Touki Bouki was released in 1973. The film was directed by Senegal’s and one of Africa’s most renowned filmmakers, Djibril Diop Mambéty. Mambéty’s film has garnered praise and critical acclaim from all over the world. It is seen as a cinematic achievement not only in African cinema but in world cinema too. The film’s exuberant aesthetics has seen it have a relative amount of influence in pop culture spaces, such as African American music videos. The standout look of the film’s poster, which has the two main characters riding a motorcycle with a cows head mounted at the front, has been a fascinating feature for many who come to this intriguing but very strange piece of cinematic art.
Cinema in general requires its audience to be attuned to a certain type of context. For example, the films of Kurosawa, Kobayashi, and Mizoguchi are distinct and reflect the uniqueness of each director, but their cinematic repertoire is drawn from the fact that they are Japanese filmmakers who are trying to stay true to that world and its reality. We could also consider the history and impact of the Soviet regime on directors such as Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky or even as far back as Sergei Eisenstein’s silent era films. The world and the time a director finds themselves working within is quite inseparable from the art itself. And this reality rings true, even more so, for this African cinematic masterpiece.
African cinema as opposed to other parts of the world had its cinematic inception tied to the continent’s period of colonialism. The use of motion picture projection was mainly used by the colonial powers as a tool of instilling Western values disguised as educational projects. These projects would span through the British, French, and Belgian colonial territories, having only Europeans giving directions for how and what could be shot. The commercial growth of many major African cities also saw the proliferation of urbanisation and many other forms of western entertainment. Soon enough movie theatres, or what was then referred to as the bioscope, grew numerously in these main urban districts. And since these movie houses were becoming quite popular, the colonial administration would loosen some of its control and allow private owners to run these venues, with the main goal being that of facilitating the colonies economic stimulation.
With the growth of the bioscope came the demand for foreign films, particularly Hollywood films that many found entertaining and escapist. So the style of film making began to change from colonial educational films to more of this kind. Films that were produced in Hollywood were deemed too liberal and open minded. Fearing that these American films would negatively influence the native’s perspective on the power structures of the time, a new slate of films and subject matters would be proposed. These films would include some form of native African life, but they would be directed by Europeans and would be centered on the benevolence and leadership of western culture and white people. A classic example of this type of movie would be Zoltan Korda’s film Sanders of the River. These films came to be known as colonial burden films, since they really weren’t of Africa but rather about it, or merely about it, given that no African had creative control over them.
But what these colonial burden films did do, which came to the African’s advantage, is that it gave them proximity to the film making process and all its technical requirements. Many Africans who were on set as actors, backgrounds actors, sound or camera operators, would soon learn the tools of the trade. Some of them would even go on to study in film schools, such as Paulin Vieyra, Oumarou Ganda, Safi Faye and more.
African writers were also eager to break into filmmaking at this time, particularly Ousmane Sembene who struggled to get sponsorship from the French but would later on succeed in securing support from the Soviets. It was really in the late 1950s and 1960s that Africans began to take the helm and gain more control of the filmmaking process. African independence and a growing sense of national identity paved the way for many to begin telling stories in their own way, without the constraints of western preferences. But with independence also came the challenges of corrupt neocolonial African regimes. The African landscape which most of these filmmakers adopted was like a shattered glass with bits and pieces of African history, colonialism, nationalism, scattered all around. These first filmmakers attempted to piece these broken pieces together by weaving these experiences and the burden of modern African life through the power of moving images.
And so it is in this context that African cinema requires its audience to be attuned to. It is in this landscape of broken worlds and half-forgotten stories that Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki takes presence. Touki Bouki, a Wolof word meaning journey of the hyena or journey of the mischievous one, tells the story of a young poor cowherder by the name of Mory, and Anta, his girlfriend, a university student in Dakar. Mory and Anta find life in the slums of Dakar difficult and alienating. They dream of leaving Dakar and going to Paris. They come up with various schemes to raise money for the trip and risk it all in hopes of reaching the streets of Paris.
