*** GUELWAAR
(A must-see) Directed and written by Ousmane Sembene With Omar Seck, Mame Ndoumbe Diop, Thierno Ndiaye, Ndiawar Diop, Moustapha Diop, Marie-Augustine Diatta, Samba Wane, and Joseph Sane.
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Guelwaar, for instance–which is about the separate, if interlocking and interdependent, Christian and Muslim communities in a Senegalese town–presents the most detailed and knowing treatment of tribalism I’ve seen in any film of the 90s, and it offers the most blistering attack on the ethics, administration, and effects of foreign aid I’ve ever seen. Both subjects are treated comically as well as tragically, and in so deftly spelling out their precise African and Senegalese inflections Sembene gives them universal significance as well. If you want to understand the way an African village works, take a look at this one. And if you want to understand how the world at large works, you might try starting with an African village.
I’ve only managed to see three of Sembene’s features so far–Black Girl (1966), Camp Thiaroye (1987), and Guelwaar (1992). All three have a novelistic richness of texture and fineness of detail that marks Sembene as a major writer as well as a master director, so it’s hardly surprising that his published work–which so far includes seven novels and two short-story collections, all written in French–is even more critically acclaimed than his films. In fact, Sembene’s major motive for becoming a filmmaker in the early 60s was his desire to reach more Africans than he could via the printed page. Six of his books have been translated into English since 1987: The Black Docker, God’s Bits of Wood, The Money Order (published with the short story “White Genesis”), Xala, The Last of the Empire: A Senegalese Novel, and Niiwam and Taaw: Two Novellas. (Sembene’s films The Money Order and Xala were based on his novels; working in the opposite order this time, he has reportedly completed a novel based on Guelwaar.)
The driving force behind Sembene’s narrative style is his didactic and passionate desire to impart information, and often polemical arguments, as quickly and efficiently as possible. Sometimes the polemics are so inherent to the story that the results are seamless: when critic Manny Farber placed the hour-long Black Girl in the number-one slot of his ten-best list for Artforum in 1969–ahead of such films as My Night at Maud’s, The Wild Bunch, and Easy Rider–he wrote that “Sembene’s perfect short story is unlike anything in the film library: translucent and no tricks, amazingly pure, but spiritualized by a black man’s grimness in which there is not an ounce of grudge or finger-pointing.” A tragic and powerful account of what ensues when a Senegalese maid gets taken to the Riviera by her French employers, Black Girl is too confident throughout to register as polemical, though it might be argued that a certain amount of finger pointing is implicit in the original French title, La noire de . . . , which translates as “the black woman (or girl) of (or from, or belonging to) . . . ” The same thematic seamlessness is there in Camp Thiaroye, based on the real-life mutiny in 1944 of African soldiers in Senegal–who return from fighting with the Free French army to discover that they’ve been cheated out of their severance pay–that ended in their massacre. And if Sembene’s style becomes marginally less assured in Guelwaar, this may be because the number of things Sembene has to say, and the urgency with which he wants to say them, occasionally threatens to exceed what a single story can convey. The fact that at 71 Sembene is already planning other films, some of which he hasn’t yet been able to finance, helps explain his impatience.
