Moolaade

28/09/2024

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Triangulating Perspectives

    While the message in Moolaade is clear, the issue is not. The message is that men, aided by conservatively inclined women, shouldn’t be allowed to be dictating the terms of a woman’s body, a debate often focused on a womb of one’s own and a woman’s right to abort. In Moolaade, it is based on the woman’s right to avoid genital cutting. The film is unequivocal on where it stands and a work can be clear without being polemical: when it comes to murder and rape filmmakers needn’t equivocate as they might over which side to take on a divorce or when a child fights back after being bullied. Often a nuanced filmmaker in the latter instance will see that both parties have their reasons, and that beating up a bully might not always be the best way to end a cycle of violence. Our point is that not all positions are equally valid and it would be often wrong-headed for a filmmaker to be even-handed over a situation that contains a fundamental unfairness or injustice. Director Ousmane Sembene noted: “of course, I faced a lot of pressure not to make this film, but I refused to kneel before that pressure. This is a very sensitive issue. Many in Africa say it is our culture. But what they’re saying is a way of escaping from reality. They are hiding behind the tradition. They don’t think of the reality of what is being done to women. To me it is butchery.” (Socialist Worker). The film proposes exactly that stance.

    Yet in his claim, Sembene reckons this is indeed a sensitive issue and part of that sensitivity rests on a complex culture. When Brian Eggart says Sembene “is unafraid to criticize blind adherence to time-honored practices", he quotes Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a female computer programmer and U.S. Naval officer, who famously said, "The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We’ve always done it this way.’” (Deep Focus Review). We can half agree. It is clear, this isn’t how things have always been done: it comes out of an Islamic practice most Islamic nations in itself reject that, and “the Qur’an, for example, makes absolutely no mention about FGM [female genital mutiliation] and the few statements falsely attributed to Prophet Muhammad supposedly okaying FGM were declared unreliable centuries ago.” (Islamic Relief Worldwide) The film also makes clear this isn’t quite the ancient practice the village elders would like to claim but an additional later one than the titular word that is used to counter the girls’ circumcision. Central character Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly) insists on creating a threshold with a rope that can’t be crossed and where the Moolaade spell will protect the girls who are due to be circumcised as nobody will dare cross it. Colle is the second wife of the relatively moderate Cire, and their grown-up daughter Amasatou (Salimata Traore), has escaped the cutting. 

     The film presents three cultures intermingling and this is what makes the message unequivocal but the issues complex. The traditional African village traditions clash with Islamic ones, and the older magical belief still carries a strong force as those determined to see the young girls operated on refuse to cross this line. However, there is also a further cultural presence — the Western-inflected values that allow the locals to understand a world much broader than the immediacy of the village. The women often listen to the radio and the Elders decide that in response to Colle and others’ resistance to the girls’ circumcision, they will be confiscated — which in turn adds to the rebellion as other women in the village join Colle. 

      The radio isn’t the only Western presence: the village leader’s son returns from Paris, a handsome and wealthy young man, Ibrahima (Theophile Sowie) and will marry the beautiful Amasatou. The only problem is she hasn’t been ‘purified’ (ie, circumcised) and this means his father would prefer to marry him off to an 11-year-old cousin, no matter if this would make him a paedophile — a remark offered by Mercenaire (Dominique Zeida), a womanising, mildly exploitative travelling vendor who nevertheless gained his nickname from an act of heroism. He used to work for the United Nations as an officer, and who after creating better terms for other workers was then ostracised. Here he will again act heroically — when late in the film Cire capitulates and tries to persuade his wife to allow the circumcisions to go ahead by lifting the moolaade, and tries to whip her into compliance, Mercenaire intervenes. He is forced that night to leave the village with his things, but that turns out not to be enough: villagers follow him out and the film cuts to black crows in the morning sky, and later we hear he has been murdered.  

        Mercenaire is a character with redeeming qualities while Colle is one with honourable ones, and it tells us something of the film’s complexity that, of all the characters, she is the only one who acts with consistent fortitude and purpose. Mercenaire, though very brave, isn’t very honest: he thinks nothing of chatting up any village woman he can and makes a tidy profit from his mark-ups. Ibrahima is generous with his money and agreeable in his personality, yet he wants for much of the film to please his father, while Amasatou at one moment accepts that she ought to be circumcised since she fears without doing do so the marriage to Ibrahima will be off. Cire is a more considerate husband than most, but he isn’t impervious to his older brother’s manipulations and exhortations and thus will end up whipping his wife. 

