Ousmane Sembene is now best known as a great film director, ‘The Father of African Cinema’, but before his first films he was already acclaimed for his novels. The son of a Senegalese fisherman, Sembene was expelled from school and after service in the French army during WW2 he became a trade union activist and joined the campaign for independence. A lifelong Socialist, he was prolific in his pioneering writing and filmmaking and dedicated his work to exploring the lives and struggles of African people with accessible forms of media and language with which to communicate his views.
This book is Sembene’s second novel and has never before been translated into English. First published in Paris in 1957 as Ô Pays, Mon Beau Peuple! three years before Senegal’s independence, the story is set in Ziguinchor, the main town of Casamance in the southern part of Senegal. It offers a realistic picture of a point in history when the colonialist mindset of the French officials and traders had not yet changed but when African opposition was starting to stir and clearly reflects Sembene’s political philosophy.
The work is a passionate cri de coeur to his compatriots to recognise the reality of the colonial situation and to take action to liberate their country in the face of political apathy and powerlessness, religious conservatism, and repressive colonial brutality.
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