The last two decades in Africa have yielded a significant crop of films devoted primarily to a critical engagement with the African past as a way of coming to terms with the many crises and challenges confronting contemporary African societies. This current preoccupation with history, and its implications for the present, underlies a number of films which have been produced during these past two decades

Cham, Mbye

English

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Contributions in Black StudiesA Journal of African and Afro-American StudiesVolume 11 Ousmane Sembène: Dialogues with Critics& Writers Article 4September 2008Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfigurationof the African Past in the Films of OusmaneSembeneMbye ChamHoward UniversityFollow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibsThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted forinclusion in Contributions in Black Studies by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contactscholarworks@library.umass.edu.Recommended CitationCham, Mbye (2008) "Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembene,"Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 11 , Article 4.Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/4Official History, Popular Memory:Reconfiguration of the African Pastin the Films of Ousmane Sembeneby Mbye ChamHoward UniversityI would like to begin my presentationby quoting the words ofa grioL His nameis Diali Mamadou Kouyat.e; he performed the Sundiata epic, which has been ttanscribedby Djibril Tamsir Niane. The griot starts his performance with these words:I am a griot. .. we are the vessels of speech, we are the repositorieswhich harbor secrets many centuries old The art ofeloquence has no secretsfor us; without us, the names ofkings would vanish into oblivion, we are thememory ofmankind... History has no mystery for us... for it is we who keepthe keys to the twelve doors of Mali. . . I teach kings the history of theirancestors so that the lives ofthe ancients might serve them as an example. Forthe world is old, but the future springs from the past.27The last two decades in Africa have yielded a significantcrop of films devotedprimarily to a critical engagementwith the African pastas a way ofcoming to terms withthe many crises and challenges confronting contemporary African societies. Thiscurrent preoccupation with history, and its implications for the present, underlies anumber of films which have been produced during these past two decades. OusmaneSembene, ofcourse, led the way with "EmitaI," "Ceddo," and more recently, "Camp deThiaroye." This is also a strain that has pretty much defined many of the ftlms of MedHondo of Mauritania, more specifically, a film he produced in 1978 entitled "WestIndies," which is an adaptation ofa play with the same title by a Martinican playwright,Daniel Bookman, and Hondo's latest ftlm, entitled "Sarraounia," which came out in1986. Also in this category is a recent film producedbya young filmmaker from Guinea-Bissau, whose name is Flora Gomes. The title of the film is "Mortu Nega," and it is areconstruction of the recent history of Guinea-Bissau during and after the armedliberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism. There is also a young Malagasyftlmmaker, Raymond Rajaonarivelo, who in 1988 came out with another film thatreconstructs an event that took place in the context of the Second World War in theMalagasyRepublic,and the titleofthat ftlm is"Tabataba"Wealso have tworecent filmsfrom Ghana Oneisbya young Ghanaian filmmaker who iscurrentlyresiding in London.CONTRIBUTIONS IN BLACK STUDIES, 11 (1993):20-251Cham: Official History, Popular MemoryPublished by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 199321His name is John Akomfrah; his 1988 film entitled "Testament" looks at the Nkrumahem in Ghana. The other one, "Heritage Africa," also a 1988 film, is by Kwaw Ansah.So dominant is this current in contempomry African filmmaking that one isreminded of a statement made by Jorge Fraga, a Cuban filmmaker and member of theCuban Film Institute: "Cuban fIlmmakers are always viewing things from a historicalperspective because, 'we can't help it."'28 Judging from the recently finished fIlms, aswell as a number of projects that are currently in production, it seems that AfricanfIlmmakers too cannothelpbut look at things from a historical perspective. Thenecessityoflooking at the present in the past is made urgent by the fact that the histories offormercolonies have been characterized by arbitmry fictions, fictions such as the White Man'sBurden, Manifest Destiny, Hegel's Africa beyond the pale ofhistory,repeated by HughTrevor-Roper's notion of history in Africa as only the history of Europeans in Africa,and so on and so forth. And because of these fictions, African fIlmmakers and otherartists have taken on the task ofpurging their histories of these imposed remembrances.In