For a long time, the African film industry was in the stranglehold of its colonisers, who monopolised funding, technology, and the narratives projected onto African screens, and therefore minds. But Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène’s shining 1963 debut Borom Sarret marked the birth of African cinema. It was – to quote Tunisian director Férid Boughedir – the ‘first time the image of Africa had come from within’ (1983).

In his 1983 documentary Caméra d’Afrique, Boughedir illuminates the practical and financial difficulties African filmmakers, including Sembène, faced. The documentary itself took a decade to make for this very reason.

In this clip from Caméra d’Afrique, Sembène’s stance is as powerful and steadfast as his insistence that ‘l’Europe n’est pas [son] centre.’ His only movement is his impassioned gesticulation, which the camera follows, implicitly encouraging the viewer to follow Sembène’s argument, and to decentre the West. With the intimately handheld shot and ‘vous,’ he seems to address us, instructing us as he does the interviewer with ‘mettons nous bien ça dans la tête.’ We are forced to listen. His delivery, laden with short, direct sentences, rhetorical questions, the repeated ‘je’ and the emphatic ‘moi-même,’ assert his belief in his own independent selfhood just as much as the speech’s content. By the time we reach his striking metaphor ‘je suis moi-même le soleil,’ Boughedir and Sembène have collaboratively convinced us that the Senegalese director is indeed as dazzlingly powerful as the ‘soleil,’ and that self-definition should not be ceded to anyone, least of all the West. In fact, visually, thanks to the low-angle shot and the sky behind him, he almost becomes this very ‘soleil.’ 

This clip demonstrates his intellectual ethos of shifting the ‘centre’ away from the West. The speech’s meaning becomes clear when we see how he put its principles into practice throughout his life.

Firstly, his defiance of colonial powers in the clip becomes obviously characteristic after even the briefest glance at his biography. Expelled from high school for slapping his French teacher, he then continued to hit back at the coloniser throughout his life. Subsequently self-educated in what his biographer Gadjigo calls ‘l’école de la vie’ (2007, p. 55), Sembène claims to have had over thirty-five jobs, including fisherman, mechanic, and soldier. But it was his decade-long work in the Marseille docks where his militant social activism began, participating in trade unions and left-wing politics (Mortimer, 1972, p. 26). The docks inspired his 1956 debut novel about racism in France, Le docker noir. He went on to write other acclaimed books, such as Les bouts de bois de dieu (1960), but realised that, for a largely illiterate African public, the written word was not the most efficient means of educating the masses on social issues. It was here that he turned to cinema. After a year training in Moscow in 1962, Sembène released Borom Sarret (1963), followed by his first feature-film ‘La Noire de…’ (1966), for which he won the Prix Jean Vigo at Cannes, aged fourty-three. Sembène continued directing until his death in 2007. His extensive and provocative oeuvre, as well as his pioneering role in the African film industry, have given him the title of ‘the father of African cinema.’

Despite success as an activist and writer, it was his understanding of different mediums’ capabilities where his true genius as an intellectual lay. The majority of Sembène’s intended African audience could not read, afford, or access books (Watson, 2007, p. 5). His pragmatism and devotion to his people led him to film-making. In Diawara and Thiong’o’s 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema, Sembène explains the conversion from his preferred literary medium to that of the screen: for him, cinema is a‘meeting permanent avec le public… C’est ça qui [l]’a amené au cinéma pour mieux poursuivre [sa] quête de militantisme’ ; literature is, conversely, a ‘luxe.’ During the press tour of his 1964 film Niaye, which challenged aspects of traditional life, he toured rural Senegal, holding makeshift, open-air screenings and discussing the film with its primary audience (Mortimer, 1972, p. 6). He clearly appreciated the educational possibilities of cinema, which he called ‘l’école du soir’ (1976, p. 15).Sembène’s commitment to educating the masses is apparent in his mastery of cinema, as an art, and as an activist’s tool. In turning away from the literary form, which was mostly only accessible to either Europeans or the colonised elite, Sembène put into practice his assertion that ‘l’Europe n’est pas [son] centre,’ and faced instead his African public.

However, Sembène’s turn away from literature was one of the levels on which he was at odds with other black intellectuals at the time, notably those from the Négritude movement. Sembène’s president Léopold Sédar Senghor was one of the major figures in this intellectual revolt championing black culture and identity in the face of its devaluation under colonialism. But, where Senghor focussed heavily on literature, Sembène rejected this exclusionary approach in a place where literacy was reserved for the select few. Sembène (1976) criticised negritude for its lofty ideas – such as its blind glorification of largely extinct, pre-colonial traditions – that offered no solutions for day-to-day post-Independence challenges. While Senghor was arguably alienated from his people because of his colonial education, the self-educated Sembène grounded his intellectual work in benefitting the masses, exemplified by his focus on accessibility. Sembene opposed Senghor not only by making films, but also in the films themselves: his Xala (1975) ridicules a diminutive politician, arguably satirising the short-statured president. In a scene cut from the Senegalese version, a bust of Marie Antoinette is thrown from a window, possibly mocking Senghor’s white wife, or his relative allegiance to the French as a member of its colonial elite. Sembène’s filmography and intellectual method can therefore be seen as defying not only the West, but also the black intellectual elite who turned, like his condemned ‘tournesol,’ towards the more European medium of literature, and away from the modern realities of the African majority.