     If Sembene is certain about where we should stand when it comes to genital mutilation, that doesn’t mean he wants us to know exactly where he stands over various cultural forces in and on the village. Sembene has often been dismissive of European influences on African culture, speaking out against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles at the time of the film’s release. “Bush, Blair, Chirac and the rest are doing nothing for Africa. One also has to mention their allies in Africa like Mbeki. The situation is even sadder because our soil is rich. We should be the breadbasket of the world. But instead we are beggars…This is how they behave towards the G8. If I were an African leader I would never attend this kind of summit.”  (Socialist Worker) But the radios represent a positive presence in the village and it is the combination of the ancient and the modern that allows Colle and others to fight against the elders. By using traditions that can counter oppression and acknowledging modern societies that see female circumcision as barbaric, the films shows that the Islamic one the Elders insist upon is a choice and not a necessity. 

         Perhaps one way of understanding the film is to see Sembene offering a variation of scissors, paper and rock. The scissors can cut paper; a rock blunts scissors, while paper can smother a stone. Each has its value just as ancient village traditions have theirs, Islam has its and France’s presence in Africa needn’t be entirely bad. Sembene was a member of the French Communist Party and lived in France between 1948 and 1960. He then went on to study with Soviet filmmakers Sergei Gerasimov and Mark Donskoi in Moscow, and his films (The Money Order, Xala, Ceddo) were seen as central to Third Cinema as Africa, Latin American and other developing parts of the world were producing films working outside Hollywood and arthouse expectations. Sembene often looked at older traditions within newer forms and many saw in Xala a masterpiece — and in Sembene’s work more generally not so much an ambivalence between older traditions and modern ideas, but a dialectic. 

As Laura Mulvey noted: “…Sembene’s commitment [was] to promoting and transforming traditional culture, to using the cultural developments of Western society in the interests of Africa. Sembene was more interested in finding a dialectical relationship between the two cultures than in an uncritical nostalgia for pre-colonial pure African-ness.” (‘The Carapace That Failed’) Moolaade offers triangular reasoning over a dialectical binary, over one that pushes a thesis and its antithesis before arriving at a synthesis. If we invoke the image of scissors, paper and rock it is to bring out these three elements and see them reflected in the presence of traditional village culture, Islam and modern, western-inflected media. When Marx picked up on Hegel’s dialectics it was to push a historical thesis and a material one. To see that out of historical circumstances, the bourgeoisie was the enemy of the proletariat and that out of conflict between the two would come the teleological society the human was moving towards. The two classes (thesis and antithesis) would collapse into one society, famously based on ‘people’s abilities and needs. Jonathan Wolffe and David Leopold note that for Marx, “…a society must satisfy not only basic needs (for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity)." But it would also attend to "...less basic needs, both those that are not always appreciated to be part of his account (for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure), and those that Marx is more often associated with (for fulfilling work and meaningful community).” (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) 

    Sembene would be unlikely to disagree with such an outcome but that doesn’t mean it can be achieved in the same way in a small African community as it may in an industrialised western milieu. Sembene may well have been involved in communist politics in France and studied in the Soviet Union afterwards but a straightforward transposition in the African context was never going to work. Rather than seeing class conflict, especially, he sees conflicting interests, and this is partly why Ibrahima needn’t be viewed negatively. He isn’t the wealthy villager living in France who comes back to steal away the village beauty; he is the dutiful son returning who wants to please his father and is aware that marrying Amasatou is troublesome, and why he starts feeling obliged to marry a child bride. Yet this isn’t the paedophilia Mercenaire accuses him of; it is the weakness of a young man determined to do what he is told. The viewer must accept that from a given perspective, Amasatou is more of a problem than the cousin, even if Amasatou is of an age to make her own decisions while the young girl is still pre-pubescent. But in a culture that insists on purity over maturity, there is a perverse and perverted logic at work. 

     If tradition demands unity, Islam, purity, and the French-inflected values dignity, then that doesn’t mean the villagers should adopt Western culture. Anyone who says as Sembene does that “I always repeat that African cinema cannot depend eternally on the “goodwill” of the French. On the one hand, this is because that can hold surprises for us, on the other hand, because it is not normal. All that returns to the general problem of the neocolonialism which we are in with the complicity of our governments” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews), is unlikely to see the Western approach as the solution. But this indicates an ideological pragmatics that shows that if in certain instances western values can counter what are seen in a given instance as oppressive ones, then the Western values should be utilised. Ibrahima returns with enough Western ideas for him to be eventually capable of standing up for himself, while the radios that have helped the women understand that, in the broader world, female circumcision is seen as an atrocity shows that Western media needn’t be propaganda forcing outside values on their milieu, but an opportunity for old values to be questioned and new ones to be supported. In different circumstances, Islam might be a force of good. When speaking of Islam in his earlier Ceddo, Sembene says: “what’s at issue is the abuse of Islam in West Africa at a given period.” (Conversations with Ousmane Sembene). Much the same could be said of how Islam is used in Moolaade, though in another film, at another time, it could be adopted as a positive force against the presence of Catholicism. As Sembene notes, “when Islam came across the Sahara into the countries of black Africa, its first representatives had lighter skin. But they married the daughters of kings, brought up their children. Islam very rapidly penetrated the social structure as I show in my film while the Catholic Church remained more on the surface.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews) Catholicism was an impositional religion; Islam a transformational one, whatever the negative consequences, and few more negative than those present in Moolaade. 

