Letter to the Defunct Cineaste

Kenneth W. Harrow

Dear Sembène,

We meet your passing by noting how central your work has been to the way in which we think about African cinema. I want to talk to you now, in this ghostly communication, about what it might mean for us to think about your films, and African film, at this moment.

All the work which followed that first step of “Borom Sarret” involved the creation of an increasingly large crew, as is always the case in the making of a movie. Those who worked on the film in whatever capacity, the actors, the voiceover, the editing, the production, the distribution, the showings, were followed by those of us who critiqued, studied, and taught the film. All the years of teaching it, followed by La Noire de, Tauw, Xala, Emitai, Ceddo, Camp de Thiaroye, Guelwaar, Faat Kine, and finally Moolade. Old man, we are still waiting for that epic on Samori. I have one question for you. It is for myself as well, and the rest of us who have not stopped thinking about your oeuvre all these years. How are we to think about African cinema now? Now that we finally have a financially viable African cinema, but not the night school you wanted it to be. Not the cinema engagé we thought we were participating in creating. And not for a world in which national liberation can be viewed as the guiding principle for political action any more. Not for a world in which neocolonialism, either, is our nemesis. Somehow global Walmartization took place while we were all looking at the ways in which France was attempting to maintain its place in a world that gradually forgot to pay attention to them. And that old nemesis over language, over la francophonie, what does that mean for a Wolof that   absorbs French, that shifts away from the village like everything else in Senegal, and is actually the only language employed in those  Senegalese TV series, what is called “théâtre,” comedies, soaps, except for the French dubbed Argentinian or Mexican telenovellas.

This is the truth of our politics today: we are no longer able to sustain the binary logic that drove our politics in the past. The absolute impoverishment of Africa seems a thousand times worse: the wealthy are so much wealthier, the poor increasingly disempowered and often despairing, while the new visage of global despotisms has rendered increasingly remote the memories of those old-time dictators. We need a new way to think of our culture, yours and mine, the political culture of progressive politics today; and that might have to start by questioning everything we had taken for granted at the outset, in the 60s and 70s, when all it seemed to take to fight the good fight was a little courage.

I want to put the question to two truths we had held to be immutable, and then seek answers in two directions: We took as irrefutable truths of Fanon’s analysis of the path to national liberation: with the initial forms of a colonial subordination that couldn’t be sustained; with the assimilation that eventually turned on itself; and with the decolonization that was threatened by the return of the new bourgeoisie to the old colonial forms of domination. And secondly, we thought we could accomplish the goals of decolonization by speaking truth to the purveyors of false consciousness.

We had forgotten, what we had never really known, that as Raymond Williams put it, we didn’t go far enough in seeking the material base for the superstructure and for the social processes that sustained it. That meant that false consciousness wasn’t simply a product of deluded class consciousness controlled by dominant economic or political forces, by dominant metropoles and their control over media. Rather, it was false in respect to the underlying notion that the power of consciousness itself was directing our situation, and that for a change – “il faut que ça change” – all we needed was a revolutionary credo. What else could it be? While our notions of mobilization were grounded in labor unions and solidarity, in all their political forms, another model for commodification was taking shape, driving the forces that would create new forms of society and culture that had nothing to do with national industries. In fact, commodification was outsourced so completely and so quickly that it became impossible to sustain the old industries. This included cinema and its apparatuses, especially in locations across the African continent, with their outdated, expensive celluloid equipment and run-down cinematic palaces.

Even before you died, Le Paris had closed, the last of all the movie theatres in downtown Dakar. On the edges of the Plateau there is one that still shows Hindu romances and another in Amitiés still showing run-down action flicks, not too far from the dark hull of El Mansour. In the Medina there is a small, dark storefront room that gives onto the street, with an obscure chalk sign on the outer wall showing the actions DVDs that are to be played, the admission a few francs. That small room is the edge of tomorrow for any cinema in Dakar. And it is the metaphor for our approaches for today.

We need to begin with the street. A street in a popular quartier where you and so many other Dakarois directors had their start. It is now filled with shops marked by Amadou Bamba’s image on the walls; where people are still selling household goods, drums, clothes, and especially food in that huge market. Where sandals are being made. Where kids are still playing soccer. Where the call for prayer finds mostly Tijani and Mourids answering. Where some students can afford to rent a room, but most cannot. Where you are close to the city, to the downtown that has become so irrelevant to so many people’s lives that they no longer go to the Plateau any more, which explains why the theatres are gone. It was there that any cinema for African audiences was going to be shown.  All that remains are the miniscule audiences in the French Culture Center, who might show up for a retrospective of your films.

What is needed now is no longer clear. Whatever can help us see meaning in the popular tastes and their direction would have to be the starting point. There, we can still talk about the sexual politics of patriarchy, since no film being shot today would seem not to display some anxiety over the diminished place of the old patriarch. There we can see with greater clarity the way that commodification is linked to the lives of those who have little or nothing, who can’t even get the water they need without paying for it, never mind electricity or clothes or food. Within that context, the nexus formed by the Medina, the video films, the TV shows, contain the elements of a new critical direction that is struggling to emerge – that is emerging with all the scholarship that Jonathan Haynes, Birget Meyer, Brian Larkin, Onookome Okome, and many others are now creating.

For me it has to include cognizance of their work, and of the materiality that includes the dingy viewing room, the scratched up and pirated DVDs, the popular soaps or their emotional equivalents in other forms of melodrama – but also our engagements of the past, our cinematic and analytic engagements, and our political engagements.

next •• >