Sembène Ousmane

Ousmane Sembène was born on the first of January 1923 at Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of southern Senegal, the son of Moussa Sembène — a Lebou fisherman of the small Atlantic-coast Lebou community — and Ramatoulaye Diop. He was raised in the fisherman household of the Casamance estuary and educated at the École de Marsassoum at the local French colonial primary school until his expulsion at fourteen for striking the French headmaster who had insulted him.

He apprenticed thereafter as a brick-mason, a mechanic, and a fisherman across the Casamance coast through his late adolescence. He was drafted in 1944 by the Free French Forces into the Sixth Tirailleurs Sénégalais and served with the Free French in the Italian and Provence campaigns of 1944 and 1945.

He took employment after demobilisation in 1946 at the Marseille docks of the Compagnie générale transatlantique, where he worked the cargo-stevedoring docks for ten years — the period during which he read the French literature of the inter-war years, began his trade-union activity with the CGT, and joined the French Communist Party in 1950. He led the Marseille dockworkers’ strike of 1947.

He published in 1956 his first novel Le Docker noir — a fictionalised account of the Marseille dockworker years — and returned to Senegal at independence in 1960.

He published in 1960 the novel Les Bouts de bois de Dieu — the chronicle of the 1947–1948 strike on the Dakar–Niger Railway through the eyes of the strikers’ wives — at the Paris house Le Livre contemporain. The novel was at the time of publication and remains the principal francophone African novel of the colonial-period labour struggle.

He took the one-year course in cinematography at the Gorky Film Studio at Moscow in 1962 under Mark Donskoy, and returned to Dakar in 1963 to begin the principal phase of his career as a filmmaker.

He completed in 1966 the feature film La Noire de… (Black Girl) — the first feature film made in sub-Saharan Africa by an African director — and across the following forty years a further eleven feature films, among them Mandabi (1968), Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1988), and Moolaadé (2004).

He died at Dakar on the ninth of June 2007 of complications of pneumonia, at eighty-four.

He is honored here as the founder of African cinema.