(Black) Consciousness (Reprise): Neo-Soul’s “Baduizm,” African Cinema of Liberation, and Hip-Hop’s “QUEEN B@#$H”

Abstract

The reputed “Father of African Cinema,” Ousmane Sembène is perhaps ironically famous for the sexual politics of his revolutionary productions of Black independent film. For example, Mooladé (2004) is about resistance to female “circumcision” or “genital excision.” It makes use of the traditional “right to give protection [or sanctuary] to those who are weaker,” rejecting any practice that would “continue the subjugation of women,” while it makes an appeal to the maternalism of Africa and “our pre-Islamic matriarchy” as well. This tale of anti-sexist resistance was to be the second after Faat Kine (2000) in a trilogy— “Heroism in Everyday Life”—to be followed by The Brotherhood of Rats before the writer and filmmaker’s death in June 2007 at the age of eighty-four.¹ Earlier, Emitai or God of Thunder (1971) is dedicated to “all the militants of the African cause” and its militants are a community of women who resist French occupying forces which are robbing the Senegalese village of Casamance of men and rice for world war in Europe. The women hide the rice and defend their traditions and status among the Diola people at all costs. Guelwaar (“Noble One,” 1992) may center on the story of Pierre Henri Thioune, a Christian activist mistakenly buried in a Muslim cemetery, but it also treats the theme of prostitution. The daughter of the deceased Catholic becomes a prostitute or sex worker who is portrayed as a survivor of economic oppression in Dakar, while the colonized elite is cinematically condemned as a political-economic “beggar” or prostitute to “foreign aid,” that is, contemporary colonial imperialism.

When I die, the consciousness I carry I will to black people. May they pick me apart and take the useful parts, the sweet meat of my feelings. And leave the bitter bullshit rotten white parts alone.

(LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Black Magic [1969])