Ousmane Sembene or, Work Inspired by Commitment

by Rogelio Martínez Furé  (published 1975)

Introduction to the Cuban edition of Sembene's novel, God's Bits of Wood

Published by Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 1975, pp. 7-20.

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann (2007)

In a brief but quite juicy interview given by Ousmane Sembene to Tajar Benyeloon for the now-defunct Moroccan literary publication Souffles (nr 16-17, 1969-1970, pp. 50-51), when asked how he conceived the cultured man in Africa, and what was the role of the intellectual on the continent, the outstanding Senegalese writer and cinema director replied:

“For me, he is a political man, along with all that this term implies. He is a man totally committed to perpetual denunciation. His role is to be a militant, a combatant. Art can be a weapon. Besides, every culture is political.”

Questioned about his views on the relationship between the intellectual and the people, particularly in the case of a people with an illiterate majority, he responded:

“Firstly, he should be confident with respect to his people. He should not define himself with respect to the people according to hierarchies. In order to express the aspirations of his people, he must become a part of them.”

In these brief phrases, the artistic and ideological conceptions which nurtured the life and creative endeavours of this man were clearly expressed. His work has been, since its very inception, a violent blow in the midst of the literary world of French-speaking Africa.

In his novels, long or short, in his drama and his cinema, the denunciation of colonialism and its sequels emerged, as did the unmasking of the native neo-bourgeosies, strong criticism of backward “feudal” remnants, the subtle traps of neo-colonialism which continues to exploit the masses of this continent, in spite of formal “independences”, national anthems and flags of many recently inaugurated republics.

He displeased the évolués, the former and the new masters, the marabouts (Muslim hermits), settlers, foreign experts, treacherous union leaders, corrupt politicians, nouveau riches of “black skins and white masks”, opportunistic beings alienated by  the myths of  bourgeois European culture. In short, all the sick fauna nourished for generations by the work of the African peoples, their vices and shortcomings where exposed in broad daylight, denounced, and for the first time, the voice of the oppressed was heard without minced words, without any romantic exoticisms.

But who was the man who, from the very first book he wrote, took upon himself the destiny of the majority, in the midst of the narcissism which characterized a large part of the Senegalese intelligentsia?

We must bear in mind that French colonialism always presented that country as an example of its “civilizing” mission in Africa: Saint-Louis, the first town founded by France at the mouth of the Senegal River already in the course of the XVII century (1659) by instructions from Cardinal Richelieu; Dakar, with its high and white buildings and its wide avenues filled with trees, the capital of so-called French West Africa; the “old municipalities” (Saint-Louis, Gorée, Dakar, Rufisque), whose “native” inhabitants enjoyed the “privilege” of being French nationals; Senegal, the first “producer” of intellectual and administrative cadres for “Black” Africa…

Who was this Ousmane Sembene, who was to be later known in the world of literature and cinema?

He had nothing, or almost nothing, to do with that world-mirage, with that miscarriage for export which -–even if producing African ministers for the French Republic — made the Black children in its schools repeat in concert: “Our ancestors, the Gauls, were white and blond”. Sembene did not emerge from the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie, nor was he a descendant from the big families who inherited the elevated cultures which flourished in the Midaeval empires of Ghana and Mali. He was not an aristocratic gelowar, nor had he been trained in religious schools in which he would have translated from Latin from infancy. He had emerged from the bowels of the people, from the most exploited strata, in a country on which –over the complex pre-colonial socio-economic stratification, with its divisions in classes and castes, in ethnic groups and different religions— a new stratification brought by European colonialists had been superimposed.

Senegal, a country of big contrasts, a narrow strip of land in which Guinean, Sudanese and Saharan Africa meet; a hearth of races and peoples (Wolof, Serer, Fulbe, Toucouleur, Dioula, Malinke, Sarakole, Lebue, Moors, Syrians, Lebanese, French, Cape Verdians); in which 86% of the population is Muslim but where older “animistic” religions also resist the push of Christianity and Islam. A country in which production relationships of a capitalist nature, implanted by the French, had dislocated the various socio-economic structures: from regions where elements of the primitive community survived, to powerful “feudal” kingdoms, with remains of slavery, albeit marked by its patriarchal character.

And in this basically agricultural and stratified land, Ousmane Sembebe was born –- in fact, on January first 1923 and not on the 8th as documents say —, in Zwingchor, Casemance, a fertile region in the south of the country. Being the son of a Lebu fisherman he enjoyed the fact of being a French “national” for having been born in one of the “old municipalities”. His father's status allowed him to undergo elementary studies, but when he was fourteen years old he was expelled from the school following an incident with the colonialist director. N no other school admitted him again. So he was forced to go into the world to earn his bread.