Sembène’s work is not only significant as a protest against dominant powers in African society, but also as an assertion of Africans taking control of their own image. The African image had previously been either entirely absent from African screens, due to the European monopoly over its film industry, or had been imposed from the West’s outside view. French director Jean Rouch, for example, was famed for his portrayals of Africans. However, in a confrontational 1965 interview between the two directors, Sembène condemned Rouch’s ethnographic films as treating Africans ‘comme des insectes,’ with their scientific distance. So, when Sembène picked up the camera, he was pushing the dominant European perspective to the ‘periphérie.’ He consistently used non-professional African actors: Mandabi (1968) starred office-worker Mamadou Gueyewho. His stories were generally those of working-class people. La Noire de… (1966),for example, depicts a black girl’s struggles working as a white family’s servant. With his careful artistry, he affords these characters, and therefore the demographic they represent, a dignity they had been denied in cinema’s historically Eurocentric lens. By placing their stories at the centre of the narrative, Sembène declares to the audience yet again that ‘l’Europe n’est pas [son] centre.’ In Moving the Centre (1993), prominent decolonial intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o emphasises the postcolonial need to decentre the West. By placing Africans at the heart of the production and consumption of his films, Sembène is certainly doing this work. Africa was no longer only turning, like the ‘tournesol,’ towards the coloniser’s cinematic viewpoint, but becoming its own ‘soleil,’ beaming out its own story. 

The weight of Sembène’s decolonial work is illuminated when compared with one of the greatest intellectuals on decolonisation, Frantz Fanon. Sembène arguably actualises much of Fanon’s theoretical work, and practically overcomes the issues Fanon presents. ‘Pourquoi voulez-vous que je sois comme le tournesol qui tourne autour du soleil ? Je suis moi-même le soleil’ echoes Fanon’s statement in his monumental Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (1952): ‘ma conscience nègre ne se donne pas comme manque. Elle est. Elle est adhérente à elle-même’ (p. 109). Both radicals reject black people’s reduction to secondary objects following the white lead, and declare the self-sufficient value of black identity. Sembène cinematised this idea. Both the act of making films for and by Africans, as well as centring the lived black experience in his projects, manifest Fanon’s assertion of black selfhood in a tangible way for the African people. For example, although colonialism is thematically relevant, Xala (1975) features no white speaking roles. And it is not just Africa’s image that Sembène puts front and centre, but its languages too: his Mandabi (1968) was the first feature-length film in an African language. In Peau Noire, Fanon goes on to say‘le Noir n’a plus à être noir, mais à l’être en face du Blanc’ (1952, p. 110). However, for those in the audience of Sembène’s films, their image was no longer displayed to them in relation to whiteness, but on its own terms. While Fanon, in Les Damnés de la Terre (1961), laments the highly educated intellectual’s alienation from the people they theorise about, Sembène is the people’s intellectual. He worked with them, lived among them, and put their lived experiences, like that of the cart-driver in Borom Sarret (1963), on the silver screen. Sembène shows black people, by example and with his art, that they do not only have to exist ‘en face du Blanc,’ but that they can be their own suns.

However, in some ways, Sembène’s work was at odds with Fanon’s visions. Fanon denounces the ‘imitation caricaturale’ (1961, p. 304) of ‘le style européan’ (p. 303). Yet, paradoxically, Sembène’s work arguably follows the French auteur style, therefore seeming to ‘tourne autour’ to French culture. And cinema itself was invented by the French. The Senegalese director was also criticised for accepting French funding for Mandabi (1968). But Sembène argued that the ‘Diable’s money was the only way to fund his film-making (1969, p. 73). The funding was given on the condition that the film was in French; so, cunningly, he made one French version, and one version in his native Wolof. In the process of putting his dissenting ideas to practical use, Sembène necessarily came across practical issues, such as the financial obstacles that Caméra d’Afrique depicts. As to his seeming ‘imitation’ of the French style, Boughedir sees this in a different light. He describes how France’s belief in film-making as self-expression meant that France’s colonies were luckily ‘raised’ in this culture of asserting the self on film (2021). Ironically, France’s colonised therefore resisted French oppression in cinematic terms, mutinying French culture, and resourcefully reappropriating their cultural material. So, Sembène’s apparently paradoxical methods are, perhaps, rather than a hypocritical instance of turning ‘autour de’ France, a graceful navigation of complex postcolonial realities. 

Ousmane Sembène was not just an artist, but an activist and pioneer. His dedication to the everyman led him to inventively ground his intellectual work in an accessible medium, and it was there that African cinema was born. In his masterful understanding of both political issues, and how best to communicate them to the masses, Sembène was an intellectual in every sense of the word – even down to the iconic association with smoking. Pipe firmly in hand, he devoted his life to enriching a culture that had been systematically battered for decades. We can turn to him as a bright and blazing example of a revolutionary.

