| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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fictional novels. In a chapter focused on a critical analysis of Manda bi, Murphy began with an overview of what motivated Sembène, an already established author at that point, to make films. Murphy continued with a well-documented reading of Manda bi, very much defending Sembène’s views against those of Senghor and his negritude cohorts (including Bara Diouf and Cheikh Hamidou Kane), for whom Manda bi was but an overly pessimistic and false representation of Senegal. This chapter is followed by an analysis of Sembène’s most studied film, Xala, a biting satire of the nascent postcolonial Senegalese bourgeoisie. In a latter chapter, Murphy surveyed Sembène’s representation of women as mothers, daughters, and prostitutes, not only in his films but also in his novels. The three history-inspired films that Sembène made, Emitaï, Ceddo, and Camp de Thiaroye, are the focus of his chapter on empire and resistance. The last chapter—a contrastive analysis of The Last of the Empire (novel) and Guelwaar (film), two scathing attacks on the politics of neocolonialism and the dependency mentality in postcolonial Africa—is a well-crafted piece that underscores the political deadlock that Sembène began to denounce in Borom Sarret. Whereas The Last of the Empire examines the ongoing control and exploitation, via technical assistance, of the former colony by the former colonizer, Guelwaar disparages the political elite and sneers at their trading foreign aid against the people’s dignity.
Other scholars have focused more exclusively on Sembène the man, the artist, and the social critic. The most comprehensive of these is by Samba Gadjigo, whose biography of Sembène, Ousmane Sembène, une Conscience Africaine (2007), offers vital information for making sense of Sembène’s work. This biography weaves together Sembène’s personal notes with testimonial accounts from Sembène’s immediate family and other relatives and friends. It also includes astute observations of scholars commenting on and responding to certain prose from the fictional characters of Sembène’s novels. In it, Gadjigo presented readers with a variety of lenses through which to examine Sembène’s work, and he demonstrated with ample evidence that Sembène’s novels