       Though Sembene is in no doubt what he wants the viewer to take from the film (that female circumcision is wrong), he doesn’t want to associate necessarily a value with a character and to develop a situation out of this conflictual necessity. In a commercial film, this is usually so: in Titanic, the film will have Rose’s mum as villainously trying to stop her from seeing Jack, the more villainous fiancé who is a snob and a bully, and the managing director who wants the ship to move faster to generate better newspaper headlines. It is a disaster movie tale of heroes and villains, and even the best of them (The Towering Inferno) can’t resist the tropes. In such works, the value is clear but so also are the issues. Whether it is the captain trying to warn the managing director in Titanic, or the architect in The Towering Inferno getting irate with the corner cutting and greedy electrical subcontractor, the issues and values are categorical as we know exactly who we are supposed to side with in a given scene. But what about a sequence in Moolaade when Ibrahima and Mercenarie are conversing? First, Mercenaire tells Abraham he owes him money for goods that Amasatou has purchased in advance oftheir prospective marriage, and Abraham, annoyed, speaks of the excessive prices. Mercenaire in turn gives him a condom as a wedding present and Ibrahama smiles as they seem to be getting on, before  Ibrahima says he won’t be marrying Amasatou but his cousin: that the elders have already blessed it. In turn, Mercenaire gets annoyed, saying Ibrahima, his father and his uncle are all paedophiles. Ibrahima again gets angry and insults Mercenaire in turn, and asks why Mercenaire was kicked out of the military. Mercenaire explains why and also how he came by the name everybody now knows him by. They again smile and laugh, before  Mercenaire says he will speak to Ibrahima’s father over the marriage to the young man’s cousin and, when Ibrahima says, no, he will do so, Mercenaire again insists they are all paedophiles as he angrily points his finger and, in turn, Ibrahima gives him the finger. Abrahima walks away and the seller is left saying, “Africa is a real bitch!”

       The exchange shows the characters angry with each other but even angrier with Africa — that here is a continent constantly caught in avoidable conflicts that lead generally agreeable men becoming disagreeable. While this type of exchange in a commercially-oriented film leaves us sure of who is in the right and who is in the wrong, Sembene offers a scene that leaves Africa in the wrong rather than the characters, but this wouldn’t necessarily rest on Africa absorbing other influences but how it has done so. Sembene says that, whether Islam or Catholicism, “what I cannot understand at all, is the Africans’ great belief in Gods. It is their strength but also their weakness. But that’s what Africa is like. I am interested in it, but I can neither explain nor understand it. They believe in everything. They blend everything. They are Catholic or whatever, but it doesn’t get them any further.” Sembene adds, “and then there is also the Western way of life as a reference frame—that is one of the big problems Africa is facing at the moment.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews) 

     Yet the question may not be the influences but how they are absorbed, and one that needn’t be pertinent only to Africa. If almost all nations and continents to varying degrees are multicultural, then the purpose isn’t to remove some people within them and glorify the indigenousness of others; no matter the far-right’s increasing claim that Europe or the US is full up and white people are being undermined), nor is it quite to say that we all need to live in a multicultural utopia either (as many on the left might wish for. It is to try and balance the useful cultural qualities of one race or religion with the same evident in another. Most would generally prefer the absence of honour killings and genital mutilation, while happy to absorb the contribution of cuisine and spirituality Muslims can offer. It is nice to still have the Catholic Notre Dame without the presence of the inquisition, and one might want to borrow some of the principles of the most indigenous and self-sufficient peoples without practising cannibalism. This might sound facetious, but Sembene is clear that the problem rests on how a given ethnicity or religion is absorbed into a culture and, for Sembene, it rests on the lack of discrimination that means it might not always take the best another culture will have to offer. This may be especially so given that “in the most comprehensive study of African genetic diversity to date, a team of international scientists, led by Dr Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, has revealed Africa to be the most genetically diverse continent on Earth.” (Progress Educational Trust)

