Rise of a Nation: An Exploration of Vieyra’s vision for Senegal Through Une nation est née

Abstract

Paulin Soumanou Vieyra's vision for African cinema was born out of the lack of proper representation for Africans in Western cinema. Thus, his films explore narratives of Africans on the big screen, those whose roles, as Vieyra himself writes in Le cinéma au Sénégal (1983), had previously been relegated to that of "Y a bon Banania," or that of the educated and reformed savage (52). One of his films that showcases the plurality and hybridity of Africans is Une nation est née (1961). The film, created on the backdrop of the Senegalese Independence Day celebration, is a journey through the forgotten history of the peoples of the newly formed nation, from precolonial times to the fight for independence. This film relies on the novel L'Aventure Ambiguë, by Cheikh Hamidou Kane, to structure and tell its story, but it also goes beyond Kane's work to envision the future of Senegal, in order to create a new history of Senegal and work to construct a national identity.