by Ousmane Sembene

Ousmane Sembene was born in 1923 in Ziguinchor, Senegal. The son of a fisherman, Sembène received virtually no formal Western education; he worked as a fisherman, plumber, bricklayer, and apprentice mechanic. Serving in the French colonial army during World War II, Sembene came into contact with ideas and events that would influence his creative endeavors for years to come. He was a manual laborer in Dakar, Senegal, after the war, then left to become a dockworker in Marseilles, France. Though Sembène did not participate directly in the 1947-48 Dakar-Niger Railway strike, he kept in contact with the strikers through their weekly reports to the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) in France. After being exposed to the radical ideology of the French Left, Sembène joined the French Communist Party and...