Ousmane Sembene’s most controversial film, Camp de Thiaroye, was banned in France and Senegal. It depicts the days leading up to the Thiaroye Massacre in Dakar in 1944, the extrajudicial mass execution of West African conscripts who refused to accept less pay at an unfair exchange rate and worst conditions than white French soldiers. It is a slow burn of a movie that will leave you infuriated by the end.
It is sadly a fairly universal story. Black people are used to fight wars, but then are considered dangerous because they learned how to fight and expect equal treatment. When they come home, instead of applauding their service, they are reminded how much home isn’t home. Imagine the gall of men occupying your land who are not even from your land and still feel more entitled to enjoy the benefits of your home than you do. Go back to Africa! How? You’re there too. They are French subjects, not citizens.
The West African soldiers who fought abroad face a thorny conflict with no amity from any side. They are not permitted to return home. They face hostility from the French, who are supposed to be their allies, but superiors in rank and as the French incorrectly see it, race, not merit. There is an initial lack of solidarity from African Americans because of a lack of familiarity and cultural misunderstanding. There is also a lack of allegiance from fellow West African soldiers who never had to fight abroad, but are used to serving the French and not being equals with them so if given the choice between listening to their fellow Africans or the French, they are more inclined to choose the French. Sembene artfully shows the awkward position and the constant shifting of challenges faced by these men as they have to return home and adjust to a more insidious concentration camp. The Africans who were not conscripted and don’t have to work for the French have seen this horror movie before and expect what is coming.
Camp de Thiaroye is probably controversial not only for depicting events that the French would prefer to forget, but also for equating the French colonialists with the Nazis. “The Americans are racist,” says the man who considers the African men’s home, food and thoughts innately inferior and deserving of less. They arbitrarily decide what is too good for an African to have, and they systematically degrade them. Visually Sembene explicitly shows the similarities between this camp’s barbwire and Buchenwald. At the end of the movie, a Cassandra figure, derided as crazy, is interpreted as saying, “The Germans are invading the camp,” and he is not wrong in spirit. The French soldiers fail to recognize that they are the occupying force asking their victims to fight to get France back from the Nazis while they safely cool their heels in the West Africans’ home.
Sembene reserves his worst condemnation for the best French soldier as complicit in the French’s evil for adding more Africans in the mill to be ground down with false promises and certain trauma abroad and at home. He certainly treats them like equals in conversation and pays a minor social cost for not treating them with the same open disdain as his fellow French soldiers, but when he shows disgust at the West African soldiers’ actions and asks them to appeal to a system, which ultimately shows that it is without honor considering what they did to their own soldiers without the benefit of being tried by a military tribunal—murder them in their sleep, he shows that his allegiance is with the system, not justice. The final shot is like a horror movie. The machine keeps going thanks to men like him.
Camp de Thiaroye is one of Sembene’s saddest films in terms of the limits of respectability politics. He creates a character that is like himself-well versed in multiple languages, with a white wife and a mixed baby, well read and cultured. None of it matters. Even at his most eloquent, the French are determined to write him off and the other West African soldiers that he speaks for as a tool of Communists or the Nazis because how could they survive the camps without outside assistance or have thoughts of their own. His growing disillusion with merit and conciliation probably mirrored Sembene’s as he got older.
Camp de Thiaroye is not without hope. The West African soldiers emerge from the European front unified and more sensitive to their fellow soldiers needs. There is a protection of the minority, in this case the Muslims among them, by deciding to allow the Muslims to prepare the meat so they can enjoy like everyone else instead of thoughtlessly slaughtering and asking them to conform. While people call him crazy, the Cassandra figure is largely understood as someone who endured something horrible and given a certain amount of leeway for acting in socially inappropriate ways instead of responding to his actions in anger.
Even though Camp de Thiaroye initially shows Americans in a hostile light, Sembene shows an optimistic depiction of the potential for common ground between brothers separated by violence. There is better communication between the West African soldiers and the Americans than with the French, who actually act in the way that the Americans only threaten to do.
If I had one complaint about Camp de Thiaroye, it is that like any foreign film, if you don’t know the languages being spoken, you can believe that the acting is good, but when the actors speak English, it could be because of lack of familiarity with the language, and it is harder for an actor to act in a language that he or she is not accustomed to, but there is no ignoring the fact that the acting isn’t as good as you thought that it was.
Camp de Thiaroye is like most of Sembene’s movies. They begin feeling ordinary and understated then leave you feeling the full impact of what the characters endured. Side note: Sembene stole the idea from his mentee, Bouboucar Boris Diop according to Sembene!, a documentary about the father of African cinema. Even Diop eventually forgave Sembene so do not let that fact stop you from seeing this stirring film.