ANALYSIS
The opening scene of the film shows a herd of cattle being led by a shepherd boy who is mounted on one of them. We are shown a rural and pastoral world that surrounds the young boy. The pine trees wave back and forth showing off the limited greenness of this land, a parched brownness of the earth. This opening sequence allows us to teleport to a world that resembles a time almost forgotten. There are no signs of modernity or the touches of city life and all its chaotic hustles. There is a serene beauty and peaceful breeze that passes through the landscape as the boy leads the herd along. The cattle are of zebu breed recognized by their distinct appearance of having humps like camels but more so recognized by their striking majestic horns. The horns are clearly symbolic and Mambéty’s use of them throughout the film is evident. The cattle the boy rides and the boy himself are the central images conveyed in this story. The boy rides along with the rest of the herd following behind, heading to a fate that is totally opposite to the peaceful scene we had just witnessed. The boy (we get to see a few seconds later) is actually leading these cattle to a slaughterhouse.
The slaughterhouse becomes our first contact with a different world. We are no longer out in the open where the pine trees dance in the air of the dry earth. Rather, we are now in a confined space where nothing seems to resemble nature. Everything within these manmade walls is birthed from concrete. And what follows is probably one of the most disturbing scenes in the film. We are shown the live slaughter of these cattle in camera. Blood oozes from these cattle like water squeezed out of a bottle. The concrete floor is washed up in red. The scene is painful to watch, especially when you realize that it is actual footage Mambéty used. Nothing is censored except for one sequence towards the end that gets blurred, saving us from the pain of watching anymore of this carnage.
The violence we witness from the slaughterhouse, as confusing and overwhelming as it appears, speaks of the embedded allegories that are latent throughout the film. The herd of cattle that is being led to the slaughterhouse by the little shepherd boy can be understood as that period of the African past, that primordial epoch that was just moments away from being destructed by the colonial powers of Europe, and should we add the transatlantic and Arab slave trades. Mambéty’s choice to frame the slaughter of the herd in all its visual gore is precisely there to make us feel uncomfortable. As the audience our natural instincts and reflexes are for us to look away and hope the scene ends quickly. But Mambéty here, purely through the cinematic language of image and sound, allows us to imbue vicariously what the colonial encounter had done to a world that once existed vibrantly. It is as if Mambéty encapsulates Africa’s history of violence and bloodshed into those eleven shots that complete the opening sequence of the film. And for a brief moment, lasting just a few gruesome seconds, we as the audience unwittingly get to experience the slaughter of a once vibrant world.
Then it ends – the blood, the howling cries of the dying cows, and all the slaughter. We cut to the next shot. The boy is seen riding a cattle but he is alone this time, with no herd following him, probably making a round trip to gather a new herd that will suffer the same fate. As the scene goes on we hear the sound of a motor bike. It grows louder with each passing frame. Then we cut to Mory our protagonist – the young herd boy – now all grownup, riding through the neighboring slums of Dakar on a motorbike adorned with the skull and protruding horns of the zebu cow. Mory’s motorcycle adorned with these horns, now stands as one of Africa cinema’s most famous iconography. The cow’s horns are a remnant of an ante-nascent world that refuses to die. A reminder that the ancient world still lives with him, for better or worse. And for the rest of this film, we will see this dichotomy, this tension of two worlds trying to exist and take up space within a limited environment.
We cut to Mory racing through a dirt road in the slums, parting the crowd in half and forcing passersby to quickly move out of the way. He rides through the slum as if he is at odds with the society set before him, as if the community stands in his way, preventing him from achieving a much sought-after freedom. The slums of Dakar are a clear sign of a world that finds itself ‘in the between’ – here but not fully there, a hybrid world indeed, a tug-of-war between ancient Africa and its modern counterpart, a Janus. The slum amplifies the lived conditions of modern Africa, and every major African city has its equivalent shadow in the form of these slums – be this in Kampala, Johannesburg, Nairobi, or Mogadishu. And what else could a slum be but a clear indication of modernity’s failure to terraform a world it once thought as backward, irrelevant, and savage.
