workers' strike — established him as the leading francophone African novelist of his generation.

In 1962 — at thirty-nine — Sembène concluded that fiction in French could not reach the African working class whose literacy was overwhelmingly in oral African languages rather than print French. He travelled to Moscow to study cinema at Gorky Film Studio under Mark Donskoy, returned to Senegal, and shifted his life's work into filmmaking. His 1966 feature Black Girl (La Noire de…) — the first sub-Saharan African film by an African director to gain international distribution — established sub-Saharan African cinema as a coherent artistic and political tradition.

His subsequent films — Mandabi (1968), Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1988), Guelwaar (1992), and his final film Moolaadé (2004, on female genital cutting) — won awards at Cannes, Carthage, and FESPACO. He was the principal organizing figure of the Pan-African Federation of Filmmakers from its founding in 1969.

He died in Dakar on the ninth of June 2007, age eighty-four.

He is honored here as the dockworker who became the founding filmmaker of African cinema.