              When people think of multiculturalism a Western city is more likely to come to mind than a small African village, but Sembene shows that there is no reason why, in a continent more diverse than any, the same tensions can be played out there as in London, New York or Paris. The film proposes that while ancient African customs might in some circumstances be troublesome, here they are effectively countering a more recent Islamic belief. While the Elders accept the importance of female circumcision for the purposes of purity, they also acknowledge the Moolaade, which means that a bit more than a rope can protect the girls from being cut. The influence of France and the West may generally be bad, but in this instance happens to be good, as the radios gave the women the chance to hear opposing views that put the FGM into context, and also galvanise them when the Elders decide to confiscate their link with the wider world. Introducing Ousmane Sembene Interviews, Annett Busch and Max Annas note that “two important elements of Sembène’s standards can be found across all of these interviews. He evaluates the role of France in the postcolonial process mercilessly. In spoken word, he equates France with foreign aid and corruption in Senegal and other African countries. In conversation with Bonnie Greer, he calls the politicians of francophone Africa “alienated” and claims France is responsible for Africa’s dividedness and its not being politically and culturally united.” As Sembene says, “I think it is France that is really leading the job of dividing Africa. Most of our presidents have dual nationalities, French and African. When the going gets tough, they run away to Paris and all our decisions are made in Paris.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews)  

     But in Moolaade France is a more ambivalent presence than in his brilliant first film, The Black Girl, with a young woman employed as a maid in France and becomes so unhappy she takes her life. Here, Ibrahima has made money in France and returns not just with cash but a set of values that when deployed against his father have their uses. It isn’t often that a film invokes television as a positive but this is exactly what Ibrahama uses it for when he stands up to his father. When the father says his son will not marry Amasatou, Ibrahama says that the marriage is his business, that the era of petty tyrants is over, and he will leave the TV on if he wishes. The father strikes him and curses him but we can see the son is now resolute. His stay in France has been as positive to the film’s over all outcome as the maid in Black Girl’s was negative. 

   This rests on the image we offered of scissors, paper and rock. The West can be a negative influence when people in the village are overly impressed by Ibrahima’s return, as though their own existence is insignificant next to someone who has come from its colonial oppressor. It would be proof that, though for decades West Africa has been independent, the colonial mindset is still there. But it can be positive too if it allows the women to hear on the radio perspectives that counter a different form of Islamic oppression, genital mutilation, and if it helps give Ibrahima the strength to stand up to his father.  It is French scissors to Islamic paper. When the Elders say that circumcision is part of tradition, local custom as rock can be covered by Islamic paper — the tradition isn’t that old since it relies on Islam, which is relatively modern next to village customs. But the rock of ancient belief can be used to blunt the scissors of more modern impositions and, though our analogy might be a little wobbly, it can usefully make sense of the three cultural presences at work in Moolaade. If the film moves from its opening pessimism to closing optimism, it rests chiefly on this ability to view conflicting cultural forces as capable of reformulation rather than eradication. 

        The point of our loose analogy with the famous game is that to get rid of the rock, the scissors or the paper would be to undermine new opportunities not create them. While at the beginning of the film the Elders hold traditional village power and insist on practising an Islamic operation on women, the locals are also taken by the presence of the rich man in a beige suit arriving from Paris and handing out cash. Ibrahama is potentially the worst of both worlds: the heir to the throne in Africa and the man who returns with money to burn from a colonial nation. Many of the locals practice in his company a two-fold obeisance, yet this is also the same person who is capable of accepting Amasatou, even though she will remain Bilakoro — uncircumcised. While earlier it looked like he would capitulate and marry his cousin, or that Amasatou would conform and accept genital cutting, with Ibrahima waiting the necessary fifteen days for her recovery, by the end she holds her ground; he holds to his, even if hers means conforming to her mother’s wishes, and Ibrahama defying those of his father. Ibrahama’s father may hold the power in the village but the film shows times are changing, even if it is the most ancient of traditions (the moolaade) that trumps the more recent Islamic one. Yet the film acknowledges too that this change comes about through the French influence, whether it happens to be the education Ibrahima received in the Western country that allows him to entertain, even espouse, views contrary to the older traditions or the presence of TV. 

      Yet while Sembene makes clear where he stands on the film’s topic, he ends on an ambivalent set of images. No longer wearing his beige western clothes that smack vaguely of the colonial, Ibrahima wears a blue and white Kufi androbe. He hears that Amasatou will remain a Bilakoro, and he smiles before the film cuts to a high-angle shot of the burning radios, while the camera in the same shot travels up to the mosque minaret. It then cuts sharply to the closing image: a high-perched television aerial that suggests both a passage of time and a change in expectation. We can assume that Ibrahima and Amasatou are married and that out of two opposing assumptions of village life presented by Cisse and the chief, the younger generation has managed to come together to produce a healthier society. Of the three (western, traditional, Islam) it would seem Islam is undermined and the other two paramount, as Amasatou won’t be circumcised and the locals will have access to media that allows them to think more broadly. But if the film is more than a tract about a barbaric policy, it rests on the intricacy of its issues, no matter the singularity of its point. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Moolaade

