The Money Order

03/01/2026

Literature    Download PDF  

Eroding Communities

How to make the metaphysics of Kafka, physical? There is often a sense in Kafka’s work that persecution is contained by paranoia and that the sense of reality conjured up is simultaneously an inner feeling and a cosmic force, with the writer’s greatness resting centrally on showing us a world that isn’t quite our own, but that manages to make evident almost all our fears. In Ousmane Sembene’s The Money Order, commentators on both the book and the later, better-known, film have referred to them as Kafkaesque, with the Criterion Collection, for example, calling it a “scathing Kafkaesque satire”, while Karlovy Vary film festival notes: “Sembene, the ‘father of African cinema’, harnesses the Kafkaesque spirit as he examines the theme of money and corruption in an African country divided between tradition and modernity.” 

However, if Kafka’s genius was for portraying isolation, looking at figures alienated from their environment even if they were persecuted by it, Sembene’s fiction (God’s Bits of Wood, White Genesis and also Xala) tend to take place in hectic environments, and none more so than The Money Order, with the writer placing his central character Ibrahima Dieng in a densely textured social milieu, with relatives, neighbours, beggars and marabouts (holy men) all pushing and prodding their way around a newly independent Senegal, and its capital Dakar. Dieng can’t read or write, but he does have a nephew in Paris, Abdou, who has sent the money order. The problem is, it proves almost impossible to cash, as Dieng lacks both a birth certificate and a photographic ID, and is also unsure of his birthdate. To say around 1900 is a bit too vague for the bureaucrats. “I need an identity card. For that, I need a birth certificate, a fifty-franc stamp and three photos.” Dieng also needs money to get his photo taken, and still more money if he wants to hurry things along in a corrupt environment. The sum he will receive is 25,000 francs: 2,000 for Dieng himself, 3,000 for his sister and Abdou’s mother, and 20,000 he must keep safe for Abdou. Dieng is unemployed, has two wives and seven children, yet the order turns into a curse not so very different from the curse of impotence deliberately placed upon the arrogant father in Xala — perhaps Sembene’s best-known work in fictional and filmic form. 

The money order is partly a curse because Dieng faces numerous difficulties in cashing the order, but also because not only is Dieng relatively poor, but he also lives in a country and a city that is itself impoverished. As he says early on, “I hope the whole quarter doesn’t know about the money order.” Yet some do very quickly: his illiterate wives promptly go to the local shop and find someone there who can read the letter, and they then purchase items on the back of it. Dieng says, “You should not have had the letter read to you, nor obtained credit from that rover Mbarka [the shop owner] without asking me first.” The wives tell him there was nothing to eat that day, nor the day before: “We can’t keep the children alive without feeding them. The children can’t live on hunger.” Here we have a family of ten in a country where many would have been likewise trying to live on the merest of morsels, and in a continent that has long been the poorest in the world. 

Thus, the Kafkaesque is contained by a threefold material problem. There is begging, corruption and swindling, all leaving Dieng a victim. Early in the novella, the narrator says, “his wives and children were forbidden to give alms to able-bodied men or to young men. These two categories were parasites, he said, on the look out for a free meal.” But while such remarks might seem odious in a wealthy country where very few go hungry, it can seem good common sense in one where many people happen to be, and where his own kids have gone without a meal for a couple of days. However, giving to women has its dangers too. When he offers 25 francs to someone who tells him that she has been robbed of all her money and wishes to get home, he later sees what he is sure is the same woman trying to tap him and others for cash, claiming that she was in the city to find treatment for her husband and needs money to return to her village.” He may have thought he was giving to a beggar, but may well have been caught out by a swindler — even if in many instances the line between swindler and beggar is slim.

Yet just because many beggars are swindlers, that doesn’t mean swindlers are likely to be beggars. Late in the book, Dieng finds a relative of one of his wives (Mety) who will cash his cheque for him, someone with money, an education, a nice house and a big car. Yet after he accepts the money order, Mbaye goes missing for a day and, when he returns, he tells Dieng that “leaving the car, I crossed the market. I bought something or other, and when I came to pay for it, I felt for my wallet. It had gone! Not only were your twenty-five thousand francs in it, but sixty thousand others as well.” He offers to give him five thousand for the moment and promises him the rest at the end of the month. Has he been swindled by someone who is his wife’s blood relative? It seems so. Then there is the corruption. He asks an unemployed bricklayer, while queuing for a birth certificate, how long it will take. “That depends”, he says, “on whether they know you or you have contacts. If you don’t, all you can do is try not to get discouraged. But if you have the money, well, then things can go quickly.” 

