Touki bouki: Word, Sound, and Power

Mambéty’s journey to making Touki bouki, released when he was twenty-eight, was indelibly shaped by his surroundings. He was born in 1945 in the Colobane district, on the outskirts of Senegal’s capital city, Dakar. He developed a taste for cinema in his childhood with regular illicit trips to the open-air movie theater in his neighborhood, although a lack of money often forced him to remain outside the gates and listen to the westerns and Hindi films being shown—this formative experience hints at why he would come to attach such great importance to sound in his films.

In contrast with other prominent West African filmmakers who emerged in the sixties, and whose work also intersected with the international anticolonial movement of Third Cinema (his compatriots Ousmane Sembène and Safi Faye, Mauritania’s Med Hondo), Mambéty declined to immigrate to France to find work or study. And though Mambéty would draw inspiration from Soviet cinema—in particular the associative qualities of Eisensteinian montage—he did not follow in the footsteps of Sembène, the Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé, and myriad other aspiring African cineastes to study film at VGIK (State Institute of Cinematography) in Moscow. (As scholar Josephine Woll has noted, the Soviet Union saw its transition from tsarism to communism as akin to the change from colonialism to independence that African countries were undertaking in the sixties: fertile ground for political and artistic interplay.)

Instead, Mambéty trained as an actor and joined a theater company—Dakar’s Théâtre national Daniel Sorano—only to be kicked out for being undisciplined. Searching for a new form of creative expression, he took an autodidactic route to filmmaking, propelled by his own curiosity and inspired by the French New Wave and Italian neorealist films that had been distributed in Senegal. In 1966, at the age of twenty-one, he borrowed a camera from the director of the French Cultural Centre and, alongside friends, filmed the first version of Badou Boy, a wry and ribald short study of a rebellious young man. Despite the poor quality of the equipment and stock, the film was reviewed positively later that year by the esteemed French film critic Georges Sadoul in Les Lettres Françaises following its screening at the inaugural Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar. This festival was founded by Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor—a poet and, back in thirties and forties Paris, a founder and leader of the Francophone, African-inspired Négritude movement of Black artistic consciousness. Mambéty was immensely moved by Senghor’s unabashed celebration of Black creative culture and cited that first Mondial des Arts Nègres as one of the most significant moments of his life.

He channeled this inspiration into his next project, Contras’ City (City of Contrasts, 1968), a short film reminiscent of the city symphonies of the late silent era but with added satirical bite, presenting a freewheeling montage of Dakar’s denizens, architecture, markets, and mosques, and of the beauty and absurdity foisted on the capital by the French colonial regime (Senegal had gained its independence in 1960). On a roll, Mambéty remade Badou Boy altogether in 1970—this is the version known and shown today.

Touki bouki builds on the picaresque pleasures of Badou Boy. A master class in effervescent ambivalence—reportedly made on a budget of thirty thousand dollars—it continues Mambéty’s experiments with discontinuous editing, dreamlike narrative flourishes, and jagged sonic soundscapes and reflects scholar Manthia Diawara’s assessment that his films represented “the most serious challenge [in West African cinema] to Sembènian socialist realism and the utopian narrative of independence.”

Like Mory, Mambéty stayed. He went on to complete just four more films before his death. One, Parlons grand-mère (1989), is a short documentary about the making of Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouédraogo’s second feature film, Yaaba. The remaining three—the feature Hyenas (1992) and the shorts Le franc (1994) and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun (released posthumously in 1999)—are idiosyncratic, deeply felt portraits of life in Colobane tinged with characteristic touches of magical realism.

If Touki bouki is notable for its imaginative spins on oral tradition, it is equally striking for its soundscapes. Scholar Mbye Cham has argued that music and sound are so central to the fabric of Mambéty’s film narratives that they can be seen as “retaining a certain measure of aesthetic independence, an autonomy that confers . . . the status of character, a narrative entity unto itself that aggressively calls attention to itself.” This rings true for Touki bouki’s sonic stew, which comprises—often in overlapping or brusquely adjacent formations—indigenous music (played on a Peul flute, particular to the nomadic Fula people); a contemporary score played largely on untuned percussion; a repeated recording of Josephine Baker singing the jaunty chanson française “Paris, Paris,” which keeps catching in the same spot; a recording of French soprano Mado Robin singing Jean-Paul-Égide Martini’s dreamy classical love song “Plaisir d’amour”; and doleful American guitar funk as the film reaches its downbeat conclusion. Notable, too, is the presence of Senegalese mbalax singer and actor Aminata Fall, who plays Mory’s Aunt Oumy. Oumy, who first rages at Mory for defaulting on his debts to her, is later conjured by him in a self-laudatory fantasy as a traditional praise singer who bestows honor and grand status on him through her ritually powerful gestures, language, and incantatory vocals.

In a brilliantly perceptive essay from 2019, “Reclaiming Josephine Baker in the Filmic Ethnomusicology of Djibril Diop Mambéty,” musicologist Alexander Fisher argues that Touki bouki, with Mambéty in the hybrid role of griot-DJ, serves to remove the Black American Baker from a Eurocentric space in which she was exoticized for her gender and race (that space was principally the “utopia” of Paris, where she appeared as an almost-nude erotic dancer) and reposition her within an encounter between Africa and Europe, deploying the Western-invented apparatus of sound capture and editing to refigure the conventions of African aesthetic practices. This, says Fisher, breaks down the prevailing divisions between African and Western music, with the film’s various recordings together forming a narrative of cultural meeting, establishing a direct line that connects the Fula’s forced migration on slave boats to the United States to Baker’s migration from the U.S. to Europe. Baker’s voice is then “reclaimed” for Africa by Mambéty, thereby completing a triangular journey that demarcates the “Black Atlantic.”