Movie Review – Emitaï

Emitaï (1971)
Written and directed by Ousmane Sembène

To combat the Nazi occupation back home, the Vichy government (the official French State government during WWII) would conscript men from the lands they occupied in West Africa. These men would be shipped into Europe, where they were made to fight in that war. Ousmane Sembène devoted several of his films to this practice. This one focuses on the way the French government would slowly exploit & drain people already living in abject poverty for the sake of the empire. It’s probably Sembène’s most straightforward film, which shows he wanted to be very precise & clear in what he shows us.

The Diola are an ethnic group found throughout West Africa. The French have been visiting regularly to take the crops one village grows so that they can feed their troops housed nearby. The women of the town decide to hide the rice. They are already enraged watching their young men be stolen and sent off to die in a faraway place. The French separate the women from the rest of the village, holding them hostage, believing the men will comply. The Diola have numerous debates in their meetings as they negotiate with the French, trying to decide the correct plan of action. Eventually, they seek the counsel of their gods, in particular, the titular Emitaï.

While Emitaï is a fairly straightforward movie, that doesn’t mean Sembène chooses to be plain in the structure. Time is abstracted throughout the film, signified through changing propaganda posters on display. The film begins with images of Charles de Gaulle plastered around the community. Eventually, these are torn down and replaced with those of Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy regime. Despite these changes in leadership and governmental structure, the African people are still the subject of brutalization and extraction. The resources being taken in this story are the young men, the rice, and eventually, the lives of villagers, which are bargaining chips to gain compliance.

Films like this remind us why Ousmane Sembène should be a widely known name in cinephile circles and why we don’t know who he is. Sembène relied on French distribution companies to spread his work outside of Africa. The French government didn’t like what he was making and made sure of two things. First, they would censor anything they felt they could get away with. The final scene of Emitaï was blacked out by French censors because they didn’t like what it said about their colonial rule. 

Second, they ensured his work was locked up and never spoken of. When Alain Sembène, the director’s son, attempted to recover original prints warehoused in France, he was refused. The people in charge pointed out contracts the filmmaker hadn’t signed or didn’t sign correctly and cited that as evidence of why Alain had no entitlement to his father’s work. It took Martin Scorsese writing a letter to the French government, decrying this as a crime against humanity, for them to finally release the film prints so they could be properly restored. 

So, while we are right in saying the Germans were the “bad guys” in WWII, this does not mean the French were automatically “good.” What was ultimately the problem with the Germans is why the West is furious with Russia. A European nation invaded another European nation. Germany’s seizing of territory in North Africa was seen as evil not because this was the land of other people but because they were the colonies of other European nations already. The many genocides that have happened throughout the continent of Africa for centuries will never be given equal measure to the Holocaust because the African genocides killed Black people who are systemically devalued by the West. It doesn’t mean the Holocaust should be ignored, but that we should expand the scope of how we examine genocide as an act done by colonizers to the colonized.

Emitaï is a film that is just as progressive today as it was when it was first released. That is a horrific shame because it means the violent practices of colonization are still alive and well, morphing to fit with the times but never fundamentally changing. You can see this is how the film is remembered. The Wikipedia entry for Emitaï lists only the names of the white actors. Names of some of the African performers can be found on IMDb. For the same reason, you likely didn’t know who Sembène was; you don’t know the actors’ names. Why? Because they are African and therefore seen as non-humans in the eyes of the West.

There is an anger that burns from start to finish in Emitaï. We watch as Black men trained by the French are sent out to round up others just like them to be brainwashed and forced into a war for a land they know nothing about. The French casually throw out racial slurs and talk about people who are sitting in front of them as if they are dogs. At the same time, they think the Diola should jump at the chance to take a gun, go across the sea, and die in France. To the French, this seems reasonable because where they come from is a place of cultural value. Africa is simply a place to be extracted from to enrich a small few back home.

Ousmane Sembène spoke about the French occupation because it was the direct oppression he lived under and knew intimately. I have learned a lot about the African perspective on colonialism from watching his films; there are more to come. If you are from the United States, you should also see a connection to our history. The U.S. is a country founded on the backs of two major genocides (the mass killing of indigenous people & the Transatlantic slave trade). 

Neither of these things has fully ended; they persist in new ways as the white government attempts to make less than minimal effort to bring a resolution. The descendants of people who were enslaved still struggle to be treated as human beings in the States. The indigenous people were given reservations, and life has been a struggle ever since. 

There is no struggle I have had in my life as a cis hetero white man that will ever be as bad as your average Black or indigenous American. That’s simply a fact. We can’t heal or move forward as a species until we collectively acknowledge reality and tear down the systems perpetuating this. You can do land acknowledgments and take a knee wearing a Kente cloth daily, but that won’t change the fundamental problems embedded in the broken systems.