We wouldn’t want to suggest that the Kafkaesque isn’t applicable, but it is as if numerous writers, ever since the Czech author, have looked to apply it in their own way. Less because they wish to escape the enormous influence Kafka has had on literature; more that the Kafkan has inevitably permeated numerous societies in manifold ways. We can see it in Orwell’s relationship with bureaucracy and surveillance, which gave us the Orwellian. Beckett took further Kafka’s characters’ point of collapse by making it very physical. As he would say: a “Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling to bits. Another difference, vou notice how Kafka's form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller — almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time but the consternation is in the form. In my work here is consternation behind the form, not in the form.” (New York Times) In James Kelman’s work, we have the combination of a character falling to bits and at the same time a purposeful purpose as they try to sign on or receive a disability benefit. All three writers absorb elements of the Kafkan, just as Sembene does so too, beyond the European context. It is the very size of Kafka’s metaphysical propositions, his ability to ask questions that simultaneously address aspects of fear and anxiety, while predicting many of the preoccupations of the 20th century, that makes the work so pertinent, even permanent. 

Some may say that Sembene’s novella is of a much smaller magnitude; others that it gives specificity to problems that Kafka always kept just out of reach. “Sembene’s commitment was not to abstract notions of justice and peace,” Zahraa Rezga says, “but to [focus on] the actual struggle of the African peoples – the working class and its peasant class allies – to seize power and hence be able to control all the forces of production and hence lay the only correct basis for peace and equality.” (‘Nationalism Through Literature : Ousmane Sembene’s Novels, The Money Order and Xala’) But phrased like that, it can seem a problem: with Sembene working within too narrow a notion of class specifically shaped within a Marxian analysis. There is some truth to this, but no less so when Sembene says, “There is a proverb in Bambara that says, ‘If you manage to eat for a whole year without touching your wallet, it’s because you are living in someone else’s pocket.’ So when you’re in contact with a man like that, you have to describe his whole mentality as well as the society surrounding him, to understand how he thinks. That’s how I proceed.” (Bomb) 

What matters is defining the social conditions and hence the specificity. Dieng may not quite be living in anyone’s pocket, but he is unemployed, finds himself reliant on money sent by a nephew, borrows money from relatives and gets credit at the local shop. He isn’t by any stretch his own man, and that needn’t be such a terrible thing in a society that offers a sense of community. However, Sembene’s purpose is to show what happens when that society isn’t mutually supportive but mutually exploitative.

When we propose that Sembene shows us begging, corruption and swindling, they are all contained under the broader rubric of exploitation.  Dieng says, “There is no law in the country”, and little in the story suggests this is hyperbole. He offers this after picking up the photographs he has paid for and that he needs for identification. But the photographer’s assistant has beaten him up, turned a table he claims Dieng was responsible for overturning, and Dieng receives a barrage of abuse from the photographer Ambrose when he returns to his shop. Dieng ends up neither with the photographs nor his money back. Someone says, “Ambrose is a crook. In spite of all the scandal he causes, the police never trouble him.” The police’s indifference is another example of corruption, but it is there because everybody accepts the necessity of exploitation. This doesn’t make all abuses equal, but it does mean it will be difficult to find those who aren’t involved in its various possibilities and who are thus capable of transforming society. Senegal may have gained its autonomy in 1960, but “after formal independence from Europe, Sembene identified first the constructions of African elites and later the new dependency of African countries”, Annett Busch and Max Annas note, “through development aid from the North as signifiers of evil.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews)

By relying on capitalist economic models without the functioning democracy that at the time allowed Western economies to raise general living standards, Senegal seemed caught in a system neither conducive to economic development nor societal well-being. “When I say that the Senegalese don't have any work”, Sembene says, “I am talking about the men: the situation is even worse with respect to women — who comprise the majority of a total population of 4 million. Most of them are not yet 25 years old, and of these perhaps there are only about one-third who go to school; and even their future is not sure.” (A Journal of Opinion) 

Dieng may be at the poorer end of the societal spectrum and Mbaye at the higher end, but that doesn’t mean they have opposing ideologies. When we first see Dieng visiting Mbaye, the narrator says that Mbaye “…belonged to the ‘New Africa’ generation, these are men who managed to combine Cartesian logic with the presence of Islam along with the atrophied energy of the negro…It was said of him that there was no difficulty he could not resolve. With a villa on the far side of the southern sector, he also had two wives, one a Christian, and the other a Muslim, and a 403. He had reached the top.” The narrator reflects here the expressed admiration of the locals with the scepticism of someone who can see beyond the success, and Sembene then tells us exactly where the villa is located: “…in the middle of the shanty town and its tumbleweed shacks.” Mbaye is a man who has done well for himself, but while some may see in him evidence of aspiration that others can then emulate (and Dieng would be such a man), the narrator is more inclined to see someone who has done so without much concern for the people quite literally around him. When Mbaye speaks of “the terrible disadvantages of modern life”, where he doesn’t even have time any longer for a siesta, and that “according to his doctor, he ought to go to France for a rest cure”, this is a luxury he can perhaps afford. Few others can. 

