Senegalese novelist and filmmaker, widely regarded as the father of sub-Saharan African cinema and one of the first African writers to insist that the people he was writing about should be able to see their own lives on a screen in a language they spoke. The choice to turn from the novel to film in his mid-thirties was explicit and political: most of the people whose situation his novels described were not literate in French, and in many cases not literate at all, and the novel therefore addressed its subjects' problems in a form that could not reach them.
Sembène grew up in Ziguinchor in Casamance, worked as a fisherman, a bricklayer, and a mechanic before being drafted into the Free French Forces in 1944, and after the war worked as a docker in Marseille for a decade, where he became politically active in the CGT union and the French Communist Party. His first novel, Le Docker noir (Black Docker, 1956), drew on that experience; the breakthrough novel God's Bits of Wood (Les bouts de bois de Dieu, 1960) is a great labor novel on the 1947–48 strike of the Dakar-Niger railway workers, written from within the strike and giving unusual narrative weight to the women who sustained it. After Senegalese independence he returned to Dakar, studied filmmaking at the Gorky Studios in Moscow, and made Borom Sarret (1963), the first film directed by a sub-Saharan African. La Noire de… (Black Girl, 1966), widely regarded as the first sub-Saharan African feature, followed.
The film career is a continuous argument, in a distinctively patient and unsentimental idiom, with both colonial and postcolonial power. Mandabi (The Money Order, 1968) is the first feature film in the Wolof language. Xala (1975) is a comic skewering of the Senegalese postcolonial bourgeoisie. Ceddo (1977) takes on the historical Islamization of Senegal. Camp de Thiaroye (1988, co-directed with Thierno Faty Sow) reconstructs the 1944 French massacre of West African soldiers who had served in the liberation of France and were then killed on their return for asking for their back pay. Moolaadé (2004), his last film, is on female genital cutting and the village women who resist it. Across all of it Sembène worked with non-professional actors, in local languages, and in forms intentionally legible to the audiences he wanted to reach.