This review is part of Honi Soit’s continued coverage of the 71st Sydney Film Festival, 5-16 June. Read the rest of our reviews here.
Ousmane Sembene’s Camp de Thiaroye (1998) is a triumphant film. Detailing the experience of troops from the West of Africa who were fighting for France in World War 2, the film depicts their experience of horrific mistreatment and colonial abuse at the hands of the French, following their return from the front. The power of Sembene’s treatment of colonialism is its endlessness. For those subjugated, the evil comes from the fact that hope and freedom are entirely absent, for even when they are given supposed ‘freedom,’ the victims remained imprisoned. This is a deeply moving, well acted and incredible film that indicts French colonialism in Western Africa to the highest degree.
Essentially, Sembene’s film is concerned with the massacre of these troops by French officials. The film picks up the story after a detachment of Tirailleurs returns to Senegal following the liberation of Paris in 1944. Despite their bravery and the fact that some of the troops survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, they were the victims of base mistreatment and racism from French officers. They are imprisoned once again (with clear parallels to their earlier horrors in a Nazi concentration camp) and fed inedible food. What is striking about the eponymous Camp at Thiaroye is how it is such a barren waste. The West African characters are left to live in huts, set against a scorching desert sun and the arid endlessness of the desert. Sembene juxtaposes this setting of the majority against that of the colonial elite, who drink aperitif in the officer’s mess and adjudicate acts of evil in banal, sybaritic comfort.
This is the central thrust of Sembene’s film: those who have undertaken the greatest hardship (the troops) are treated like animals, whilst the officials relax, even though they have done nothing but subjugate and exploit. This anticolonial current is so well executed in the film. In effect, Sembene has links fascism with colonialism, and racism with both.
There were three stand-out performances in the production. Sergeant Diatta, the archetype of Fanon’s “colonised intellectual” is well-read and married to a French woman. He hopes to finish his law degree and live an intellectual life. He mediates between coloniser and colonised, proud of his African identity yet connected to France through marriage and education. Diatta is the victim of a racially motivated attack when leaving a bar. This is one of the many small incidents of colonial oppression Sembene presents; it is not so much the singular overt act, as it is the glacial pouring of small acts that let him make his profound point. The French don’t help Diatta when he was a victim, even when he had given them so much in the past. To Sembene, the crux of colonial evil is that it is about taking away from the oppressed, without giving them anything. It is robbery, and Diatta and his fellow soldiers (accused of robbery themselves in an expression of colonial hypocrisy,) are the victims of such stealing.
Private Pays (French for country) survived Buchenwald and had flashbacks in the Camp at Thiaroye. Here, Sembene illustrates how one of the greatest horrors of French colonialism was that it expected its victims to endure extreme hardship on France’s behalf, and then treated such victims like refuse when they returned. He is mentally unstable and unable to speak any longer; such is the evil of colonialism to Sembene that it takes away the ability of its victims to even undertake normal human actions. Pays is his country. He is named for his country, and, yet, that country gave him only death.
Captain Raymond is the one sympathetic Frenchman in the film. The troops were demanding their back-pay be exchanged at the proper rate, a simple request refused. Raymond speaks on their behalf and demands justice. For this, the other French officials ostracise him socially and accuse him of being a traitor. Raymond allows Sembene to illustrate the fundamental dehumanisation in colonialism: everyone who attempts to decolonise, be they Senegalese or French, is simply punished, dehumanised, and abused. In a way, Semebene’s decision to portray a Frenchman as being attacked by French colonialism is significant as it allows the film to suggest the intrinsic evil in colonisation, for even those from colonising nations who attempt to alleviate the suffering of the colonised are dehumanised and beaten down.
The film was well shot, in mainly an understated, naturalistic way that foregrounded the events taking place not to be overly distracted by the production. It was nevertheless elegant in parts, with scenes framed against an omnipresent eye of a flag. At two and a half hours, I felt the film was reasonably paced, but there were some parts, especially the scenes in government offices, that felt long and maybe could’ve been executed more implicitly.
The film ended with a deeply sad juxtaposition. West African troops, dancing in the camp after being told they were going to be paid, are massacred by faceless functionaries of colonial oppression. The evil of this exploitation stops their very humanity, their moment of singular, personal joy.
Sembene has produced a masterpiece that ranks surely as one of the finest political films or war films ever made. Camp de Thiaroye is simply exceptional.