Sembene would probably see this as a twofold dilemma: firstly, that a handful of individuals in Senegal have the chance for a good life, but most will remain quagmired in poverty; secondly, that looking outside of the country for solutions is part of the problem. “They want us to only look toward the white man and that shouldn’t even be the point of reference, he who is the worst enemy of humanity. All the suffering of humanity came from them. They didn’t invent anything to make the earth liveable. Everything they do is to destroy the land.” (Bomb) Sembene, as a filmmaker, might often have required French funding for his work, yet, as he says, “I’m full of contradictions”. Though this may be a necessary pragmatism rather than wilful hypocrisy — raising funds within Africa is far from easy. He may have been capable of working on the cheap while writing fiction, but films usually cost a lot of money, even low-budget ones. But then films can reach people as literature often cannot, especially in a country with traditionally high levels of illiteracy, even if literacy has doubled from 1988 to the present, with more than half the population now able to read and write, moving from just over 26% to over 55%, according to Open Date for Africa. Sembene, who made many of his key films (Black Girl, The Money Order, Xala and Ceddo) when literacy levels were low, understandably wishes to find, in film, a language reliant on images and the spoken word — The Money Order was filmed mainly in Wolof, the Senegalese national language. 

The director, well aware of his own contradictions, nevertheless saw many of them played out with the aid of dialectics, saying “OK, I use Marxist dialectics to try to understand the work of the individual within a community. The dynamics of Marxist economic theory are very important to creating this complexity.” (Bomb) While Marx and Freud were often used as a potent combination in addressing how white Westerners needed to free themselves from the tyranny of their class consciousness, by looking below the surface to the construction of a self possessing motives and drives intentionality may not comprehend, Sembene is more Marx and Kafka. He shows how Kafka can inform the Marxian, especially if we keep in mind a Kafka comment, “the wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude. To be face to face only with myself. Perhaps I shall have it in Riva” (Kafka Diaries), with Sembene’s claim that the artist is “the expression of the whole community. You are the mouth for people who cannot speak. You are the eyes of people who cannot see. You are the ears of people who cannot hear, and the legs of people who cannot walk. You and me, we are nothing without our communities. No artist is somebody without the community.” (Bomb)       

Can two statements appear more antithetical: the need for complete solitude and the awareness of speaking for the broader group? How to weld together the potential alienation of the former position with the social dimension of the latter? How can a Marxist writer become Kafkan? How can the Kafkaesque reflect the Marxian? The simple answer is by turning what in Kafka’s work is the indeterminate milieu into a resolute one. While in Kafka’s fiction the people are vague, often persecuting forces that frequently leave us wondering how much is a feeling of persecution and how much a consequence of actual animosity, in The Money Order every slight, every insult, every difficulty is a product of a social order that becomes manifest because of the money order - which, in turn, reveals the pecking order.  Dieng is low on this scale, as Sembene reveals that he is part of a community that doesn’t function through mutual support but dysfunctions based on hierarchical priorities. The very money order is an example of this hierarchy, with the nephew in Paris making money he can send back home to a poorer nation. As he says, “there is no work in Dakar. I couldn’t spend all day, year in year out, sitting doing nothing….If you are a failure in France it is because you want to be one.” The implication is that to be a failure in Senegal is entirely possible, even probable, and that a person from Africa with any ambition or purpose will leave.

However, even if the nephew is correct in escaping the country, his ostensibly generous gesture of sending money back home can exacerbate problems rather than alleviate them, given the nature of Senegalese society as Sembene describes it. While Dieng is suspicious of others, he always wants to impress others. When Mety says she went to Mbarka’s shop he is angry that he “hopes the whole quarter doesn’t know about the money order”, yet at the same time Dieng has a “desire to impress his neighbour, this taste for clothes always raised him a degree above the person to whom he was talking, whose only worth, in his eyes, lay in his appearance and his dress."

It is such a belief that will, before the end of the novella, leave him without the cash: that nobody he knows is better dressed than Mbaye, with his “European clothes.” He is at the top of the heap hierarchically, and it seems as capable of corruption as anyone else. In colloquial terms, Sembene shows us a world that is both 'dog-eat-dog’ and ‘you scratch my back, and I will scratch yours’. These idioms are closely linked but not interchangeable. A dog-eat-dog world is one of self-reliance; one where we scratch each other's backs, in some ways the opposite: you need someone else to do your back, and in turn you do someone else’s. But few people are inclined to use the latter idiom positively, and the idiomatic equivalent of quid pro quo. If Sembene sees himself as a Marxist concerned with community, then what matters would be much more “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Critique of the Gotha Programme) What is clear in Marx’s statement is the importance of ability, which we might see as a useful function —  people have skills in the community, just as others have needs within it. The impoverished elderly person who requires free medical care also needs the skills of the doctor or nurse.    