Ousmane Sembene undertook the most variegated occupations: he was a fisherman, a bricklayer, a mechanic. At the same time he read and trained himself as a self-taught man. During World War II  he was drafted into the French army and took part in campaigns in Italy and Germany. At the closing of that hecatomb for humanity, he returned home, but the colonial milieu continued to deny him opportunities for work and intellectual development. So he migrated to France.

The docks of Marseille became his new world. There, labouring as a docker for ten years, he personally experienced the infra-life of (particularly migrant) workers, victims of every kind of abuse and discrimination. Soon his rebellious nature and his clear class consciousness led him to take part in movements to pursue workers’ demands, and he went as far a becoming a union leader. Being forced to quit work for several months due to an accident he suffered, he enjoyed enough spare time to organize his negative experiences while living in the colonial power and to write his first semi-autobiographical novel, The Black Docker (Le docker noir, Eds. Debresse, Paris, 1956).

In that novel, with all the shortcomings of an opera prima, he keenly and very critically reflected the universe of dock workers. In spite of the considerable missing elements which affect this book, the reader can guess that its pages were written by a man who was definitively placed on the side of the oppressed and who had the intention of voicing their protests vis-à-vis injustice.

On the following year a new work saw the light, Oh, Country, My Beloved People! (O Pays, mon beau people!, Eds. Amiot-Dumont, Paris 1957), a much better-written novel this time, dealing with the life of Senegalese peasants and the clash of renovating ideas on the one hand with traditional society and colonial interests on the other. This book confirmed hope in the new intellectual who, in spite of not having taken university studies, was creating for himself a career as a writer with perseverance and discipline; and, above all, reaffirming his critical sense that was put to the service of the masses.

Finally, he publishes God’s Bits of Wood (Les bouts de bois de Dieu, Eds. Amiot-Dumont, Paris, 1960), a peculiar novel coloured with a deep militant spirit about the emerging working class in West Africa, and endowed with a breadth, a major key and a purified poetic style containing pages which were destined to turn classic in contemporary African literature.

From this book on, Ousmane Sembene has not ceased to pursue the route of style improvement: Voltaïques, novels ( Voltaïques, nouvelles, Ed. Présence Africaine, Paris, 1962), a collection that some critics consider a brief master´s work; The Harmattan (L’Harmattan: Vol. I: Reférendum, Ed. Présence Africaine, 1964); Vehi Ciosane and The Money Order (Vehi Ciosane ou blanche genèse suivi du  Le Mandat, Ed. Présence Africaine, 1965), and Xala (Ed. Présence Africaine, 1973) have solidly placed him as one of best African fiction writers in French.

Because of Sembene’s restless talent and his creative vitality, he could not limit himself to the work of literature. The artist and militant required a more direct and efficient means of communication with the African masses, most of whom were illiterate and ignored French. His main objective was not to dialogue with minorities tending to a bourgeois way of life who were proficient in the language of Racine and Moliere, but with the peasant majority and the growing working class who expressed themselves in Wolof, Fulbe, Dioula or Malinke. They had been prevented (first by colonialism, and later by the neo-bourgeosies who substituted –at least formally— the French at the helm) from accessing modern technical culture in order to better exploit them. His objective was to communicate directly with them, to make them aware of their terrible situation and of their right to a better life. In order to achieve this, he resorted to cinema: “‘Among all the arts, cinema is the most important’, said Lenin. Having said that, we must not forget that 90% of our population is illiterate. On the other hand, cinema tends to make people see and think. A truly revolutionary culture, that is, a popular culture, can and must be transmitted via the cinema.”

Being awarded a scholarship by the USSR, he studied cinema in Moscow, guided by Marc Donskoi and Serguei Guerasimov. That period deeply marked Sembene’s life. Contact with the Soviet people’s day-to-day reality and the study of Marxism-Leninism contributed the last keys that he needed for the analysis and full comprehension of the economic and social causes that gave rise to the exploitation of peoples by capitalism.

Upon his return to France and to his country, he began the quest for funds to begin his career as a director. It was not easy to found a national cinema in a neo-colonized republic where French companies owned the movie theatres and controlled the circuits for the distribution of third-category films designed to alienate and stupefy African spectators, with the complicity of its local agents. Nevertheless, again Ousmane Sembene’s firmness of character prevailed, and little by little his movies began to appear: first, two short films, Borom-Sarret (1963) and Niaye (1964). After The Black Girl (La Noire de…), in 1966, the first Black African full-length feature film in history, that received the Jean Vigo award in France and the Gold Tanit at the Cartage (Tunisia) Festival, came his colour full-length feature films The Money Order (Le Mandat), that merited the special award of the Jury of the 1968 Venice Film Festival, Emitai (1971), Xala (1974) and lastly the colour short-length film Taw. All these films have given him renown in international milieus as one of the great promises of the emerging African cinema.

