Senegal's Ousmene Sembene wrote and directed Black Girl, the very first African film, in 1965. Recently the Film Forum in NYC field a Sembene retrospective to run consecutively with his latest feature FaatKine. This gave me the opportunity to see the 1971 Emitai (God of Thunder), which I saw when it first came out, and two other films that are closely related thematically: the 1977 Ceddo (Common Folk) and the 1987 Camp de Thiaroye. These three films, dealing with questions of class oppression, colonialism and racism, are, like all of Sembene's work, passionate denunciations of injustice and an implicit call to action.
Born in 1923, his father a fisherman, Sembene fell in love with movies at an early age after seeing scenes of Jesse Owens' track victories in Leni Riefenstahl's pro-Nazi documentary Olympics documentary. "For the first time," he told the L.A. Times in 1995, "a black honoured us by beating whites.... It became the film for the young people of my generation." We can be sure that this was not Riefenstahl's intention.
Sembene quit high school after punching out a teacher who had hit him first. He then joined he Free French army during World War II. After the war he became a rail worker, participating in an epochal Dakar-Niger railroad strike in 1947-48. After stowing away a ship to France, he became a longshoreman in Marseilles and a member of the French Communist Party.
In France he …
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