Its title derived from Senegalese slang for sexual impotence, Xala (1975) was the first feature film from the West African Republic of Senegal to receive international recognition and acclaim. The story of a modern Muslim businessman, the very picture of post-colonial success, who discovers on the occasion of taking a third wife that he is impotent, was meant by writer-director Ousmane Sembène as a criticism of a culture only nominally independent of but in fact all too dependent on foreign influence. The son of a poor Lebou fisherman, Sembène came of age through Africa's sub-Saharan working class after having been expelled from school at age 14 for striking back at a French teacher. After his military service with the French Army during World War II, he worked as a manual laborer, his experiences pushing him to the worker's side of labor disputes and to membership in the Communist Party. After participating in the 1947 Dakar-Niger Railway Strike, Sembène emigrated (illegally) to France, where he found work in a Citröen factory in Paris and on the docks of Marseilles - the setting of his first novel, Le Docker Noir ("The Black Docker," 1956). Though his subsequent writings would thrust him to the forefront of the international literary scene, Sembène sought a way to reach out to illiterate Africans. After a period of study in the Soviet Union, he returned to Senegal to complete a number of short subjects. His feature film debut, La noire de... (Black Girl, 1966), is widely considered the first African film.
Sembène's feature films alternated between dead-serious social causes and satires of light and dark tones. His last film, the acclaimed Moolaadé (2004), dealt with the fractious opposition to the African tradition of female genital mutilation, which makes it a companion piece of sorts to the more phallocentric Xala. Sembène had first written the cautionary tale of El Hadji Aboucader Beye as a novel, published in French in 1973 and translated into English in 1976 (at which time it was praised by The New York Times as "cutting, radiant, and hilarious"). Sembène's feature film adaptation of his own acclaimed novel did not open up the material cinematically (the filmmaker's techniques remained simple, or perhaps even crude, in sympathy with his intended audience) but rather presented the plight of modern Africans in a medium normally reserved for movie stars, giving El Hadji (as played by diminutive actor Thierno Leye) equal standing with such international film icons as John Wayne and Marlon Brando - albeit that status bestowed upon him by means of deconstructing mythology rather than upholding it. Unfortunately, at least for Sembène's intended audience, his films were rarely exhibited in African cinemas, control of which was maintained by the very powers-that-be that the filmmaker routinely took to task. Sembène remained, nevertheless, "The Father of African Cinema," continuing to make films in Senegal up until his death at age 84 in 2007.
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources: Ousmane Sembène: The Making of a Militant Artist by Samba Gadjigo (Indiana University Press, 2010)
Ousmane Sembène: Interviews edited by Annett Busch and Max Annas (University Press of Mississippi, 2008)
"Ousmane Sembène: The Elder of Elders" by Baba Diop (translated from the French by Barbara Lorey), Cinemas of the South (The International Federation of Film Critics, 2006)
World Directors and Their Films: Essays on African, Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern Cinema by Bert Cardullo (Scarecrow Press, 2012)
Black Africa Cinema by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike (University of California Press, 1994)
Ousmane Sembène obituary by A. O. Scott, The New York Times (June 11, 2007)
Ousmane Sembène obituary by Sheila Whitaker, The Guardian (June 11, 2007)
