A CONVERSATION ON GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION AND THE ROLES OF WOMEN AND THE YOUTH THROUGH THE AFRICAN GAZE
Xala was produced by African filmmaker Ousmane Sembene in the early 1970s. The movie follows a government official, nicknamed “El Hadji”, who seemingly through a stroke of bad luck gets struck with “xala”, a curse of sexual weakness. Its themes are presented through an “African Gaze” and discuss corruption in the government, the role of women, and the role of youth.
As mentioned before, El Hadji is a government official, who works directly underneath the president in the newly independent Senegal. The movie opens up with Hadji, the president, and their colleagues discussing the fact that “never before has an African occupied presidency of [our] chambers,” and how the “sons of the people are leading the people.” While all of it seems to be progressive, the movie goes on to show Hadji making unsavory business deals and using government money to take care of his personal business, such as paying for the expenses of taking on a third wife and paying off a marabout to cure his xala. Besides him, small scenes show some of his colleagues being unjust as well, for instance at Hadji’s wedding when two men are making a business deal and one of the men says that the other needs to pay in cash because he doesn’t like to leave any records of his business deals, or towards of the end of the film when the viewer witness someone we know as a thief, being appointed to Hadji’s position after he is fired. All of these things display corruption in the government or system, which has negative impacts on the country’s citizens.
In Xala, the women’s roles symbolize different things. Hadji’s first wife, can be seen as the “traditional African woman”, whereas as the second wife is her opposite, the “Westernized African woman.” While one wears an African headtie throughout the film the other wears a wig. The second wife explicitly argues back with her husband and seems commanding of what she wants and how she wants it (making her seem more Westernized), which again opposes the nature of the first wife, who asserts her agency in more subtle ways. The third wife, differs from both of the previous two simply because she is so much younger than them. So much so that for the majority of the film, for the viewer she is almost shadowed by her mother, a woman whose personality can be described as a balance between the two first wives. The third wife’s mother is assertive towards Hadji and says what’s on her mind like the second wife (ie. saying “You’re not a white man, you’re nothing special”, or “you think you are European but you are not exceptional” to Hadji), but is similar to the first wife because she wants to engage with the traditional (ie. telling her daughter “don’t raise your voice and be submissive” and asking Hadji to change into a kaftan and sit on a mortar and pestle, something to preventive bad luck for her daughter). “The structure reflects the need of Africa at the time to revalue and recoup its traditional cultural practices precisely because of the way in which colonial oppression stripped the continent of its right to express its various indigenous cultures.” [1] All of this is to say that while each of the woman shows it differently, they each play an important role in tying the film together.
When discussing the themes in African cinema, in relation to The African Gaze, the role of the youth as perpetrators for the liberation is a big one. The youth is often portrayed as the ones in society who are pushing for change and pushing out old colonialist/ racist ways. In Xala the one that does this is Rama, El Hadji’s daughter. From the beginning of the film, we see her standing up to her father and his wanting to take a third wife by saying “every polygamous man is a liar.” She sees the hypocrisy in her father trying to guise taking a third wife as an intrinsic part of African culture, when in reality Hadji is a pompous and arrogant man who lets greed get in the way of what is really important. Later on in the film, she asserts her agency again by refusing to respond to her father in French, although that is what he speaks to her, and only in Wolof. She mentions she doesn’t using air conditioning or drink bottled water, things her father seemingly cannot live without, not out of necessity, but because he likes having the objects of Westernness around him. Rama sees through her father and did since the beginning of the film. One can assume that maybe if Hadji had taken the time to hear his daughter out more instead of telling her to “take her revolution elsewhere,” the ending of the film could have been different.
CREDIT:
[1] “How an African Woman Can Be”: African Women Filmmakers Construct Women by Sheila J. Petty