Marx’s statement can seem a charitable remark, but it is no less predicated on a skill set to match the need. “Nowadays, in African cities, begging has become the expression of a social and economic predicament” (Research in African Literatures), Sembene says, and returns us to three earlier Sembene remarks we quoted: about the number of unemployed in Senegal, that we are nothing without community, and of living in and out of someone else’s pocket. This links too, to swindling, begging and corruption. Of the three, only begging has possible positive connotations. As Sembene says, the term "yelwaan" refers to street beggars. It applies to people stricken by a physical deformity, blindness, or some type of disability and to whom others provide assistance.” (Interview with Ousmane Sembene) He and the interviewer distinguish between yelwaan, which is Wolof, and quamander, which is from the French, and is usually translated as a sponger or a parasite. Sembene says, “begging has existed in Senegal from times immemorial, but we have spent the last thirty years in Senegal begging for help from Europe, America, Japan, and Germany", a report notes. "It has been estimated that Senegal receives one billion CFA francs per day in foreign aid. One does not need to do a thorough analysis of the situation to realize that there is a waste somewhere, but, above all, that the country cannot survive from begging raised into a state policy.” (Research in African Literatures) 

Equally, if society functions based on dog-eat-dog meeting quid pro quo, then what you have is corruption, swindling and begging raised to a societal obligation: that you shouldn’t expect anyone to be honest, and your purpose is to think always of self-interest. In turn, everybody else will be thinking self-interestedly, and this is where, if one is inclined to Leftist thinking, society will inevitably fall apart. If more inclined to market economics, then out of all this, we can have Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”, from The Wealth of Nations, and James Mill’s “light taxes and good laws, nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe.” (History of British India) Smith’s term has been variously interpreted, but it is usually used to indicate the importance of people looking after their interests and others doing likewise, all contained by a market economy that will then self-regulate. Our purpose isn’t to simplify complicated economic arguments, but to understand why what matters most for Sembene is Marxism and community, and how the writer sees the importance of both ability and need over status and self-interest. 

As two men in The Money Order speak on a bus, one says to the other, “Everyone has his price. The main thing is to get what you want.” But there is the suggestion that this self-interest has come from without, from what are called the tubas (Europeans). After Dieng goes to a distant relative’s house and borrows some money, the man’s wife recalls a remark her husband had made years earlier: “Here, our relatives and in-laws come to see us when they want something. So, why should we bother ourselves with African social custom?” After Dieng leaves, the cousin’s white wife says, “money is all they ever think of, and that was all he wanted.” The cousin doesn’t quite see it that way and thinks: “he understood his wife’s feelings, and looked at her with sympathy. The notion of the mutual responsibility that helps and sustains the members of the same community in time of need was foreign to their milieu.” 

Is this Sembene condemning Europe or accepting that it is indeed a foreign land and people do things differently there — including the development of welfare states? The society Sembene shows in The Money Order is neither one thing nor another, as it produces self-interest without a welfare system, and a value system that erodes community. The people who have a useful role within it aren’t so respected. The postman who delivers the money order, for example, “because of his job, the man carries with him an unfavourable prejudice.” When Dieng’s wives see him, they say he is worse than an alcati (policeman): “You only have to leave a paper once or twice a year for the tax man to come and carry off our things. You have never brought good news to the house.” Mbarka might not deserve much sympathy, but he is a local merchant, though hardly one much respected if the description of his shop is what we have to go on. “Mbarka’s shop stood on the corner of two streets. It was lopsided. It was shabby on the outside, and the inside was hardly any better. The merchandise was crammed onto rickety shelves held up by wire and strips of leather.” The letter writer isn’t initially paid and so on. Let us not pretend we are talking about people of great character; it is only to say that those with a function are no more respected than those without one, and tend to see their function as exploitable or exploitative rather than helpful and useful. 

In such a world, how can people be other than paranoid, suspicious and fearful? These words are all applicable to Kafka’s vision of the world. But the great Czech writer insisted on viewing these things through the prism of privacy, through seeing others as usually an ongoing threat that may have said far more about his narrators than it did about the societal. It is partly why Milan Kundera can say of his fellow Czech: “in Kafka’s novels, there is neither the party nor ideology and its jargon nor politics, the police, or the army. So we should rather say that the Kafkan represents one fundamental possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.” (The Art of the Novel) This can lead someone to read Kafka in Paris one way, and in the Eastern bloc another, but Kundera does add “there are tendencies in modern history that producers the Kafkan, including the bureaucratisation of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths and the resulting depersonalisation of the individual.” If Kafka is such an important writer of the 20th century, it rests on the implicit exploration of power in dimensions so suggestive that his sensibility can be very widely applied. Sembene’s is narrower, of course, and also much more explicitly focused as he brilliantly takes apart a society that doesn’t know how to function communally.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Money Order

Eroding Communities

How to make the metaphysics of Kafka, physical? There is often a sense in Kafka’s work that persecution is contained by paranoia and that the sense of reality conjured up is simultaneously an inner feeling and a cosmic force, with the writer’s greatness resting centrally on showing us a world that isn’t quite our own, but that manages to make evident almost all our fears. In Ousmane Sembene’s The Money Order, commentators on both the book and the later, better-known, film have referred to them as Kafkaesque, with the Criterion Collection, for example, calling it a “scathing Kafkaesque satire”, while Karlovy Vary film festival notes: “Sembene, the ‘father of African cinema’, harnesses the Kafkaesque spirit as he examines the theme of money and corruption in an African country divided between tradition and modernity.” 

