Ousmane Sembène

Ousmane Sembène was born in Ziguinchor, in the Casamance region of Senegal, the son of a fisherman. He was thrown out of school at fourteen after a fight with the headmaster and worked as a labourer, mechanic and bricklayer in Dakar. During the Second World War he was drafted into the French colonial army and served in Africa and Europe, an experience that taught him that the men who ruled his country were not superior beings.

In 1947 he stowed away on a ship to France and spent the next ten years as a docker in Marseille. He damaged his back lifting cargo, joined the union and the Communist Party, and read his way through their libraries. His first novel, The Black Docker, appeared in 1956; God\'s Bits of Wood, about a railway strike, followed in 1960 and remains a classic of African fiction.

Then he noticed the obvious: the people he wrote about could not read. So at nearly forty he went to Moscow to study film-making. Borom Sarret, his 1963 short about a Dakar cart driver, is often called the first film made in Africa by a black African. Black Girl, in 1966, was the first feature. Mandabi, in 1968, was in Wolof, the language his audience actually spoke.

He made films for the rest of his life, several of them banned at home, ending with Moolaadé in 2004, a plainly argued attack on female genital cutting. He died in Dakar in 2007.