Commentaries on Ousmane Sembène often hail the Senegalese director as the “father of African cinema,” a pioneer with an illustrious string of firsts to his name: the first film shot in Africa by a sub-Saharan African, Borom Sarret (1962); the first feature film, Black Girl (1966); and the first film in a sub-Saharan African language, Mandabi (1968).
These were not the only achievements he had to his name. Sembène also just happened to be one of the continent’s great twentieth-century novelists. Before his artistic career, he had been a fisherman, a mechanic, a soldier, a docker, and a trade union activist.
The vast majority of cultural figures in France’s African empire were products of a colonial education against which they sought to rebel to various degrees, which makes Sembène’s artistic trajectory pretty unique. How did this son of a fisherman without much formal education rise to become one of the giants of twentieth-century African culture?
In 1956, Sembène published his first novel, The Black Docker. In part a realist portrait of working-class life in the Marseille docklands, the book followed the well-worn advice that novelists should write from their own experience. However, it also contained a reflection on literary representation and the difficulties faced by Africans in having their stories heard.
The doomed protagonist is an aspiring writer whose novel is stolen and published by a white, French writer who had promised to help him. The Black Docker is no doubt a flawed novel, but it engages in far more complex ways with form…
Auteur: David Murphy
