International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest

Extract

Writer, film director, and leading voice in African avant-garde cinema, Ousmane Sembène was born January 1923 in Zinguinchor, Senegal. Sembène was primarily self-educated after he was expelled from French colonial school for striking back at his French teacher who had slapped him. After various jobs as diverse as fisherman, plumber, and mechanic, Sembène enrolled in the French army until the liberation of France from the Nazis in 1944. After the war Sembène returned to Senegal where he participated in the railway strike of 1947. The following year, he went back to France to work in an automobile factory in Paris and on the docks of Marseilles. For more than ten years, he was confronted by the working-class struggles that radicalized him politically as a filmmaker in the years to come. As a worker in France, Sembène was actively involved in labor and trade union struggles and joined the French Communist Party. He returned to Senegal in 1963, three years after independence. In 1956, Le Docker Noir (Black Docker) , Sembène's acclaimed first novel, depicted his experiences as a dockworker in Marseilles. The novel was the first work in launching his ac claimed career as a leftist writer and filmmaker. Sembène's novels typically reflect his own experiences as a worker and observations of Senegalese everyday and political life. Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (God's Bits of Wood , 1960) is ... log in or subscribe to read full text