Triangulating Perspectives

    While the message in Moolaade is clear, the issue is not. The message is that men, aided by conservatively inclined women, shouldn’t be allowed to be dictating the terms of a woman’s body, a debate often focused on a womb of one’s own and a woman’s right to abort. In Moolaade, it is based on the woman’s right to avoid genital cutting. The film is unequivocal on where it stands and a work can be clear without being polemical: when it comes to murder and rape filmmakers needn’t equivocate as they might over which side to take on a divorce or when a child fights back after being bullied. Often a nuanced filmmaker in the latter instance will see that both parties have their reasons, and that beating up a bully might not always be the best way to end a cycle of violence. Our point is that not all positions are equally valid and it would be often wrong-headed for a filmmaker to be even-handed over a situation that contains a fundamental unfairness or injustice. Director Ousmane Sembene noted: “of course, I faced a lot of pressure not to make this film, but I refused to kneel before that pressure. This is a very sensitive issue. Many in Africa say it is our culture. But what they’re saying is a way of escaping from reality. They are hiding behind the tradition. They don’t think of the reality of what is being done to women. To me it is butchery.” (Socialist Worker). The film proposes exactly that stance.

    Yet in his claim, Sembene reckons this is indeed a sensitive issue and part of that sensitivity rests on a complex culture. When Brian Eggart says Sembene “is unafraid to criticize blind adherence to time-honored practices", he quotes Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a female computer programmer and U.S. Naval officer, who famously said, "The most dangerous phrase in the language is, 'We’ve always done it this way.’” (Deep Focus Review). We can half agree. It is clear, this isn’t how things have always been done: it comes out of an Islamic practice most Islamic nations in itself reject that, and “the Qur’an, for example, makes absolutely no mention about FGM [female genital mutiliation] and the few statements falsely attributed to Prophet Muhammad supposedly okaying FGM were declared unreliable centuries ago.” (Islamic Relief Worldwide) The film also makes clear this isn’t quite the ancient practice the village elders would like to claim but an additional later one than the titular word that is used to counter the girls’ circumcision. Central character Colle (Fatoumata Coulibaly) insists on creating a threshold with a rope that can’t be crossed and where the Moolaade spell will protect the girls who are due to be circumcised as nobody will dare cross it. Colle is the second wife of the relatively moderate Cire, and their grown-up daughter Amasatou (Salimata Traore), has escaped the cutting. 

     The film presents three cultures intermingling and this is what makes the message unequivocal but the issues complex. The traditional African village traditions clash with Islamic ones, and the older magical belief still carries a strong force as those determined to see the young girls operated on refuse to cross this line. However, there is also a further cultural presence — the Western-inflected values that allow the locals to understand a world much broader than the immediacy of the village. The women often listen to the radio and the Elders decide that in response to Colle and others’ resistance to the girls’ circumcision, they will be confiscated — which in turn adds to the rebellion as other women in the village join Colle. 

      The radio isn’t the only Western presence: the village leader’s son returns from Paris, a handsome and wealthy young man, Ibrahima (Theophile Sowie) and will marry the beautiful Amasatou. The only problem is she hasn’t been ‘purified’ (ie, circumcised) and this means his father would prefer to marry him off to an 11-year-old cousin, no matter if this would make him a paedophile — a remark offered by Mercenaire (Dominique Zeida), a womanising, mildly exploitative travelling vendor who nevertheless gained his nickname from an act of heroism. He used to work for the United Nations as an officer, and who after creating better terms for other workers was then ostracised. Here he will again act heroically — when late in the film Cire capitulates and tries to persuade his wife to allow the circumcisions to go ahead by lifting the moolaade, and tries to whip her into compliance, Mercenaire intervenes. He is forced that night to leave the village with his things, but that turns out not to be enough: villagers follow him out and the film cuts to black crows in the morning sky, and later we hear he has been murdered.  

        Mercenaire is a character with redeeming qualities while Colle is one with honourable ones, and it tells us something of the film’s complexity that, of all the characters, she is the only one who acts with consistent fortitude and purpose. Mercenaire, though very brave, isn’t very honest: he thinks nothing of chatting up any village woman he can and makes a tidy profit from his mark-ups. Ibrahima is generous with his money and agreeable in his personality, yet he wants for much of the film to please his father, while Amasatou at one moment accepts that she ought to be circumcised since she fears without doing do so the marriage to Ibrahima will be off. Cire is a more considerate husband than most, but he isn’t impervious to his older brother’s manipulations and exhortations and thus will end up whipping his wife. 