turning to the pre-colonial and colonial past, many contempomry African filmmakersrepeat, with a significant difference of course, the gestures of an earlier genemtion ofAfrican artists, who in their various ways responded to prevailing Western fictions andorthodoxies about Africa and Africans by effecting a return to the sources in the formof counter-accounts and reconstructions of Africa before the arrival of Europeans.Early in this century-in the twenties, thirties, and forties-some African poetsand novelists developed Negritude and other cognate rallying cries and ideologies as aframework for delving into the African past in order to intervene in and alter dominantEurocentric versions of Africa and Africans by introducing different African versionsof Africa and Africans. I don't wish to explore here how authentic these NegritudeversionsofAfrica and Africans were, but the point I am interested in is the act of lookingback as a means ofcoming to terms with current prevailing beliefs and orientations andchallenges in Africa. While the contemporary African filmmaker repeats the historicalmoves of his Negritude predecessor, he does so with a different set of ideologies andorientations, a different conception of history and tradition, and under a different set ofsocial, political, and cultuml circumstances. Given these differences, what emerges inrecent African fIlm is a mdical revision and representation of the African past in wayswhich notonly purge itofimposedEuropean and otherforeign remembrances, butwhichalso foreground the relevance of the new reconstructed histories to the present chal-lenges of post-colonial African societies.It is not an exaggemtion to claim that the principal force behind this orientationin African film is Ousmane Sembene, whose fIlms, especially "Emital," "Ceddo," andmore recently, "Camp de Thiaroye," constitute someofthe most compelling and indeedradical fIlmic revisions and reinterpretations of history in Africa Particularly notewor-thy in these new film versions of history are:a) The recovery and deployment of popular memory to recomposepast events.b) The mdical reconstruction of Euro-Christian as well as Amb-Islamic histories and how these are implicated in African history.c) The conflation ofEuro-Christianity and Amb-Islam as two sides of2Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 11 [1993], Art. 4https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/422the same colonial coin.d) The national as well as the pan-African nature and dimension ofthese histories.e) The recovery and reconstitution of African women's histories-from a male point of view, of course.I had wanted to consider these and related issues as well as their modes ofrepresentation in "Ceddo," "Emitai'," and "Camp de Thiaroye," but because of thelimitation of time, I am going to focus only on "Ceddo." I would like to echo here thewords ofDiali Mamadou Kouyare, which Ihave quotedat the beginning, with the wordsof another noted African elder and intellectual from Mali, whose name is AmadouHampathe BA. Amadou Hampathe BA has stated the following:The fact that it has no system of writing does not in itself depriveAfrica ofa pastor of a body ofknowledge... Ofcourse, this body of inheritedknowledge that is transmitted from the mouth ofone generation to the ear ofthe next may either grow or wither away... The African body of knowledgeis vast andvaried, and it touches onall aspects oflife.The "knowledge expert"is never a "specialist" but a generalist... The African body of knowledge isthus a comprehensive and living knowledge. and that is why the old men whoare its last trustees can be compared to vast libraries where multifariousbookshelves are linked to each other by invisible connections which are theessence of the "science of the invisible."19It was in reference to the urgency of recovering and deploying the knowledgeand wisdom of this last generation of great depositories, this living memory of Africa,that Hampathe BA made his now canonical statement that in Africa an old person whodies is a library that bums. The filmic reconstruction ofhistory, in the work ofOusmaneSembene, rests solidly on this heritageoforal traditionand memory. Fromthis base, withthe true griot as a model, Sembene enters into a battle for history and around history.Official versions of the past. Western as well as Arabic, are contested, revised, and/orrejected, and new, more authentic histories are put in their place.Sembene's ftlms may partly be seen as undertaking whatTeshome Gabriel haslabeled "arescue mission," to theextent to which their recourse to popular memory aimsto recover, privilege and articulate the historical significance and the contemporary, aswell as future, implications of what official histories insist on erasing. My conceptionof the notions of popular memory and official history owes a great deal to TeshomeGabriel's elaboration of these concepts:Official history tends