Soon Mory weaves his way out of the crowded slum and veers onto a paved road that is smooth, well aligned, and painted – probably resembling a world he would very much like to attain, a world that has its manifestation in the city, but who’s birth perhaps is in Paris, that great European metropolis bearing the allurement that still haunts the many dreams of West African societies. After a brief sequence showing parts of Dakar and the day-to-day happenings of its people, we cut to Anta’s scene, Mory’s girlfriend. She sits at a table with a pen and some papers in her hand studying. We get another shot of Anta, but this time the camera pans from her out to the surrounding area. The camera continues to pan upward, and just above the many shanty houses scattered about we see in the distance the high-rise buildings of Dakar. In these few establishing shots we already see where Mambéty wants to focus our direction. Anta is a student, who finds herself in a situation she wishes to improve, albeit by her pursuit of education. And the measure of her failure or success is painfully juxtaposed in the high-rise buildings that speak of a supposedly better life compared to her lived reality of a life in the slums. The themes of the film are firmly established, and once more the landscape, its architectural designs, and the general look of things that surround her world are a reflection of a similar conflict going on in her mind, and to that extent Mory’s mind as well.
The next scene we cut to has a woman seated by a vending table selling some vegetables. She is approached by a friend who wants to buy some tomatoes from her. The vending lady tells her customer that she has not heard from her son who travelled to France. Her customer tells her that she shouldn’t have let him go in the first place. She says that he might never return and if he does he will probably come back with a white woman. She adds that nothing good comes from France. The vendor retorts, saying that her son would never do that. Her customer carries her basket of goods and says she will pay the vendor when her husband returns. The conversation is disrupted by Anta who walks in and forces the lady to pay the vendor. We soon find out that the vendor is her mom. There’s a little scuffle but the customer finally pays the money. Now satisfied that her mother received the money owed to her, Anta then tells her mom to let Mory know that he should meet her at the university, then she walks off. But her mother and her friend aren’t happy about this. Both mother and customer begin throwing offensive remarks as she walks away. Anta clearly embodies a different type of woman. She wears pants instead of the traditional dresses that her mother and the customer have on.
Mambéty reiterates this notion when he cuts to the next sequence where Anta walks about the neighborhood. Here Mambéty shows us the average day-to-day lives of ordinary women who go about doing the laundry, collecting water, and minding the children. There’s only one man among them. He patrols the water pump, making sure all is in order. He’s a bit of a pain in the ass by the way he goes about controlling things with a stick for a whip. Anta weaves her way through everyone, defiantly, as if making a bold statement that she is paving a different life for herself. She even walks passed the man overseeing the water supply, close enough to see him out of the way. She heads off on her journey leaving this backdropped of women, both young and old, doing their domestic chores. The sequence of women and children goes on for a few more shots and ends in a dispute between two women. Things get quite physical between them, eventually they drag the man overseeing the water supply to the ground. He is left undignified along with the two women, all to the kids delight and entertainment.
Anta makes it to the university but she is soon confronted by a group of bourgeois students riding a red topless SUV. These pretentious revolutionaries cat-call her and try to grab her attention but she resists and heads her way. The following shot is of Mory, riding around the city in his motorcycle. He heads to Anta’s university to meet her. As soon as Mory arrives he is confronted by the same revolutionaries that troubled Anta earlier. They start picking on him, saying that he is the reason why Anta no longer attends their meetings. Mory has a standoff with one of the students. But the group overpowers him. They tie a rope around him and seize him as they break off the cattle skull from his motorcycle. The sequence cuts to another shot where two men are slaughtering a calf. The shot cuts back to the bandit students. Mory is held by the others whilst one of them continues to break free the horned skull from the bike. The camera cuts back and forth, comparing the defilement of Mory’s motorcycle with that of a calf having its throat slit wide open. The shot cuts back to Mory who is seen tied to the back of the red SUV with his cattle horns hanging loosely from his neck like a necklace. He appears to be beaten up and the bourgeois revolutionaries parade him around the streets, almost resembling a crucified martyr, in total shame and humiliation.