     If Sembene is certain about where we should stand when it comes to genital mutilation, that doesn’t mean he wants us to know exactly where he stands over various cultural forces in and on the village. Sembene has often been dismissive of European influences on African culture, speaking out against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles at the time of the film’s release. “Bush, Blair, Chirac and the rest are doing nothing for Africa. One also has to mention their allies in Africa like Mbeki. The situation is even sadder because our soil is rich. We should be the breadbasket of the world. But instead we are beggars…This is how they behave towards the G8. If I were an African leader I would never attend this kind of summit.”  (Socialist Worker) But the radios represent a positive presence in the village and it is the combination of the ancient and the modern that allows Colle and others to fight against the elders. By using traditions that can counter oppression and acknowledging modern societies that see female circumcision as barbaric, the films shows that the Islamic one the Elders insist upon is a choice and not a necessity. 

         Perhaps one way of understanding the film is to see Sembene offering a variation of scissors, paper and rock. The scissors can cut paper; a rock blunts scissors, while paper can smother a stone. Each has its value just as ancient village traditions have theirs, Islam has its and France’s presence in Africa needn’t be entirely bad. Sembene was a member of the French Communist Party and lived in France between 1948 and 1960. He then went on to study with Soviet filmmakers Sergei Gerasimov and Mark Donskoi in Moscow, and his films (The Money Order, Xala, Ceddo) were seen as central to Third Cinema as Africa, Latin American and other developing parts of the world were producing films working outside Hollywood and arthouse expectations. Sembene often looked at older traditions within newer forms and many saw in Xala a masterpiece — and in Sembene’s work more generally not so much an ambivalence between older traditions and modern ideas, but a dialectic. 

As Laura Mulvey noted: “…Sembene’s commitment [was] to promoting and transforming traditional culture, to using the cultural developments of Western society in the interests of Africa. Sembene was more interested in finding a dialectical relationship between the two cultures than in an uncritical nostalgia for pre-colonial pure African-ness.” (‘The Carapace That Failed’) Moolaade offers triangular reasoning over a dialectical binary, over one that pushes a thesis and its antithesis before arriving at a synthesis. If we invoke the image of scissors, paper and rock it is to bring out these three elements and see them reflected in the presence of traditional village culture, Islam and modern, western-inflected media. When Marx picked up on Hegel’s dialectics it was to push a historical thesis and a material one. To see that out of historical circumstances, the bourgeoisie was the enemy of the proletariat and that out of conflict between the two would come the teleological society the human was moving towards. The two classes (thesis and antithesis) would collapse into one society, famously based on ‘people’s abilities and needs. Jonathan Wolffe and David Leopold note that for Marx, “…a society must satisfy not only basic needs (for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity)." But it would also attend to "...less basic needs, both those that are not always appreciated to be part of his account (for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure), and those that Marx is more often associated with (for fulfilling work and meaningful community).” (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy) 

    Sembene would be unlikely to disagree with such an outcome but that doesn’t mean it can be achieved in the same way in a small African community as it may in an industrialised western milieu. Sembene may well have been involved in communist politics in France and studied in the Soviet Union afterwards but a straightforward transposition in the African context was never going to work. Rather than seeing class conflict, especially, he sees conflicting interests, and this is partly why Ibrahima needn’t be viewed negatively. He isn’t the wealthy villager living in France who comes back to steal away the village beauty; he is the dutiful son returning who wants to please his father and is aware that marrying Amasatou is troublesome, and why he starts feeling obliged to marry a child bride. Yet this isn’t the paedophilia Mercenaire accuses him of; it is the weakness of a young man determined to do what he is told. The viewer must accept that from a given perspective, Amasatou is more of a problem than the cousin, even if Amasatou is of an age to make her own decisions while the young girl is still pre-pubescent. But in a culture that insists on purity over maturity, there is a perverse and perverted logic at work. 

     If tradition demands unity, Islam, purity, and the French-inflected values dignity, then that doesn’t mean the villagers should adopt Western culture. Anyone who says as Sembene does that “I always repeat that African cinema cannot depend eternally on the “goodwill” of the French. On the one hand, this is because that can hold surprises for us, on the other hand, because it is not normal. All that returns to the general problem of the neocolonialism which we are in with the complicity of our governments” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews), is unlikely to see the Western approach as the solution. But this indicates an ideological pragmatics that shows that if in certain instances western values can counter what are seen in a given instance as oppressive ones, then the Western values should be utilised. Ibrahima returns with enough Western ideas for him to be eventually capable of standing up for himself, while the radios that have helped the women understand that, in the broader world, female circumcision is seen as an atrocity shows that Western media needn’t be propaganda forcing outside values on their milieu, but an opportunity for old values to be questioned and new ones to be supported. In different circumstances, Islam might be a force of good. When speaking of Islam in his earlier Ceddo, Sembene says: “what’s at issue is the abuse of Islam in West Africa at a given period.” (Conversations with Ousmane Sembene). Much the same could be said of how Islam is used in Moolaade, though in another film, at another time, it could be adopted as a positive force against the presence of Catholicism. As Sembene notes, “when Islam came across the Sahara into the countries of black Africa, its first representatives had lighter skin. But they married the daughters of kings, brought up their children. Islam very rapidly penetrated the social structure as I show in my film while the Catholic Church remained more on the surface.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews) Catholicism was an impositional religion; Islam a transformational one, whatever the negative consequences, and few more negative than those present in Moolaade. 