to arrest the future by means of the past.Historians privilege the written word ofthe text-itserves as their rule oflaw.It claims a "center" which continuously marginalizes others. In this way itsideology inhibits people from constructing their own history or histories.Popular memory, on the other hand, considers the pastas apoliticalissue. It orders the past not only as a reference point but also as a theme of3Cham: Official History, Popular MemoryPublished by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 199323struggle. Forpopularmemory, there areno longerany "centers"or "margins,"since the very designations imply that something has been conveniently leftout.30Then, echoing a widely articulated Third World view, Teshome Gabriel has argued thatPopular memory, then, is neither a retreat to some great traditionnor a flight to some imagined "ivory tower," neither a self-indulgent escap-ism, nor a desire for the actual "experience"or"content"ofthepast for its ownsake. Rather, it is a "look back to the futurc," necessarily dissident andpartisan, wedded to constantchange.31"Ceddo," "Emital," and "Camp de Thiaroye," each in its own way, embody thespirit of popular memory. "Ceddo" is a film that re-creates the structures of power andpower relations in the nineteenth-century Wolof state ofJoloff, on the eve of its demiseat the hands of Islam, in competition at times with Christianity and its ally, Frenchcommercial and secular power. The privileged point of view in this film is clearly theceddo's, and it inscribes itselfin popularmemory. Foregrounding this hitherto repressedpointofview results in the explosion by Sembeneofa solidly entrenchedofficial versionof history of Islam in Senegal. According to this version, Islam is Senegalese. In otherversions that concede its non-Senegalese origins, it is posited that Islam's mode ofentryinto Senegal was all peaceful. Anotheraspectofthis official version states that Islam wasvoluntarily espoused by the Senegalese, who were won overbyexponents ofredemptionand salvation. In"Ceddo," therefore, the term "official" takes on a new meaning, beyondits usual designation of that which is French or French-derived, which is the dominantconception of what is official in Senegal and also in many other Mrican countries. It isno longer a monopoly of the French.In the same breath, Sembene also enlarges the field of foreign colonial actorsin Senegal beyond the French, as is the case in "Emitai'" and "Camp de Thiaroye," toexpose the other equally significant and deadly force which has succeeded in passingitself offas Senegalese, namely Islam. Unlike a good number of his fellow Senegalese,who tend to subscribe to Islam's claim to indigenous antiquity in Senegal, Sembenepresents Islam in "Ceddo" as one of the forces-the other being Euro-Christianity, ofcourse-responsible for what Wole Soyinka refers to as "Africa's enforced cultural andpolitical exocentricity.''32 Customs, beliefs, values, and practices, hitherto presented andtaken as Senegalese or Mrican, are examined and shown to be of Arab-Islamic originby Sembene in "Ceddo." Moreover, the process by which these Arab-Islamic customs,beliefs, values, and practices came to take root in Senegal is presented as insidious andviolent, not unlike the ways in which Euro-Christian slavery, colonialism, and imperi-alismbulldozedtheirwayintoSenegal.Thus, SembenecounteractstheofficialSenegalese-Islamic version of the West as the sole source of Africa's cultural contamination anddegradation with a new version which splits Islam's roots away from Senegalese soil,casts Islam as heavily infused with Arab culture, and conflates it with Euro-Christianity."Ceddo" is therefore the most irreverent rewriting of Islam in Senegal by a Senegalese4Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 11 [1993], Art. 4https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/424artist It reconstructs its history in Senegal in ways that radicallydestabilizeand undo thedominant Islamic myth espoused by the Muslim elite and their followers, who happento be the majority of the Senegalese.In "Ceddo," the imageofIslam that is portrayed is nota beautifuloneat all. TheMuslims are presented as scheming, violent fanatics with little regard for the principlesofself-determination and religious and cultural freedom. Their belief in the supremacyof Islam is translated into a series of highly studied moves, which systematicallyeliminate the rival Christian mission, the traditional secular power structure, and asignificant number of the ceddo and their belief systems. This project culminates in theestablishmentofa regimeofrulebasedon principles ofIslam, with the imam as the head.The designs ofthe imam on the society are progressively made clear in the course ofthenarrative in "Ceddo." His initial litany of verbal attacks on the persistence of paganpractices among the ceddo is indirectly pointed at the Wolofsecular authority, the