What follows next is an intriguing but very mysterious scene. We see Anta running on a path along the cliff’s edge. She runs as if she’s in search of something, maybe Mory perhaps. As she runs along this path the sequence cuts to the calf being slaughtered by the two men. Shots of her running and the slaughter of this calf go back and forth until we see Anta arrive at what seems to be Mory’s motorcycle. We get an off kilter Dutch angle shot of Anta looking into the ground but we are not shown what she is looking at. We cut to another graphic shot of the calf’s throat being slit open on the ground, as if this is what she is looking at. She begins to unbutton her shirt, revealing her bare breasted chest. The shot cuts again to the bloodied calf now having its neck almost completely severed off. We cut back to her, now naked and kneeling towards the ground. She drops out of frame, down onto whatever she desires that is on the ground.
The following shot is of a woman skinning the dead calf that had just been slaughtered. Her appearance is unusual. The bottom half of her mouth is painted black. Her hair is fashioned like a goats horn, it protrudes from her headband. She goes on skinning the calf. Anta runs down from a hillside and gets to the lady. She asks her where Mory is. The lady shouts out, in a cackling laughter, that Mory threw himself over the cliff. Anta walks away from her. The lady’s laugh grows eerie with every passing shot. Her laughs become uncontrollable. She holds the knife she skinned the calf with her one hand and says to Anta, now go kill the goat. Anta turns and starts running away. Then the sequence of her running down the cliff’s edge repeats. But this time there are vultures flying in the air, as if circling a dead body that is about to decompose.
The sounds of the vultures are intermixed with those of the lady’s laughter, reverberating into the air like a hyena’s cry. We are given one more shot of the calf being slaughtered by the two men. But this time it is limp and no longer moving or kicking to stay alive. The scene cuts to the bottom of the cliff where the ocean waves are crashing into the rocks. We cut back to Anta facing a wall of rock with her back turned towards the camera. Her face is hidden, we can only assume given her body language that she might be crying over the loss of something or someone. The shot cuts back to the sea waves crashing onto the shore. There is no sign of Mory’s body down at the bottom of the cliff. The only thing there are the back-and-forth undulations of the waves. Even though this scene is filled with ambiguity we can be certain of its visceral and audio-visual effect – it provokes an uneasiness that is tied to Mory, reiterating what was established in the beginning with the slaughterhouse. What we might assume is that something did die in this scene, something more than just the calf. And it is clear that the fate of the slaughtered calf, or whatever visual metaphor Mambéty wants to portray, bears an identical oneness with Mory - it is Mory in some shape or form.
The next shot opens to a frame of the Atlantic ocean captured beautifully in the background, disappearing into the blue sky. And in the foreground we see the horned skull that belongs on Mory’s motorcycle rested on a piece of rock. Anta reappears again, just as she did before and unbuttons her shirt, going down to the ground where someone lays down waiting for her. The shot cuts to the waves splashing onto the rocks. We hear the sound of a zebu cow mooing faintly as the shot of the waves go on. These sounds are interspersed by the voice of love making possibly coming from Anta. There is a sexual engagement here that is clearly taking place but Mambéty doesn’t show us anything physical. It all takes place somewhere off camera, in the realm of sound, in the autonomous sensory meridian response. After a few more shots of the waves beating against the rocks we open to a wide angle shot of Mory and Anta laying naked at the edge of the cliff overlooking the Atlantic. They both seem at peace as if the strange scene that had happened before did not even occur. Mory’s bike appears to be repaired and the zebu skull lies close by, undamaged. Mory tells Anta that a ship will be leaving the following day headed to Paris. He tells her that they should leave. Their plan isn’t secure but Mory convinces Anta that they will be lucky. These dreams and possibilities come in the backdrop of the massive blue of the Atlantic. The Atlantic ocean, especially given its history with African costal societies bears something more than just the functionality of geography or nature. The Atlantic also bears as a symbol the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that dark corridor of history which birthed the modern world as it is. But in the late twentieth century this same body of water changed its face into a passage towards the possibilities of greener pastures.