       Though Sembene is in no doubt what he wants the viewer to take from the film (that female circumcision is wrong), he doesn’t want to associate necessarily a value with a character and to develop a situation out of this conflictual necessity. In a commercial film, this is usually so: in Titanic, the film will have Rose’s mum as villainously trying to stop her from seeing Jack, the more villainous fiancé who is a snob and a bully, and the managing director who wants the ship to move faster to generate better newspaper headlines. It is a disaster movie tale of heroes and villains, and even the best of them (The Towering Inferno) can’t resist the tropes. In such works, the value is clear but so also are the issues. Whether it is the captain trying to warn the managing director in Titanic, or the architect in The Towering Inferno getting irate with the corner cutting and greedy electrical subcontractor, the issues and values are categorical as we know exactly who we are supposed to side with in a given scene. But what about a sequence in Moolaade when Ibrahima and Mercenarie are conversing? First, Mercenaire tells Abraham he owes him money for goods that Amasatou has purchased in advance oftheir prospective marriage, and Abraham, annoyed, speaks of the excessive prices. Mercenaire in turn gives him a condom as a wedding present and Ibrahama smiles as they seem to be getting on, before  Ibrahima says he won’t be marrying Amasatou but his cousin: that the elders have already blessed it. In turn, Mercenaire gets annoyed, saying Ibrahima, his father and his uncle are all paedophiles. Ibrahima again gets angry and insults Mercenaire in turn, and asks why Mercenaire was kicked out of the military. Mercenaire explains why and also how he came by the name everybody now knows him by. They again smile and laugh, before  Mercenaire says he will speak to Ibrahima’s father over the marriage to the young man’s cousin and, when Ibrahima says, no, he will do so, Mercenaire again insists they are all paedophiles as he angrily points his finger and, in turn, Ibrahima gives him the finger. Abrahima walks away and the seller is left saying, “Africa is a real bitch!”

       The exchange shows the characters angry with each other but even angrier with Africa — that here is a continent constantly caught in avoidable conflicts that lead generally agreeable men becoming disagreeable. While this type of exchange in a commercially-oriented film leaves us sure of who is in the right and who is in the wrong, Sembene offers a scene that leaves Africa in the wrong rather than the characters, but this wouldn’t necessarily rest on Africa absorbing other influences but how it has done so. Sembene says that, whether Islam or Catholicism, “what I cannot understand at all, is the Africans’ great belief in Gods. It is their strength but also their weakness. But that’s what Africa is like. I am interested in it, but I can neither explain nor understand it. They believe in everything. They blend everything. They are Catholic or whatever, but it doesn’t get them any further.” Sembene adds, “and then there is also the Western way of life as a reference frame—that is one of the big problems Africa is facing at the moment.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews) 

     Yet the question may not be the influences but how they are absorbed, and one that needn’t be pertinent only to Africa. If almost all nations and continents to varying degrees are multicultural, then the purpose isn’t to remove some people within them and glorify the indigenousness of others; no matter the far-right’s increasing claim that Europe or the US is full up and white people are being undermined), nor is it quite to say that we all need to live in a multicultural utopia either (as many on the left might wish for. It is to try and balance the useful cultural qualities of one race or religion with the same evident in another. Most would generally prefer the absence of honour killings and genital mutilation, while happy to absorb the contribution of cuisine and spirituality Muslims can offer. It is nice to still have the Catholic Notre Dame without the presence of the inquisition, and one might want to borrow some of the principles of the most indigenous and self-sufficient peoples without practising cannibalism. This might sound facetious, but Sembene is clear that the problem rests on how a given ethnicity or religion is absorbed into a culture and, for Sembene, it rests on the lack of discrimination that means it might not always take the best another culture will have to offer. This may be especially so given that “in the most comprehensive study of African genetic diversity to date, a team of international scientists, led by Dr Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, has revealed Africa to be the most genetically diverse continent on Earth.” (Progress Educational Trust)