King,who is now a convert, yet who tolerates the presence of such infidels, as he calls them,in his society. These attacks become more pointed as the militancy of the Muslimsintensifies and as the imam's vow to undertake a jihad against all non-Muslims in thesociety looms closer to execution. To the King's question as to why the imam neveraddresses him by the title "King," the imam replies that for him there is only one king,and that king is Allah. To the ceddo'scomplaint about the growing harassment from theMuslims, and to their question as to whether religion is worth a man's life, the imam,usurping the prerogativeandpowerofthe King, shoutsblasphemyand renews his threatsagainst them. This attitudedefines therelationshipofthe imam to the societyaround him,and it sets the stage for embarkingonajihadtobringabout theruleofAllah. TheMuslimsburndown theChristian mission andkill the white missionaryand the trader, from whomthey had obtained their weapons. Next, the news is announced that the King has diedfrom a snake bite; as a consequence the ceddo are subdued and forcibly converted toIslam. Into the power vacuum created by the death of the Wolof king steps the imam.Thus, Sem1Jene reconstructs the origin of, and the reasons for, the absence of traditionalsecular power figures and structures, and the hegemonic status and power of Muslimmarabouts and brotherhoods in Senegal today.In "Ceddo," the imam's ascension to power marks the beginning of whatSembeneconveys in the fIlm as one ofthe most radical and intolerantprojects ofculturaltransformation in Senegalesehistory. The imam institutes as law mostofthespiritual andsocial conduct hitherto adhered to by only a tiny minority. Among the practices of theceddo that are prohibited under the new Muslim theocracy are the consumption ofalcohol, the reproduction of human forms in art, and former modes of worship. TheIslamic regime of five daily prayers, the shahtJda, and koranic education becomemandatory. Thegriotoftheerstwhile royal court. together with his cronies, is unceremo-niously dismissed and replaced by thekoran-totingdisciples of the imam. The high point·of this process of social and cultural change comes in the mass conversion sequence ofthe fIlm, where the ceddo are subdued and submitted to a ritual of purification as aprerequisite for assuming new Muslim identities. They have their heads shaved cleanand their ceddo names are replaced by new Arab or Arab-derived names, such as5Cham: Official History, Popular MemoryPublished by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 199325Hadidiatou, Fatoumata, Mamadou, Souleymane, Babacar, and Ousmane. Historicalreconstruction in "Ceddo," then, privileges a non-Muslim perspective, one that isrepressed in official accounts of Islam in Senegal. It explores a deeply ingrained mythin Senegalese society. Sembene's own attitude towards this myth is most gmphicallydefined in the final sequence when Dior Yacine, the princess, heir to the throne, kills theimam with a shotgun, in full view of his disciples and the new converts. Thus Sembenerewrites and represents, in a radically different view, a much neglected aspect of thehistorical role of women in African history. In "Ceddo," Princess Dior is posited as afigure of resistance and liberation. The amount of screen time that she occupies in thefIlm is rather limited, and we only hear her voice in relatively few sequences. However,in spite of these physical absences, Princess Dior is the overwhelming presence in thefIlm. The narrative turns and moves aroundhercaptivity.And it is she who emerges fromherposition ofroyalty-captured royalty nevertheless-to rekindle and put in action theceddo spiritofresistance and refusal ofdomination. This is captured symbolically in thefmal sequence of the fIlm which ends-and I put"ends" in quotes here,because the fIlmnever actually ends-in a half-shot freeze-frame, with her occupying the larger portionof the screen.Historical reconstruction, then, in "Ceddo," aims to explore deeply ingrainedmyths in Senegalese society. "Ceddo" may be unique in Senegalese artistic perceptionsof Islam and the history of Islam, in terms of its tone, its tenor, and its uncompromisingview of the religion. But it is indicative ofa growing currentof thought, both in Africanliterature and in African fIlm. One is reminded of the equally caustic savaging of Islamin Yambo Ouologuem's Le devoir de violence, Ayi Kwei Armah's Two ThousandSeasons, and elsewhere in ChancellorWilliams's The Destruction ofBlackCivilization.6Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 11 [1993], Art. 4https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cibs/vol11/iss1/4

Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembene

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Official History, Popular Memory: Reconfiguration of the African Past in the Films of Ousmane Sembene

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