ARTISTIC AND IDEOLOGICAL CONVERGENCE: OUSMANE SEMBENE AND HAILE GER IMA By Mbye Baboucar Cham History is replete with examples of intellectual, artistic, and political pairings that have in various degrees influenced and shaped human thought and actions over time. Perhaps the most celebrated of such duos is that of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels whose formulations and reflections on the human being and human society continue to guide and inspire many forms of thought and action in many parts of the world today. Other pairings did occur within the conte.xt of what could be referred to loosely as "schools of thought." Such is the case of black literary greats of the Harlem Renaissance like Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston whose literary as well as socio-cultural acts marked a historic turning point in black aesthetics. Negritude, taking some inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance Movement, highlights Leopold senghor, Al.me cesaire, and Leon Damas. The impact--literary and otherwise--that Okot p ' Bitek and Ngugi wa Thiong'o have made on literary creativity is well documented. The revolutionary orientation given to cinema and to the entire process and technique of making film in early twentieth century Russia is credited to luminaries such as Sergei Eisentein and Vladimir Pudovkin. Out of Latin America have emerged progressive film theoreticians and prac­ titioners such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino who~e concept of "Third Cinema" or revolutionary cinema has made a profound contribution to the effort to redefine and reorientate cinema, especially in Third Worid countries. The anti­ imperialist and anti-neo-colonial struggle in Africa produced the minds of Kwame Nkrumah and Franz Fanon, Julius Nyerere and Amilcar Cabral whose historic contributions to African and black thought and action are only too well known. The traits which mark each of these pairings include (a) some degree of similarity in field action and in ideological orientation, and (b) the fact that the individuals involved are more or less contemporaries and seriously committed to the theory and praxis of transforming society to bring about freedom, social justice, and equality. Ousmane Sembene and Haile Gerima belong to this category of celebrated duos, and in this paper we explore the artistic, political, and ideological thought and action of these two African filmmakers whose work has shaped and continues to shape the contours and essence of the African film. The differences in their general background notwithstand­ ing, sembene and Gerima have in separate ways combined to help define the broad outline of what can be referred to as the 140 quintessential African film. This is a film that dramatizes and exposes the truth of the African historical and/or con­ temporary experience in order to create a consciousness for liberation from all forms of oppression, injustice, and in­ equality, and a consciousness for the construction and develop­ ment of a just and viable African society. The quintessential African film draws upon the artistic resources of the film­ maker' s indigenous creative traditions, modifies these, if necessary, and integrates them skillfully and realistically into the medium. Thus, the quintessential African film captures and scrutinizes typical forces in society in a structure, rhythm, pace, and language that are largely, though not ex­ clusively, African, and the mission of this film is revolution­ a.ry. Such is the synthesis that emerges from a careful examin­ ation of the work and pronouncements of these two premier African filn'anakers, one working out of Senegal and the other forced by current circumstances in his native Ethiopia to work tempor­ arily out of Washington, D.C. Together, Sembene and Gerima account for a pretty large share of the feature films made by Africans for the period from 1960 to 1980. Of the approximately 38 films--documentary as well as fiction--made by 14 Senegalese filmmakers from 1958 to 1977, 8 belong to Sembene,1 the rest average 2 . 5 films per director. In the case of Gerima, he is so far (apart from Solomon Bekele who made The Rotten Existence) the only known filn'anaker from Ethiopia, and to date he is credited with 6 films2 and is currently editing a new film tentatively entitled Calalloo, for release in 1981. Quantitatively, then, one is dealing here with a comparatively substantial body of work. Both Sembene and Gerima came to film via another medium and for the same reasons, too. How this impinges upon their conception and practice of film will be examined in another pa.rt of this paper. One of the most striking characteristics of the work of Sembene and Gerima is the clarity and effectiveness with which their very similar ideological orientations are imparted on different levels within the context of any given film, and these levels, the most central of which are structural and thematic, work to reinforce and comment on each other in various ways for maximum impact. In this way, the ideology embodied in their work does not in any way emerge as a result of direct moralizing or preaching by the director through mouthpiece characters; rather, the ideology emerges primarily from the structure of the work itself, and it is this structure, a structure of opposites in_most of the films of Sembene and Gerima, that enables Sembene and Gerima to organise and control shots and sequences and the component elements of these so that the final product usually becomes a living dramatisation of ideology. 