And in this new means of expression, Ousmane Sembene upholds the same constant elements of his literary work: an authentic reflection of the life of his people, denunciations of social injustices and of human vices engendered by archaic customs and by the disintegrating effect of colonialism and its post-independence sequels, respect and admiration vis-à-vis the positive values of traditional societies, absolute militancy regarding the revolutionary transformation of African life in general and Senegalese life in particular:

“Firstly, one must have the courage to see reality; seeing it is one thing; understanding it is another. You have to begin by knowing your country, placing it in the midst of the international revolutionary movement. The country might either be outside the movement or be a part of it, but all art must be defined vis-à-vis this movement."

God’s Bits of Wood    

Ousman Sembene’s third novel is inspired by an historical event: the strike carried out by African workers of the Dakar-Niger railroad from October 1947 to March 1948. The book is constructed as a great frieze criss-crossed by the post-war society which we know today as Senegal and Mali (a portion of French West Africa at the time), when the emerging African working class is being organized and, in spite of colonialist repression, demands equal salary for equal work and the same living conditions enjoyed by the company’s European workers. This is a very important period of world history, due to the fact that at the closing of World War II, when socialism was implanted in Eastern Europe, internationalist workers’ movements were reinforced, and this influx reached the exploited African masses, that began to demand economic-social transformations. Mass actions would later on lead to decolonization of this continent, a development that could have liberated those peoples from capitalist exploitation but for the betrayal of native neo-bourgeosies in most of the territories controlled by the Europeans.

In brief and brisk vignettes, the book exposes the hardships suffered by strikers and their families, the diverse individual and collective responses vis-à-vis the pressures exerted by the railroad firm, the growing awareness of the exploited majority (in spite of those that turn into deserters because they are weak or egotistic, of internal treasons and repressive brutality), the process of political learning in the life of the union. And from the midst of this mass that has remained insignificant and apparently submissive, a certain number of characters begin to take shape as they recover their humanity in the process of being taught by the strike that a world of injustice can be transformed by the joint action of men. Some characters will never again abandon the reader, such as:

Bakayoko, the revolutionary union militant who sacrifices his individuality to the struggle. He is present everywhere through the teachings that he has transmitted to his comrades about organization, with an austere and contradictory character, a witty intelligence to find answers to the most critical situations. Loved by those who know and admire him, hated by those aware of the fact that he represents a fully mature class consciousness that will, in the long run, subvert the unfair order of things that prevail; envied by the mediocre who will never be able to equal his absolute selflessness and his devotion to the people. Here, organizing the masses for the strike; there, supporting the hesitant; farther down, alerting, teaching, sowing confidence in a better world, demanding of himself a maximum discipline, subordinating all his personal interests to the cause of the majority.

Penda, the independent woman, the one who leads a “bad kind of life” in the eyes of a society that determined the lower position to be occupied by her sex, under the shadow of a man. Turned into a prostitute by colonialism, she rediscovers, nevertheless, a deep reason for living when she finds out that she can be useful, that there is also a place for her in the struggle.

N’Deye Tuti, the young lady who studies at the teachers’ training college, of a proletarian origin, caught between her fascination for “Sweet France”, idealized through the books she has read, and the tough reality of her daily existence. Almost a foreigner among her own people, but she is never accepted in the world of the Europeans. A victim of the hypocritical French assimilationist policy, dispossessed little by little, through violence, death, destitution, of her petty-bourgeois myths –- of her class — she forges a mighty personality.

Ad’jibid’ji, the precocious girl, the new Africa, who analyzes everything, hungry for knowledge, driven by the curiosity of deciphering all the unknown, who already breaks the reduced circle to which women are destined in Islamic tradition, and grows in the midst the books of her father, Bakayoko. She takes part, silently, in union assemblies, and judges, ponders, asks questions about the adult world around her. Ad’jibid’ji, the emergent Africa that already feels on her shoulders the blows of repression, but discovers all by herself the answer to the big enigma transmitted to her by her grandmother on her death bed: “What is it that washes water?”