However, if Kafka’s genius was for portraying isolation, looking at figures alienated from their environment even if they were persecuted by it, Sembene’s fiction (God’s Bits of Wood, White Genesis and also Xala) tend to take place in hectic environments, and none more so than The Money Order, with the writer placing his central character Ibrahima Dieng in a densely textured social milieu, with relatives, neighbours, beggars and marabouts (holy men) all pushing and prodding their way around a newly independent Senegal, and its capital Dakar. Dieng can’t read or write, but he does have a nephew in Paris, Abdou, who has sent the money order. The problem is, it proves almost impossible to cash, as Dieng lacks both a birth certificate and a photographic ID, and is also unsure of his birthdate. To say around 1900 is a bit too vague for the bureaucrats. “I need an identity card. For that, I need a birth certificate, a fifty-franc stamp and three photos.” Dieng also needs money to get his photo taken, and still more money if he wants to hurry things along in a corrupt environment. The sum he will receive is 25,000 francs: 2,000 for Dieng himself, 3,000 for his sister and Abdou’s mother, and 20,000 he must keep safe for Abdou. Dieng is unemployed, has two wives and seven children, yet the order turns into a curse not so very different from the curse of impotence deliberately placed upon the arrogant father in Xala — perhaps Sembene’s best-known work in fictional and filmic form. 

The money order is partly a curse because Dieng faces numerous difficulties in cashing the order, but also because not only is Dieng relatively poor, but he also lives in a country and a city that is itself impoverished. As he says early on, “I hope the whole quarter doesn’t know about the money order.” Yet some do very quickly: his illiterate wives promptly go to the local shop and find someone there who can read the letter, and they then purchase items on the back of it. Dieng says, “You should not have had the letter read to you, nor obtained credit from that rover Mbarka [the shop owner] without asking me first.” The wives tell him there was nothing to eat that day, nor the day before: “We can’t keep the children alive without feeding them. The children can’t live on hunger.” Here we have a family of ten in a country where many would have been likewise trying to live on the merest of morsels, and in a continent that has long been the poorest in the world. 

Thus, the Kafkaesque is contained by a threefold material problem. There is begging, corruption and swindling, all leaving Dieng a victim. Early in the novella, the narrator says, “his wives and children were forbidden to give alms to able-bodied men or to young men. These two categories were parasites, he said, on the look out for a free meal.” But while such remarks might seem odious in a wealthy country where very few go hungry, it can seem good common sense in one where many people happen to be, and where his own kids have gone without a meal for a couple of days. However, giving to women has its dangers too. When he offers 25 francs to someone who tells him that she has been robbed of all her money and wishes to get home, he later sees what he is sure is the same woman trying to tap him and others for cash, claiming that she was in the city to find treatment for her husband and needs money to return to her village.” He may have thought he was giving to a beggar, but may well have been caught out by a swindler — even if in many instances the line between swindler and beggar is slim.

Yet just because many beggars are swindlers, that doesn’t mean swindlers are likely to be beggars. Late in the book, Dieng finds a relative of one of his wives (Mety) who will cash his cheque for him, someone with money, an education, a nice house and a big car. Yet after he accepts the money order, Mbaye goes missing for a day and, when he returns, he tells Dieng that “leaving the car, I crossed the market. I bought something or other, and when I came to pay for it, I felt for my wallet. It had gone! Not only were your twenty-five thousand francs in it, but sixty thousand others as well.” He offers to give him five thousand for the moment and promises him the rest at the end of the month. Has he been swindled by someone who is his wife’s blood relative? It seems so. Then there is the corruption. He asks an unemployed bricklayer, while queuing for a birth certificate, how long it will take. “That depends”, he says, “on whether they know you or you have contacts. If you don’t, all you can do is try not to get discouraged. But if you have the money, well, then things can go quickly.” 

