Towards the end of her recently published autobiography, “My country, Africa,” the political organizer Andrée Blouin reflects on failures in the independence movements that galvanized so many Africans, including himself, to fight their colonial oppressors. A crucial subject of John Grimonprez’s critically acclaimed documentary ”Soundtrack to a coup d’etat“Blouin, as the main protocol for Patrice Lumumba’s emerging government in Congo, served. Her role gave her access to both working class, whose political strength drove the liberation strategies to success, as well as members of the new reigning class, who were statesmen who have the task of filling newly formed power vakuum.
“When I look back, I believe that the most difficult thing for us to carry during the long struggle for viable government has been the knowledge that it is not the outsiders who have mostly hurt Africa,” Blouin writes, “but the people’s mutilated will and selfishness of some of our own leaders.” These politicians often prioritized their own economic comfort over their constituents and contributed to an uncertain landscape according to independence as a direct result.
Many African filmmakers drew a similar set of conclusions in the 1970s and spent the decade to make works that dealt with the reality of public officials who, according to Blouin’s words, sold “their black brothers and sisters” in service for neocolonialism. Movies like Ousmane Sevene’s “Aunt“(1975) and Souleymane Cissé’s “Work” (1978) meditating the disappointments that sprinkle African countries according to independence and assess the importance of unrealized expectations of their people. They are within the same family of work as Ayi Kwei Armah’s melancholy novel from 1968 “The Beautyful Ones is not yet born”, where the Ghananian author believes that the robust terrain in the Gold Coast Country in the afterglow of independence.
In that text, a named storyteller fights to make an honest life as a railway office. He looks at his nation disappears when former classmates, now public employees in Kwame Nkrumah’s government, shamelessly fill their chests of bribes. While Armah’s novel works in the sad register of existentialism, Sembène and Cissé’s films enjoy the tag parameters for comedy and trade as they visit comeuppance on their corrupt leaders. Both directors rely on a kind of caustic humor to reveal the class struggle that has always complicated the colonial.
“Xala”, which Sembène adapted from her novel from 1973 with the same name, follows El Hadji Abdoukader Beye (Thierno Leye), a corrupt Senegalese businessman cursed with impotence after embezzling tone rice to secure money to marry his third wife. The film Treats El Hadji’s erectile dysfunction, and his humming endeavor to solve it, as a metaphor for leaders after independence with shallow commitments to liberation policy. Instead of prioritizing their working class constituents, these politicians abandoned or sold them.
Sembène captures this storage in the film’s effective opening sequence, during which a group of Senegalese leaders, including El Hadji, showcases white French delegates from the country’s chamber of commerce. Dressed in traditional wear and movement with a studied solemnity, men remove evidence from Europe from the office. Out go the white buster, chase boots and envoys who have the task of handling business on behalf of the empire. “It is the sons of the people, who are now leading the people, on behalf of the people,” says a never -identified storyteller through Voiceover. In theory, this transition inaugurates a chapter on one -franchisation, but in the next scene they are Senegalese businessmen in costumes, and the white men return with short days full of money as bribes. The African leaders abandon Wolof for French; And the beginning of Senegal’s new economic future looks a lot like the old one.
El Hadji’s impotence becomes a source of great embarrassment for him, and he travels around the city and tries to solve it. He repeatedly insists that money is not an object when it comes to regaining his masculinity. Through El Hadji’s obsession with masculinity, Sembène also examines how patriarch -informed postcolonial countries by strengthening neocolonialism. (It is an observation that Blouin also makes in its autobiography, especially when it comes to organizing in male -dominated spaces.) Some of the most influential scenes in “Xala” involve confrontations between El Hadji and his daughter Rama (Myriam Nian). The young woman initially refuses to participate in her father’s wedding to her third wife because she considers Polygami hypocrisy. Offended by Rama’s brave and, let’s be honest, rhetorical fear, El Hadji beats her and gives a chilly reminder: “It is people like your father who kicked out the colonizers and freed this country,” he tells her. “Never forget that I am still in charge of this house.” In this case, the house is both the physical space where this confrontation takes place as well as the wider nation state. How ironically that those whose illuminated views of the liberation do not extend to the home.
Men make similar violent claims and patriarchal decisions in Souleyman Cissé’s 1978 Evocative “Baara.” The film opens with a malian young porter named Balla Diarra (Baba Nifare) who helps a woman whose man has just kicked her out of home. Like Rama’s mother (Seune Samb) in “Xala”, this woman is the human first wife and suffers from his respect. In the previous scene, her husband not only takes her possessions on the street, but also threatens to beat her with her sandal. This moment of intrafamily chauvinism fell into a broader consideration of the patriarchy at work.
“Baara” follows Balla Diaara when he starts working for a factory handled by Balla Traoré (Bubuluar Keita) and is owned by Sissoko (Balla Moussa Keita, who later played in Cissés Masterpiece 1987 “Yeleen”). Drama surrounding these three is the majority of the film: Diarra struggles to end the meeting as a freelance sport and then factory workers; Traoré navigates in the challenges of applying its recently acquired European intellectualism to its professional life and Sissoko juggles are increasing. What is remarkable about the two latter men is how their powerful positions and refined views do not extend to their marriage. Since returning from Europe, Traoré prohibits his wife from working and Sissoko is abusive despite relying on his husband Djeneba to save him out of guilt. At one point, Djeneba asks, sketched in the same way as Rama, her husband to consider taking out his anger against a man.
Both “Xala” and “Baara” skillfully weave their two main threads – patriarchy and neocolonialism – and care about showing how they inevitably reinforce each other. Like Blouin, who was able to diagnose the issues that plague liberation movements, it is the women in Sembène and Cissès respective works that speak the most clear truths and reveal that it is worthless to replace European colonialism – built on the basis of patriarchy – with an African system that idolizes.
What is particularly exciting about Sembène and Cissès films is how the director counts this tension with images showing people’s beauty and power in postcolonial cities that Dakar (“Xala”) and Bamako (“Baara”). In both films, the rich businessmen try to get rid of or hide the poor and the working class. “Xala” has a particularly scrubbing scene by a public official who calls the police mainly the unmounced people who loiter near his office.
There are still moments of organization and resilience. The roles in “Xala” return to the city and organize each other and discuss in detail the difficulties that encounter because of the newly installed government. While the factory workers in “Baara” are planning trade union efforts despite protests from the major manager. They discuss working fewer hours and getting paid more because it feels like they are always waiting for the first month. But these workers don’t just talk, they also act. Both “xala” And “Baara” ends on arousing notes – scenes where the people, dissatisfied with their new leaders, inevitably fight back.
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