Niakoro, the old woman Niakoro, the ancestral Africa that is dying, a victim of all the violence, a painful witness of every transformation. Human, wise, eternally surprised to see how a world falls apart, the customs inherited from ancestors, family and social institutions, in the light of progress made by technical civilization and by a new concept of life; of a modern Africa that she will never see nor comprehend. Niakoro, who incarnates all that is lovely in traditional life, and also gives birth to the revolutionary Bakayoko. And this noble old woman dies barely without a complaint, with all the wise dignity of an ancestral civilization.

Fa Keita, the mystic Africa, the big Muslim tradition with its roots deep inside the legacy of the ancient empires of Mali and Songhay, that opposed a heroic resistance to the French invasion and symbolized by El Hadj Omar, Lat-Dyor, Samory and so many others. Fa Keita, the old railroad worker pushed away from his idealistic meditations by violence and is buried in the terrible reality of a prisoners’ camp. Humiliated, tortured together with his comrades in the struggle, he finds an unstoppable force in the deepest part of his being: faith. All his life is the best and the purest of African Islam, in striking contrast with the parasitic marabouts, accomplices of the repression.
 

And Maimuna, the blind woman, helpless and unhappy, ancestral memory, eternal griot[2] who sings the epic chants of legendary Africa and sustains –with her stoutness, her courage to live—  those who hesitate, while her voice is heard, emanating from the deepest corners of her loneliness.

Comparable to these, there are many other characters emerged from among the people who allow us to penetrate into the daily life of strikers. And vis-à-vis the exploited who run counter to repression singing and dancing, who rebel against injustice without any hatred in their hearts, but determined to conquer a place under the sun: colonialism and its agents. The wrath of French racists, officials or simple workers, locked up in their European neighbourhoods, in their “Vatican”, surrounded by flowery gardens; and their caricatures, Africans bribed by capital, badly leading treacherous unions, sowing the poison of  religious backwardness to benefit their pockets and whose aspiration is to escalate the pyramid of colonialist society in order to collect the crumbs from their masters, who are the descendants of  “the Gauls”.

Through the pages of God’s Bits of Wood, revolutionary Africa allows us to hear its rebellious cry, after so many books, films and chronicles that falsify the reality of the continent. And in spite of the uses and customs characteristic of Wolof and Bambara societies in which the main characters act, with their polygamy, their community and patriarchal lives in the locus of extended families, their relationship between sexes strictly regulated by tradition, their Muslim philosophy, it is the universal truths and constants of class struggle and of the fundamental role to which proletarians are destined in revolutionary transformations that flourish. For, in spite of the individualized characters, the true and great protagonist is the people. In Bamako, in Thies, in Dakar. They disarticulate the colonial machinery with their strike, resist hunger and destitution, stand high with the unique dignity of their women who march on the capital of oppressors as an unstoppable and multi-colour tidal wave, the ones helping the others, with their contradictions, their political candour, their heroic confidence in life, their extraordinary power of survival. This African people, catapulted, by historical developments and the new production relationships imposed by colonialism, from a communitarian or a “feudal” society, to the centre of the contemporary class struggle.

And all of this is described with moderation, with a fairness of tone, with firm strokes: devoid of hate. In each page, in each situation presented, it overflows with a deep revolutionary humanism.

We would not be lying if we said that God’s Bits of Wood demands out loud to be put onto film; moreover, we strongly request it…

The first workers’ demonstration repressed by soldiers in Thies, and the picture of Maimuna, the blind woman, feeling her way about, desperately looking for one of her twin children, as a dark, wounded, animal howling in the midst of beatings and teargas bombs…

The unending line of women who march from Thies to Dakar, harassed by thirst, tortured by the African sun, exorcizing themselves as victims of collective hysteria, and then, pushed by the unexpected whirlwind, but always advancing, advancing towards the proud European city…

The parting of Bakayoko and N’Deye Tuti at the be The big demonstration of strikers at Dakar’s stadium, where the reactionary attempt to neutralize the masses with their sweet talk…

The prisoners’ camp directed by the sadistic Bernadini…, all these announce, in this 1960 novel, Ousmane Sembene the filmmaker. Those are images that will never part from our mind: Africa on its feet, struggling for its liberation, beautifully virile in its men and women, sacrificing their generous blood in order to construct a world of justice. With its road full of obstacles and traps, but firm and determined it its progress. A painful mutation, difficult but irreversible.

We must not forget Fa Keita’s reply to old Niakoro: “…Never will those young people grow white hairs; our world falls apart!”

“—No, woman, your son says that ‘our universe is widening.’”

Nor what the girl, Ad’jibid’ji, says to the old man, almost at the end of the novel:

“—Grandfather, I have found what it is that washes water. It is the spirit, for water is clear, but the spirit is more transparent still.”