Widely regarded as the first film made in Black Africa, Borom Sarret (The Wagoner) by Ousmane Sembène provides an immediate glimpse of post-colonial reality. Made in 1963 on Sembène’s return from the Gorkii Studios in Moscow, it portrays one day in the life of a cart driver in Dakar, Senegal. Its formal minimalism enables Borom Sarret to reveal several layers of complexity.
In approximately only 18 minutes it discloses the structural violence, established and consolidated through colonial class and gender relationships that live on, uncannily, in the post-independence period. It is a vivid and crystalline cinematic depiction of what, just two years earlier in Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon had called the “pitfalls of national consciousness” – the way in which such an imaginary serves to mask the real, ruthlessly exploitative relationships among the citizens of newly “liberated” states. It casts doubt on the now ubiquitous idea, at least in the global north, that the abstraction of racial identification alone could ever be the organizing principle of solidarity and therefore politics.
The artificial borders of the “nation-state” constructed ex nihilo by the colonial powers continue to enact their violence, unremittingly, on the most vulnerable.
We follow the driver, whose interior monologue is delivered by Sembène himself, while he transports a series of passengers and materials to their various destinations. The cart driver considers the exertions of an unemployed man futile and irritating; he is even less sympathetic to a severely crippled yet reasonably affable beggar whose request for money he ignores: “there are so many of them, they are like flies.” Yet, the driver is more than happy to pay the well-fed and well-dressed griot or folk singer, who builds up the driver’s ego ideal by his ingratiating and obsequious praise of the warrior-identity of his ancestors.