We wouldn’t want to suggest that the Kafkaesque isn’t applicable, but it is as if numerous writers, ever since the Czech author, have looked to apply it in their own way. Less because they wish to escape the enormous influence Kafka has had on literature; more that the Kafkan has inevitably permeated numerous societies in manifold ways. We can see it in Orwell’s relationship with bureaucracy and surveillance, which gave us the Orwellian. Beckett took further Kafka’s characters’ point of collapse by making it very physical. As he would say: a “Kafka hero has a coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not falling to bits. My people seem to be falling to bits. Another difference, vou notice how Kafka's form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller — almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time but the consternation is in the form. In my work here is consternation behind the form, not in the form.” (New York Times) In James Kelman’s work, we have the combination of a character falling to bits and at the same time a purposeful purpose as they try to sign on or receive a disability benefit. All three writers absorb elements of the Kafkan, just as Sembene does so too, beyond the European context. It is the very size of Kafka’s metaphysical propositions, his ability to ask questions that simultaneously address aspects of fear and anxiety, while predicting many of the preoccupations of the 20th century, that makes the work so pertinent, even permanent. 

Some may say that Sembene’s novella is of a much smaller magnitude; others that it gives specificity to problems that Kafka always kept just out of reach. “Sembene’s commitment was not to abstract notions of justice and peace,” Zahraa Rezga says, “but to [focus on] the actual struggle of the African peoples – the working class and its peasant class allies – to seize power and hence be able to control all the forces of production and hence lay the only correct basis for peace and equality.” (‘Nationalism Through Literature : Ousmane Sembene’s Novels, The Money Order and Xala’) But phrased like that, it can seem a problem: with Sembene working within too narrow a notion of class specifically shaped within a Marxian analysis. There is some truth to this, but no less so when Sembene says, “There is a proverb in Bambara that says, ‘If you manage to eat for a whole year without touching your wallet, it’s because you are living in someone else’s pocket.’ So when you’re in contact with a man like that, you have to describe his whole mentality as well as the society surrounding him, to understand how he thinks. That’s how I proceed.” (Bomb) 

What matters is defining the social conditions and hence the specificity. Dieng may not quite be living in anyone’s pocket, but he is unemployed, finds himself reliant on money sent by a nephew, borrows money from relatives and gets credit at the local shop. He isn’t by any stretch his own man, and that needn’t be such a terrible thing in a society that offers a sense of community. However, Sembene’s purpose is to show what happens when that society isn’t mutually supportive but mutually exploitative.

When we propose that Sembene shows us begging, corruption and swindling, they are all contained under the broader rubric of exploitation.  Dieng says, “There is no law in the country”, and little in the story suggests this is hyperbole. He offers this after picking up the photographs he has paid for and that he needs for identification. But the photographer’s assistant has beaten him up, turned a table he claims Dieng was responsible for overturning, and Dieng receives a barrage of abuse from the photographer Ambrose when he returns to his shop. Dieng ends up neither with the photographs nor his money back. Someone says, “Ambrose is a crook. In spite of all the scandal he causes, the police never trouble him.” The police’s indifference is another example of corruption, but it is there because everybody accepts the necessity of exploitation. This doesn’t make all abuses equal, but it does mean it will be difficult to find those who aren’t involved in its various possibilities and who are thus capable of transforming society. Senegal may have gained its autonomy in 1960, but “after formal independence from Europe, Sembene identified first the constructions of African elites and later the new dependency of African countries”, Annett Busch and Max Annas note, “through development aid from the North as signifiers of evil.” (Ousmane Sembene Interviews)

By relying on capitalist economic models without the functioning democracy that at the time allowed Western economies to raise general living standards, Senegal seemed caught in a system neither conducive to economic development nor societal well-being. “When I say that the Senegalese don't have any work”, Sembene says, “I am talking about the men: the situation is even worse with respect to women — who comprise the majority of a total population of 4 million. Most of them are not yet 25 years old, and of these perhaps there are only about one-third who go to school; and even their future is not sure.” (A Journal of Opinion) 

Dieng may be at the poorer end of the societal spectrum and Mbaye at the higher end, but that doesn’t mean they have opposing ideologies. When we first see Dieng visiting Mbaye, the narrator says that Mbaye “…belonged to the ‘New Africa’ generation, these are men who managed to combine Cartesian logic with the presence of Islam along with the atrophied energy of the negro…It was said of him that there was no difficulty he could not resolve. With a villa on the far side of the southern sector, he also had two wives, one a Christian, and the other a Muslim, and a 403. He had reached the top.” The narrator reflects here the expressed admiration of the locals with the scepticism of someone who can see beyond the success, and Sembene then tells us exactly where the villa is located: “…in the middle of the shanty town and its tumbleweed shacks.” Mbaye is a man who has done well for himself, but while some may see in him evidence of aspiration that others can then emulate (and Dieng would be such a man), the narrator is more inclined to see someone who has done so without much concern for the people quite literally around him. When Mbaye speaks of “the terrible disadvantages of modern life”, where he doesn’t even have time any longer for a siesta, and that “according to his doctor, he ought to go to France for a rest cure”, this is a luxury he can perhaps afford. Few others can. 