What was once a dreaded trip that many would have done anything to avoid, has now become a strange symbol of opportunity - the only escape from a world, an African world that finds itself at odds with the very people who bear its name and identity. But as it was then so it is now, the Atlantic still claims the lives of many Africans attempting to make that voyage. And these are the risks and so-called opportunities that await our leading Bonne and Clyde couple, Mory and Anta. The union of Anta and Mory at the cliff’s edge brings them a new sense of resolution. As if resurrected from the dead, our two protagonists drive out of this strange location and head out to achieve their dreams. What we get is probably one of the most iconic shots in cinema, as we see Mory and Anta cruise along in their motorcycle ornamented with the cow skull. The scene oozes in such style and bravado. And added to this afro-cinematic aesthetic filled scene is the fitting song - Paris, Paris, Paris by Josephine Baker. At this point Anta and Mory’s journey has reached a point of no return, they can no longer go back at life as usual.
ACT II
Anta and Mory reach the slums. Mory notices a game of cards going on nearby. He observes that the card dealer asks those around him to identify what cards are faced down. The card dealer takes bets in small amounts. Mory sees an opportunity to make some money and bets big. He tells the dealer that he would like to place a bet of a thousand Francs. Much to the dealers surprise he refuses but eventually gives in and agrees. The cards are dished out and Mory is led to pick. But he chooses incorrectly. The dealer finds out that Mory never had money at all. Mory runs away and the crowd chases after him. He runs far enough to lose the crowd but a police officer spots him. Clearly seeing that Mory must have done something wrong, the officer simply asks Mory for a cigarette and lets him get away.
The couple begin to realize that their dream of reaching Paris will not come easy and that they will have to find more creative ways to achieve this. Anta suggests that Mory should consider the wrestling arena because a lot of money is made at each event. We are then shown an exhilarating scene of one of Senegal’s most celebrated sport, traditional wrestling, commonly known as Lutte Traditionnelle. We are spoiled with scenes of the arena and spectators watching in great anticipation as two wrestlers take center stage and battle it out. In the background Mory and Anta strategize a way to steal the money that has been made from the event. There are two large brief cases being guarded by an officer. They believe that one of these briefcases has the money. The time comes for them to decide which briefcase it might be. Mory chooses the one he believes has the money. They hire a taxi and mount the case onto the car. Anta directs the taxi driver to a desired location and Mory follows them closely with his motorcycle.
At a traffic intersection Mory is stopped by a police man who wants to issue him a fine for driving an unlicensed motorcycle. Once again Mory sweet talks his way out of this situation. The officer, who’s bracket feet stand out distinctly, is forced to withdraw. Mory is then let go. Anta directs the taxi driver to a strange location, outside the city. They arrive at some abandoned property. The driver finds her location odd. Nonetheless he helps her anyway and carries the briefcase for her. They head deeper into the secluded area. The driver starts eyeing the briefcase. He rushes ahead of Anta, hoping that he would be first in line one to open and see its contents. When he finally opens the briefcase he finds a human skeleton. This sends him running off in such a shock he doesn’t look back. Mory soon arrives and sees the taxi driver run off like a madman, abandoning his vehicle in the process. Then the scene cuts to the beach where our couple are enjoying themselves at the sea.
Unfortunately, it would seem, there was no prize money in the briefcase. Mory ponders a little more and thinks of another brilliant idea that would push their plans forward. He plans to meet an old friend of his. They arrive at a public pool where this friend happens to be. Mory sees the man and hops on a paddle boat with the man. Anta steps forward, eager to join but the man refuses her and tells her that she must go to where the other women are. The man invites Mory to his beach side house, showing signs of a clearly marked out wealthy man. The man takes a shower and continuously invites Mory to join him in the shower, proposing that they would have a great time together. Mory ignores his sexual advances and begins stealing the man’s clothes and possessions. T he shower drowns out his sneaky activities. He manages to get a few suitcases. Anta joins him and helps him with the rest. They convince a driver parked outside the beach house to carry their stolen luggage. Mory takes a seat in the back of the car, with his stolen riches. Anta leads the way on motorcycle.