Fig. 9. Sembène with pipe

Further Reading

Primary Sources

Fanon, F. (1952) Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Fanon, F. (1956) ‘Racisme et Culture’, Présence Africaine, no. 8/10, pp. 122–131.

Fanon, F. (1961) Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: La Découverte.

Rouch, Jean et Ousmane Sembène, un entretien (1965) La Revue France Nouvelle, Août 1965.

Sembène, O. (1956) Le Docker noir. Paris: Présence Africaine.

Sembène, O. (1960) Les bouts de bois de Dieu. Paris: Le Livre Contemporain.

Sembène, O. (1963) Borom Sarret Les Actualités Françaises.

Sembène, O. (1964) Niaye. Senegal: Filmi Domirev.

Sembène, O. (1966) La Noire de…. Dakar: Les Actualités Sénégalaises.

Sembène, O. (1968) Mandabi. Senegal: Les Films Domirev.

Sembène, O. (1969) Entretien avec Guy Hennebelle, L’Afrique Littéraire et Artistique, no. 7, p. 73.

Sembène, O. (1976) [entretien avec Jean et Ginette Delmas] ‘Un film est un débat’, Jeune Cinéma, no. 99, pp. 13–17.

Sembène, O. (1975) Xala. Senegal: Les Films Domirev.

Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa (1993) Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. London: James Currey.

Secondary Sources

Adesokan, A. (2008) ‘The Significance of Ousmane Sembène’, World Literature Today, vol. 82, no. 1, pp. 37–39.

African Film Festival, Inc. (2021) Caméra d’Afrique (African Cinema: Filming Against All Odds) Restored – Ousmane Sembène Excerpt. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foQ0q4w6z4Q .

Bakari, I. (2023) ‘Ousmane Sembène at 100: a guide to the life and work of the “father of African cinema”’, The Conversation.

Boughedir, F. (1983) Caméra d’Afrique. Tunisia: Ministère de la Culture de Tunisie.

African Film Festival, Inc. (2021), Caméra d’Afrique Q&A with Férid Boughedir. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrOhmLm3jZU .

Criterion (2019) Ousmane Sembène on Cinema as Activism. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9LP4nxomnc.

Diawara, M. & Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1994) Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. UK: Third World Newsreel.

Festivaldecannes (2019) ‘Caméra d’Afrique: interview with Ferid Boughedir’, Festival de Cannes, 22 May. Available at: https://www.festival-cannes.com/en/2019/camera-dafrique-interview-with-ferid-boughedir/ .

Genova, J. E. (2006) ‘Cinema and the Struggle to (De)Colonize the Mind in French/Francophone West Africa (1950s–1960s)’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 50–62. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/20464156.

Gadjigo, S. (2007) Ousmane Sembène : une conscience africaine. Paris: Homnisphères.

Mortimer, R. A. (1972) ‘Ousmane Sembène and the Cinema of Decolonization’, African Arts, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 26–84.

Nayar, P. K. (2013) Frantz Fanon. London: Routledge.

Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Mano, W., and Milton, V., eds. (2021) Routledge Handbook of African Media and Communication Studies. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.

Sithole, T. (2016) ‘The Concept of the Black Subject in Fanon’, Journal of Black Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 24–40. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24572957 (Accessed: 29 October 2025).

Watson, J. (2007) ‘Ousmane Sembène: A Memorial Tribute’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 38, no. 4, pp. 4–6. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20109534.

Appendix

Fig. 1. The Criterion Collection (2024), photograph, Ousmane Sembène.  Available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8480-three-revolutionary-films-by-ousmane-sembene-history-in-the-remaking?srsltid=AfmBOop2R5GbbhMSAapi1uVqbMD0krupdmt6XVKpaeLHT1iuHHoE2eWL.

Fig. 2. Assane N’Doye, Caméra d’Afrique, Films du Losange (1983).

Fig. 3. African Film Festival, Inc., (2021) Caméra d’Afrique (African Cinema: Filming Against All Odds) Restored – Ousmane Sembène Excerpt, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foQ0q4w6z4Q.

Fig. 4. Sembène, O. (1966) La Noire de…. Dakar: Les Actualités Sénégalaises.

Fig. 5. Criterion (2019) Ousmane Sembène on Cinema as Activism. YouTube. Available at : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9LP4nxomnc.

Fig. 6. Boughedir, F. (1983) Caméra d’Afrique. Tunisia: Ministère de la Culture de Tunisie.

Fig. 7. Everett Collection, (n.d.) Frantz Fanon, Alamy. Available at: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/frantz-fanon.html?sortBy=relevant.

Fig. 8. Getty Images n.d., Mandabi poster (1968), Getty Images, Available at: https://www.gettyimages.com.

Fig. 9. Rayner, Polly, 2025, Collage of Ousmane Sembène with pipe, (personal creation), [unpublished].