Sembene would probably see this as a twofold dilemma: firstly, that a handful of individuals in Senegal have the chance for a good life, but most will remain quagmired in poverty; secondly, that looking outside of the country for solutions is part of the problem. “They want us to only look toward the white man and that shouldn’t even be the point of reference, he who is the worst enemy of humanity. All the suffering of humanity came from them. They didn’t invent anything to make the earth liveable. Everything they do is to destroy the land.” (Bomb) Sembene, as a filmmaker, might often have required French funding for his work, yet, as he says, “I’m full of contradictions”. Though this may be a necessary pragmatism rather than wilful hypocrisy — raising funds within Africa is far from easy. He may have been capable of working on the cheap while writing fiction, but films usually cost a lot of money, even low-budget ones. But then films can reach people as literature often cannot, especially in a country with traditionally high levels of illiteracy, even if literacy has doubled from 1988 to the present, with more than half the population now able to read and write, moving from just over 26% to over 55%, according to Open Date for Africa. Sembene, who made many of his key films (Black Girl, The Money Order, Xala and Ceddo) when literacy levels were low, understandably wishes to find, in film, a language reliant on images and the spoken word — The Money Order was filmed mainly in Wolof, the Senegalese national language. 

The director, well aware of his own contradictions, nevertheless saw many of them played out with the aid of dialectics, saying “OK, I use Marxist dialectics to try to understand the work of the individual within a community. The dynamics of Marxist economic theory are very important to creating this complexity.” (Bomb) While Marx and Freud were often used as a potent combination in addressing how white Westerners needed to free themselves from the tyranny of their class consciousness, by looking below the surface to the construction of a self possessing motives and drives intentionality may not comprehend, Sembene is more Marx and Kafka. He shows how Kafka can inform the Marxian, especially if we keep in mind a Kafka comment, “the wish for an unthinking, reckless solitude. To be face to face only with myself. Perhaps I shall have it in Riva” (Kafka Diaries), with Sembene’s claim that the artist is “the expression of the whole community. You are the mouth for people who cannot speak. You are the eyes of people who cannot see. You are the ears of people who cannot hear, and the legs of people who cannot walk. You and me, we are nothing without our communities. No artist is somebody without the community.” (Bomb)       

Can two statements appear more antithetical: the need for complete solitude and the awareness of speaking for the broader group? How to weld together the potential alienation of the former position with the social dimension of the latter? How can a Marxist writer become Kafkan? How can the Kafkaesque reflect the Marxian? The simple answer is by turning what in Kafka’s work is the indeterminate milieu into a resolute one. While in Kafka’s fiction the people are vague, often persecuting forces that frequently leave us wondering how much is a feeling of persecution and how much a consequence of actual animosity, in The Money Order every slight, every insult, every difficulty is a product of a social order that becomes manifest because of the money order - which, in turn, reveals the pecking order.  Dieng is low on this scale, as Sembene reveals that he is part of a community that doesn’t function through mutual support but dysfunctions based on hierarchical priorities. The very money order is an example of this hierarchy, with the nephew in Paris making money he can send back home to a poorer nation. As he says, “there is no work in Dakar. I couldn’t spend all day, year in year out, sitting doing nothing….If you are a failure in France it is because you want to be one.” The implication is that to be a failure in Senegal is entirely possible, even probable, and that a person from Africa with any ambition or purpose will leave.

However, even if the nephew is correct in escaping the country, his ostensibly generous gesture of sending money back home can exacerbate problems rather than alleviate them, given the nature of Senegalese society as Sembene describes it. While Dieng is suspicious of others, he always wants to impress others. When Mety says she went to Mbarka’s shop he is angry that he “hopes the whole quarter doesn’t know about the money order”, yet at the same time Dieng has a “desire to impress his neighbour, this taste for clothes always raised him a degree above the person to whom he was talking, whose only worth, in his eyes, lay in his appearance and his dress."

It is such a belief that will, before the end of the novella, leave him without the cash: that nobody he knows is better dressed than Mbaye, with his “European clothes.” He is at the top of the heap hierarchically, and it seems as capable of corruption as anyone else. In colloquial terms, Sembene shows us a world that is both 'dog-eat-dog’ and ‘you scratch my back, and I will scratch yours’. These idioms are closely linked but not interchangeable. A dog-eat-dog world is one of self-reliance; one where we scratch each other's backs, in some ways the opposite: you need someone else to do your back, and in turn you do someone else’s. But few people are inclined to use the latter idiom positively, and the idiomatic equivalent of quid pro quo. If Sembene sees himself as a Marxist concerned with community, then what matters would be much more “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (Critique of the Gotha Programme) What is clear in Marx’s statement is the importance of ability, which we might see as a useful function —  people have skills in the community, just as others have needs within it. The impoverished elderly person who requires free medical care also needs the skills of the doctor or nurse.    

