Ousmane Sembene was a Senegalese author, actor, screenwriter, director, producer, historian, poet, communist organizer and philosopher. He was the first person to ever make a film in an indigenous african language (he often wrote in Senegalese and Lebu Wolof), and he spent much of his life working to dismantle French imperialism, capitalist resource hoarding, and patriarchal violence against women. He’s one of those historical figures whose biography reads as too cool to be true but he truly was that kind of guy.
Unfortunately, most of his films, especially his later work, are hard to access or purchase in western/anglophone markets- I think the criterion collection carries a few of his older films? That being said, a lot of his books were translated into English and are particularly good- God’s Bits of Wood and Xala are definitely the most beginner friendly works from his collection and are pretty easy to find second hand. If you enjoy Western authors and artists like Albert Camus, Emile Zola, or Zora Neale Hurston you’ll definitely appreciate his writing. His work is also influenced by socialist realism, the Harlem renaissance, and Senegalese oral tradition. Compared to other famous west african writers (like Chinua Achebe, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o) Sembene works a lot of satire, irony, and humor into his writings, and his work really strives towards describing African joy, hardship, and community.
He’s such a cool artist and deserves to be more commonly known in the West, especially in Anglophone and Francophone cultures :)
Is your commercial district dead? are apartments too expensive? try a Vacancy tax, it forces those nasty developers to lower rents with one simple trick. Making it so they get fairly taxed for the space they use in our cities! Developers and landlords hate this one simple way to make small businesses and apartments affordable
Basically you tax apartments and rental spaces, it can be as low as 1% of the rent price annually as long as they are vacant and it forces developers to lower rents or else they take losses, this has been shown to work in Vancouver where it managed to cause over a 3rd of empty units to become occupied within 3 years
Fuck it, this can be
the urban design concepts of the day
Does S.F. mean “single family” or “San Francisco”?