              When people think of multiculturalism a Western city is more likely to come to mind than a small African village, but Sembene shows that there is no reason why, in a continent more diverse than any, the same tensions can be played out there as in London, New York or Paris. The film proposes that while ancient African customs might in some circumstances be troublesome, here they are effectively countering a more recent Islamic belief. While the Elders accept the importance of female circumcision for the purposes of purity, they also acknowledge the Moolaade, which means that a bit more than a rope can protect the girls from being cut. The influence of France and the West may generally be bad, but in this instance happens to be good, as the radios gave the women the chance to hear opposing views that put the FGM into context, and also galvanise them when the Elders decide to confiscate their link with the wider world. Introducing Ousmane Sembene Interviews, Annett Busch and Max Annas note that “two important elements of Sembène’s standards can be found across all of these interviews. He evaluates the role of France in the postcolonial process mercilessly. In spoken word, he equates France with foreign aid and corruption in Senegal and other African countries. In conversation with Bonnie Greer, he calls the politicians of francophone Africa “alienated” and claims France is responsible for Africa’s dividedness and its not being politically and culturally united.” As Sembene says, “I think it is France that is really leading the job of dividing Africa. Most of our presidents have dual nationalities, French and African. When the going gets tough, they run away to Paris and all our decisions are made in Paris.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews)  

     But in Moolaade France is a more ambivalent presence than in his brilliant first film, The Black Girl, with a young woman employed as a maid in France and becomes so unhappy she takes her life. Here, Ibrahima has made money in France and returns not just with cash but a set of values that when deployed against his father have their uses. It isn’t often that a film invokes television as a positive but this is exactly what Ibrahama uses it for when he stands up to his father. When the father says his son will not marry Amasatou, Ibrahama says that the marriage is his business, that the era of petty tyrants is over, and he will leave the TV on if he wishes. The father strikes him and curses him but we can see the son is now resolute. His stay in France has been as positive to the film’s over all outcome as the maid in Black Girl’s was negative. 

   This rests on the image we offered of scissors, paper and rock. The West can be a negative influence when people in the village are overly impressed by Ibrahima’s return, as though their own existence is insignificant next to someone who has come from its colonial oppressor. It would be proof that, though for decades West Africa has been independent, the colonial mindset is still there. But it can be positive too if it allows the women to hear on the radio perspectives that counter a different form of Islamic oppression, genital mutilation, and if it helps give Ibrahima the strength to stand up to his father.  It is French scissors to Islamic paper. When the Elders say that circumcision is part of tradition, local custom as rock can be covered by Islamic paper — the tradition isn’t that old since it relies on Islam, which is relatively modern next to village customs. But the rock of ancient belief can be used to blunt the scissors of more modern impositions and, though our analogy might be a little wobbly, it can usefully make sense of the three cultural presences at work in Moolaade. If the film moves from its opening pessimism to closing optimism, it rests chiefly on this ability to view conflicting cultural forces as capable of reformulation rather than eradication. 

        The point of our loose analogy with the famous game is that to get rid of the rock, the scissors or the paper would be to undermine new opportunities not create them. While at the beginning of the film the Elders hold traditional village power and insist on practising an Islamic operation on women, the locals are also taken by the presence of the rich man in a beige suit arriving from Paris and handing out cash. Ibrahama is potentially the worst of both worlds: the heir to the throne in Africa and the man who returns with money to burn from a colonial nation. Many of the locals practice in his company a two-fold obeisance, yet this is also the same person who is capable of accepting Amasatou, even though she will remain Bilakoro — uncircumcised. While earlier it looked like he would capitulate and marry his cousin, or that Amasatou would conform and accept genital cutting, with Ibrahima waiting the necessary fifteen days for her recovery, by the end she holds her ground; he holds to his, even if hers means conforming to her mother’s wishes, and Ibrahama defying those of his father. Ibrahama’s father may hold the power in the village but the film shows times are changing, even if it is the most ancient of traditions (the moolaade) that trumps the more recent Islamic one. Yet the film acknowledges too that this change comes about through the French influence, whether it happens to be the education Ibrahima received in the Western country that allows him to entertain, even espouse, views contrary to the older traditions or the presence of TV. 

      Yet while Sembene makes clear where he stands on the film’s topic, he ends on an ambivalent set of images. No longer wearing his beige western clothes that smack vaguely of the colonial, Ibrahima wears a blue and white Kufi androbe. He hears that Amasatou will remain a Bilakoro, and he smiles before the film cuts to a high-angle shot of the burning radios, while the camera in the same shot travels up to the mosque minaret. It then cuts sharply to the closing image: a high-perched television aerial that suggests both a passage of time and a change in expectation. We can assume that Ibrahima and Amasatou are married and that out of two opposing assumptions of village life presented by Cisse and the chief, the younger generation has managed to come together to produce a healthier society. Of the three (western, traditional, Islam) it would seem Islam is undermined and the other two paramount, as Amasatou won’t be circumcised and the locals will have access to media that allows them to think more broadly. But if the film is more than a tract about a barbaric policy, it rests on the intricacy of its issues, no matter the singularity of its point. 


© Tony McKibbin