Marx’s statement can seem a charitable remark, but it is no less predicated on a skill set to match the need. “Nowadays, in African cities, begging has become the expression of a social and economic predicament” (Research in African Literatures), Sembene says, and returns us to three earlier Sembene remarks we quoted: about the number of unemployed in Senegal, that we are nothing without community, and of living in and out of someone else’s pocket. This links too, to swindling, begging and corruption. Of the three, only begging has possible positive connotations. As Sembene says, the term "yelwaan" refers to street beggars. It applies to people stricken by a physical deformity, blindness, or some type of disability and to whom others provide assistance.” (Interview with Ousmane Sembene) He and the interviewer distinguish between yelwaan, which is Wolof, and quamander, which is from the French, and is usually translated as a sponger or a parasite. Sembene says, “begging has existed in Senegal from times immemorial, but we have spent the last thirty years in Senegal begging for help from Europe, America, Japan, and Germany", a report notes. "It has been estimated that Senegal receives one billion CFA francs per day in foreign aid. One does not need to do a thorough analysis of the situation to realize that there is a waste somewhere, but, above all, that the country cannot survive from begging raised into a state policy.” (Research in African Literatures) 

Equally, if society functions based on dog-eat-dog meeting quid pro quo, then what you have is corruption, swindling and begging raised to a societal obligation: that you shouldn’t expect anyone to be honest, and your purpose is to think always of self-interest. In turn, everybody else will be thinking self-interestedly, and this is where, if one is inclined to Leftist thinking, society will inevitably fall apart. If more inclined to market economics, then out of all this, we can have Adam Smith’s “invisible hand of the market”, from The Wealth of Nations, and James Mill’s “light taxes and good laws, nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe.” (History of British India) Smith’s term has been variously interpreted, but it is usually used to indicate the importance of people looking after their interests and others doing likewise, all contained by a market economy that will then self-regulate. Our purpose isn’t to simplify complicated economic arguments, but to understand why what matters most for Sembene is Marxism and community, and how the writer sees the importance of both ability and need over status and self-interest. 

As two men in The Money Order speak on a bus, one says to the other, “Everyone has his price. The main thing is to get what you want.” But there is the suggestion that this self-interest has come from without, from what are called the tubas (Europeans). After Dieng goes to a distant relative’s house and borrows some money, the man’s wife recalls a remark her husband had made years earlier: “Here, our relatives and in-laws come to see us when they want something. So, why should we bother ourselves with African social custom?” After Dieng leaves, the cousin’s white wife says, “money is all they ever think of, and that was all he wanted.” The cousin doesn’t quite see it that way and thinks: “he understood his wife’s feelings, and looked at her with sympathy. The notion of the mutual responsibility that helps and sustains the members of the same community in time of need was foreign to their milieu.” 

Is this Sembene condemning Europe or accepting that it is indeed a foreign land and people do things differently there — including the development of welfare states? The society Sembene shows in The Money Order is neither one thing nor another, as it produces self-interest without a welfare system, and a value system that erodes community. The people who have a useful role within it aren’t so respected. The postman who delivers the money order, for example, “because of his job, the man carries with him an unfavourable prejudice.” When Dieng’s wives see him, they say he is worse than an alcati (policeman): “You only have to leave a paper once or twice a year for the tax man to come and carry off our things. You have never brought good news to the house.” Mbarka might not deserve much sympathy, but he is a local merchant, though hardly one much respected if the description of his shop is what we have to go on. “Mbarka’s shop stood on the corner of two streets. It was lopsided. It was shabby on the outside, and the inside was hardly any better. The merchandise was crammed onto rickety shelves held up by wire and strips of leather.” The letter writer isn’t initially paid and so on. Let us not pretend we are talking about people of great character; it is only to say that those with a function are no more respected than those without one, and tend to see their function as exploitable or exploitative rather than helpful and useful. 

In such a world, how can people be other than paranoid, suspicious and fearful? These words are all applicable to Kafka’s vision of the world. But the great Czech writer insisted on viewing these things through the prism of privacy, through seeing others as usually an ongoing threat that may have said far more about his narrators than it did about the societal. It is partly why Milan Kundera can say of his fellow Czech: “in Kafka’s novels, there is neither the party nor ideology and its jargon nor politics, the police, or the army. So we should rather say that the Kafkan represents one fundamental possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.” (The Art of the Novel) This can lead someone to read Kafka in Paris one way, and in the Eastern bloc another, but Kundera does add “there are tendencies in modern history that producers the Kafkan, including the bureaucratisation of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths and the resulting depersonalisation of the individual.” If Kafka is such an important writer of the 20th century, it rests on the implicit exploration of power in dimensions so suggestive that his sensibility can be very widely applied. Sembene’s is narrower, of course, and also much more explicitly focused as he brilliantly takes apart a society that doesn’t know how to function communally.


© Tony McKibbin