141 The dominant structural pattern which characterizes the films of Sembene and Gerima is a structure of opposites, the highest common denominator in their work being the framework of polar opposites within which the bulk of their material--the African historical and contemporary experience--is examined. This framework enables sembene and Gerima to graphically lay bare the nature and interrelationship of the forces that co­ exist in and shape African society, forces which, in the main, are conceptualized as antagonistic and therefore locked in conflict. Thus, in its detailed manifestation, this structure of conflicting opposites takes on the manner of a st.ruggle be­ tween the rich and the poor, the exploiter and the exploited, the honest and the dishonest, the progressive and the reaction­ ary, the powerful and the powerless, the landlords. and the peasants, the political and economic managers and those politi­ cally and economically managed. This organisational principle flows from a conception of reality or society as a highly structured and well-organised unit. Unlike conventional bour­ geois aesthetics which regard reality as a chaotic and unorgan­ ised mass out of which the artist selects and orders, at will, pieces of experience into a work, the aesthetics of Sembene and Gerima see reality as a neatly structured unit composed of basically two forces engaged in a struggle for dominance, and the artist, by virtue of his conunitment to truth, justice, equality, change, and progress, meticulously examines, analyses, and exposes the real nature of these contending forces and the relationship between them. Ceddo, Xa1a (which Sembene labels "un film de contradiction") , Mandabi, Emi tai, La Noire de • ••• , and Tauw are constructed on the basis of this structure of opposites, as are Gerima's Harvest: 3000 Years, Wilmington 10: USA 10,000, and Bush Mama. These films not only expose the oppressive, exploitative, and reactionary nature of one force and the oppression and exploitation suffered by the other po­ tentially progressive force, but they also reveal the ideologica] implications of regarding reality as chaotic. Reality--the African reality--is a reality of oppression and exploitation of the majority by a powerful and resource-laden foreign and indigenous minority, and the systems and modalities of this oppression and exploitation are highly studied, well-structured, planned, and organised. As such, there is nothing chaotic about this reality. The films of Sembene and Gerima expose and de­ nounce the inhumanity of the structures and the dynamics of these systems of oppression and exploitation, and the inevitable lesson that forces itself upon the viewer is the imperativeness of struggle and change. Ceddo constitutes the most critical artistic scrutiny to date of the history of Islam in senegalese society. Using the principle of opposition as a structuring device, Sembene pitches on one side the local earthly agent of Islam, the Imam together with his followers, against, on the other side, the so- called 142 'pagan' African mass- -the ceddo. Within this f r amework he pro­ ceeds to examine and analyse the events and the factors that affect and shape the relationship and the outcome of the rela­ tionship between these two forces, which represent different sets of values, interests, and aspirations. Islam emerges as a usurper, oppressive, insidious, and calculatedly ruthless in its determined quest for dominance, not unlike colonialism and imperialism of the kind portrayed in Emitai,3 a film which also uses this structure of opposites to examine the French colonial oppression and exploitation of the Diola of cassamance. The same principle of polar opposites defines the struc­ ture of Xala, where the nascent indigenous but impotent com­ mercial bourgeoisie is pitted in a conflict with the poor, cheated, and despised majority. El-Hadji Abdou Kader Beye, on the one hand, and the beggar, on the other, constitute the representatives of these two antagonistic polarities whose values, interests, and aspirations are not the same . This grid provides sembene the scope within which he analyses and exposes the neo-colonial, dependent, and impotent nature of the Senegal­ ese bourgeoisie, and the calm resolve and dignity of the strug­ gling poor. Looking at Gerima's Harvest: 3000 Years, a film set in feudal Ethiopia, one discovers this same structure of opposites. The contending forces in this film are so sharply defined and detailed by the structure that the temptation to dogmatically argue only one possible approach becomes extremely strong.