Mambéty sets up the following scene in such a way that the car Mory is in and the motorcycle leading at the front looks like a presidential motorcade. Mory begins stripping naked. He stands and parades his black naked body for an audience that seems to exist only in his mind. As this happens Anta loses control of the motorcycle and veers off the road. She abandons the motorcycle and some tree dwelling person takes the bike for himself. At this point Mory is so invested in his new found status that he doesn’t even question where his bike disappeared to. Following from this we get scenes of an actual presidential parade moving about in the streets of Dakar to a celebratory audience lined up along the city’s sidewalks. The main subject of this parade is Mory and Anta. They are dressed luxuriously and they now possess a certain aura about them, one of upper-class aristocracy. The city that once disregarded them now celebrates them. Mory and Anta sit comfortably in the back whilst taking it all in. They have conquered Dakar and are now a few steps away from reaching their ultimate goal – Paris is near. Mory is even celebrated in his home village, showing how riches do transform not only the material but also the psychology of those who once treated you worthlessly.
We cut to another scene. This time the gentleman who Mory stole the clothes and the car from calls the police department to report the crime. He finally gets ahold of an officer who is willing to help him. Before he lays out his proposition he flirts with the police man on the other side of the line whose name happens to be Mambéty, clearly a clever inclusion of himself and a breaking of the fourth wall. He gives the officer a description of Mory and Anta, saying that they wouldn’t be easy to miss because they look hungry, scruffy and unkempt – a common look of those who are poor and are from the slums. Meanwhile Mory and Anta, now looking nothing like the slums they came from, make their final preparations. They book their tickets for a ship that will soon set sail to France. They head to the port. The scene cuts to the harbor, and a key segment involving some white Europeans on the deck having a candid conversation begins. This scene is of particular importance because it highlights the many racial presumptions and attitudes held by many Europeans at the time. Two people, a man and a woman, speak about everything they find wrong with the locals and the country as a whole – calling it intellectually barren and saying that there’s nothing to buy in Dakar except masks. They think of African art as a joke. To them all the locals are simply greedy beggars demanding a pay raise. And to cap it all off, the man says they are all just a bunch of big kids. The camera cuts to a group of black men waiting in line to board the same ship, looking like actual school kids.
ACT III
We then have a shot of Mory and Anta. They are now just a few steps away from boarding the ship. Their transformation has been fully realized. They no longer bear the markings of their poor old selves. They approach the ship ahead of everyone else. Anta walks ahead of Mory. She steps onto the platform and heads into the ship. But Mory hesitates to place his foot on the step. He hears the blaring sound of the ships horns. An announcement goes off that says the ship will set sail for 4pm. Mory stands frozen, he lingers there as if something prevents him from getting on, as if him climbing on board would mean he would have lost that thing for ever. Anta looks back, a little confused about his hesitation to climb on board. She says nothing else to Mory. She looks forward and heads on to the deck. The loud sound of the ship goes off again and this time Mory is led to visions of the cattle he used to herd. The resonant sound of the ship hauntingly resembles the cries of the cow in his vision. Something in his inner mind is provoked by this sound. We get a few more shots of the cattle, now being dragged on the floor of what seems to be another slaughterhouse. We cut back to the harbor. Mory turns and begins running. He does not get on the ship with Anta. He runs out of the port, pursuing this sound and the image that haunts him.
Meanwhile his motorcycle is driven by the tree man who picked it up from Anta’s fall. He cruises through the streets enjoying the freedom the motorcycle gives him. We cut back to Mory, who is still running, probably in search of the lost motorcycle. He risks missing the ship’s departure, putting everything he has worked for, since the start of his journey, on the line. Anta now onboard the ship begins to doubt if Mory will make it in time for its departure. She starts to familiarize herself with the deck, and Frances three color banded flag can be seen waving in the wind at the ships bow – signaling that from now on this is her new reality for better or worse. We cut to the next scene where a bad accident has taken place. A large crowd has gathered at an intersection in the city.
