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This article presents a (post)colonial literary analysis of Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood [1960, Les bouts de bois de Dieu], vis-à-vis Jean-Paul Sartre’s “hexagonal cadre” for littérature engagée outlined in “What is Literature?” and “Black Orpheus.” Sembène’s novel evinces both a model of African committed writing and a nuanced (post)colonial embellishment and extension of Sartrean orthodoxy, whose requisites include: [1] genre and style; [2] audience; [3] risk; [4] situational critique; [5] ontological inquiry; and [6] existential themes. This article identifies these features in Sembène’s novel in general, and in the stand-alone chapter on the character Sounkare specifically.

African literature is a rich source for learning about politics, specifically systems of justice. Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Sahle Sellassie (The Afersata), and Ousmane Sembène (God's Bits of Wood) present stories of crime and punishment in three African societies. Insights from these texts allow for a better understanding of the values that inform contemporary ideas of justice in Africa. A comparative reading of the texts challenges the dichotomous thinking that informs much of the popular and scholarly work on Africa, demanding a reimagining of the dualities of individual/community and modernity/tradition. Thus, the stories of the past help illuminate and contextualize present structures and practices, with the hope of constructing more effective, relevant, and humane systems of criminal justice in the future.

Nearly all analyses of Ousmane Sembène’s novella La Noire de… (Voltaïque, 1962) and its eponymous film adaptation (1966) mention the fact that Sembène found inspiration for his text and film in a French newspaper report of a real suicide. However, scholars have not tracked down a copy of the original report or excavated the history of Diouana Gomis, the real woman whose suicide in 1958—on the heels of the 1958 Referendum and on the eve of Senegalese independence (1960)—served as the inspiration for one of the most iconic of African films. Indeed, the figure of Diouana has become synonymous with Sembène’s literary and cinematic character, in particular her “screen memory” as Senegalese actress’s Mbissine Thérèse Diop’s powerful performance in the film. Until now, traces of the “real” Diouana have remained buried in French police archives, her story receding from view. My essay makes a significant contribution to the study of Sembène’s art and to the memory of Diouana Gomis by reconstructing the backstory of her suicide through unstudied archival documents. Diouana Gomis (1927–58), a thirty-oneyear-old, unmarried woman from Boutoupa in the Ziguinchor region of Senegal arrived in Antibes during the second week of April in 1958 and died by suicide less than three months later. The faint archival traces sewn in the wake of her suicide make it possible, and necessary, to reconstruct some of the details of her life and death so that the ghostly signature of this real woman might shadow the “Diouana” whom we see and hear on screen.

This article explores the subjectivity of two Francophone black African women’s in/visibility. through Ousmane Sembène’s film La noire de … and Henriette Akofa’s novel Une esclave moderne, I pivot the ways the two works mirror the protagonists’ isolating experience emblematized by the in/visibility that many migratory black women live across transnational spaces on both sides of the Atlantic, a crisis that takes its most palpable and sometimes deadly turn through a socially and ethically oppressive in/visibility. Inspired in part by the work of renée Larrier (2000) and Françoise Lionnet (1995) in postcolonial Francophone contexts and theoretical works in Anglophone spaces like Samantha Pinto’s Difficult Diasporas: The Transnational Feminist Aesthetic of the Black Atlantic (2013). I examine how laboring black women’s oppression born of transnational migration informs the states and spaces of in/visibility. Ultimately, this article interweaves, in the transnational context across Francophone and sometimes Anglophone spaces, the fictional accounts of perpetual servitude of black women.

Samba Gadjigo presents a unique personal portrait and intellectual history of novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène. Though Sembène has persistently deflected attention away from his personality, his life, and his past, Gadjigo has had unprecedented access to the artist and his family. This book is the first comprehensive biography of Sembène and contributes a critical appraisal of his life and art in the context of the political and social influences on his work. Beginning with Sembène's life in Casamance, Senegal, and ending with his militant career as a dockworker in Marseilles, Gadjigo places Sembène into the context of African colonial and postcolonial culture and charts his achievements in film and literature. This landmark book reveals the inner workings of one of Africa's most distinguished and controversial figures.