They watch as an ambulance arrives to pick up the person involved in the accident. And it happens to be the mad tree man. He is alive but badly hurt. He is laid on a stretcher and put in the ambulance. Mory emerges from the crowd and sees his motorcycle on the floor, totally damaged due to the accident. There’s blood on the floor next to it, framing the subtle pointers of the scene to that of a slaughtered cow in the slaughterhouse. Mory kneels next to his bike, his livestock essentially, his world of meaning. He holds the broken skull of the zebu that once adorned his bike. The ambulance leaves and the crowd quickly follow too, gradually leaving an empty space with only Mory and the broken motorbike. Mory gets up, looking defeated, as if mourning the death of a loved one. He carries the one half of the broken skull with him. He walks away, into oblivion, whilst the broken motorcycle remains as the only thing left in the frame. A few more shots follow on, showing Anta’s departure to France. We get one more shot of Mory seated alone by some stairs looking distraught and showing more concern for the motorcycle he had lost than the fact that he had just missed his one-way ticket to Paris. Things come full circle as Mambéty chooses to leave us with the film’s last image, which is that of the young Mory innocently leading a herd of cattle ahead.
Mambéty Today
Touki Bouki speaks to us in various ways. In most instances we can relate to Mory or Anta, especially their struggles. The world Mambéty depicts in this film is very much a world we still live in today. The themes he tackled are central to any African individual who takes seriously their place in the modern world. And it is through such visionary artists like Mambéty that we get the opportunity not only to feel but to finally see these unique worlds being given a language in whose dialect we can relate to and understand. We gain access to an authentic cinematic experience of what Africa depicted cinematically should be like, unlike the colonial burden films of the past or some modern renditions which cast black leads but preserve the directorial responsibilities to white men who are disconnected to the actual realities of these stories. So Touki Bouki is not only a great cinematic achievement by one of Africa’s foremost directors. The film is also a celebration of what African storytelling is and how it sets itself apart from the rest of world cinema. Mambéty unlike many of his peers did not formally study film making.
And it is this self-taught approach that allowed Mambéty to work outside the framework and boundaries of conventional filmmaking techniques. Mambéty took seriously Africa’s long held tradition of orality as a source of inspiration. He would draw on ancient tales, stories from a past world, of which he would refer to as Grandma’s stories. He was convinced that these stories, told by such elderly women, bore a thread that connected them to that original form of story and fable, that primordial tale that moved humanity forward in its early days on the African plain. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelly believed that ‘every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclical poem.’ And in a similar vain we could also say that Mambéty’s films and especially his unique language of cinema when stripped to its fundamental source is itself the chaos of a cyclical oral tradition rooted in an ancient spiral that can be traced back to the dawn of our species. It is therefore justified to presume that African storytelling and orality, at its core, is the originator of cinema. Touki Bouki is heavily reliant on its sound as much as it is on its images. The idea of orality and sound mixing becomes the nexus or the plain where Mambéty amplifies the film’s impact on the audience. Touki Bouki is a hybridization of African forms of storytelling. It stands as a bold and unapologetic vision that has sprouted from the rich African soil.
In his short life Mambéty made five films, which can all be considered masterpieces in their own right. Every film brought its own challenges and lessons. But it would seem Touki Bouki, being his first feature length film, would prove to be the most difficult. The film happened at an exciting time, during the 70s when the African fever of cultural expression had reached its zenith. But this was also a difficult time for Mambéty as he tried to navigate the difficulties that laid before him. To sum up this period of Mambéty’s life, Martin Scorsese, the renowned Hollywood director said of the film:
‘Touki Bouki … is a cinematic poem made with [a] wild raw energy, about a young couple who dream of leaving for France. “Touki Bouki was conceived at a time of a very violent crisis in my life” said Mambéty. “I wanted to make a lot of things explode.” And that’s just what he did,’ remarked Martin Scorsese, ‘Touki Bouki explodes one image at a time.’
– M. Scorsese on Touki Bouki DVD commentary.
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