This article explores the portrayal of reading in the literary and cinematic works of Senegalese writer and film director Ousmane Sembène. Across a range of selected examples, it examines the characters who do the reading, the genre of texts they read (money orders, letters, newspapers, scientific, literary, and religious texts), and forms of reading (for oneself or someone else who is illiterate, for example). A number of characters in Sembène's literary and cinematic works are portrayed as illiterate and, for the most part, they express themselves in Wolof, Senegal's interethnic lingua franca. Sembène has made several films incorporating one or more African languages such as Wolof, Diola, and Bambara. Relationships with different languages stem from a character's cultural and ethnic background as well as the geographical area in which they live. Many characters are depicted as illiterate, non-French speakers, while others express themselves quite fluently in the language. The contrast between these two different categories sets the latter group apart: in many conversations and scenes that involve reading, these characters take on the role of translators or interpreters. From a sociolinguistic perspective—as this article will argue—these language choices are also embedded in the materiality of reading. The scenes of reading (and not reading) therefore contribute to the categorization of characters in different narratives and elucidate the relationships that these characters maintain with the languages themselves.

According to Clarence Delgado, his assistant for close to twenty years, \"Sembene was definitely sure that this was the location he was looking for.\" [...]of the year, the whole land is pregnant with promises of future harvests, the landscape being like a green carpet: \"A green, beautiful Africa,\" said Sembene, \"an Africa full of potentials; an Africa that lives and struggles, unlike the miserable Africa we see every day now on foreign television screens. [...]I will review the life experiences that inform Sembene's political and artistic project. [...]through a thorough study of Moolaadé, I will argue that Sembene's humanism simultaneously integrates dominant Eurocentric and capitalistic approaches aimed at protecting individual human rights while unequivocally advocating for a new world order: a \"people's\" rebellion against internal and external tyranny and oppression.

Project Overview For each of the past three years, tens of thousands of Africans experienced something new: Since 2017, the Sembene Across Africa program, created by the Blackowned, U.S. entity The Sembene Project, has presented a weekend-long celebration of the works of Ousmane Sembene—the father of African cinema. Funds will be used for ■ production support for African partner organizations ■ stipends for African coordinators ■ marketing events in Africa ■ stipends for selected participants, to support Internet costs ■ licensing for films ■ modest marketing and production support for the U.S. home office Partners Sembene Across Africa will again be working with dozens of African organizations, with lead support provided by the West African Research Center (Dakar, Senegal), Maisha Film School (Kampala, Uganda), SAMBE (Cameroon), and the Kenyan Scriptwriters Association (Nairobi). Statistics, 2017–2019 Programs ■ 352 in-person events produced, estimated attendance: 21,000 ■ Free streams: more than 2 million reached ■ 350+ partner organizations engaged ■ 44 African nations served with in-person events ■ Broadcast: South African Broadcast Channel, Sundance Channel ■ Social media imprints: 3,500,000 ■ Media coverage: 300+ articles ■ Estimated media impressions: 9,000,000 ■ Additional programming: concerts, radio broadcasts, seminars, tours, and honoring ceremonies for Sembene, \"the father of African cinema\" ■ Key funders:

[...]the meaning of the word, from a cultural standpoint: temporary sexual impotence, meaning only \"male\" impotence, so it's sort of an erectile dysfunction. The latter, in their natural movement, expel these toxic elements, but in their drift they also carry these sediments, inexorably, toward the hard rock of \"unexpected hardships\" where awaits a slow agony, death by a thousand cuts, as it were, and not the brutal, bloody kind of death, with dismembered body parts all over the place… On the crucial issue of reproductive capacity, of the ability to \"create\" life, what will always be the litmus test of virility, on this score the big man fails, his bow can't \"deploy,\" meaning he's definitely sick with the xala! [...]with a substrate taken from your African cultural heritage, you devised an allegory to raise awareness about the historical situation of a privileged, dominant group in African society, commonly known as the \"bourgeoisie,\" even though they are mostly a motley crew of bureaucrats, feudal chiefs, and theocrats, holdovers from a bygone period.

This article appraises the poetics of two of the foremost African creative writers whose literary sensibilities exhibit conspicuously Marxist conceptual models. The writers have poignantly deployed their creative ingenuities towards raising social consciousness against the bourgeois economy which imposes a politics of asymmetry, parasitism and stratification on the economic thought of the African society that once projected a communal spirit. Considering the precarious conditions of Africa’s economy due to the pernicious effects of capitalism, it is imperative to examine the sordidness of classism, alienated labour, commodification or thingification of the underclass and other bourgeois tensions in African literature, as portrayed by these writers. Marxist theoretical models of economic determinism and historical materialism are discussed as the simulacrum of Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Rule or Pareto Principle. Though Marxists are fixated on revolution as the only solution to end the misery of the underclass and terminate the hegemony of the oligarchy that exploits sellers of labour, the paper advocates economic revivalism through the exploration of the opportunities offered by the communal mode of production.