Senegalese Wrestling as “national sport” and other modern myths in Lamb

Abstract

The short documentary film Lamb (1963), directed by Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987), depicts Senegalese wrestling as a collective catharsis, a mobilizer of emotions whose regulatory function is the social cohesion of the young African nation. Unprecedentedly, the film presented Senegalese wrestling as a "national sport," a spectacle of the African tradition and modernity. Based on Vieyra's archives and the restored version of the film Lamb (2014), this article discusses Senegalese wrestling as a "national sport" in the context of African nationalism, highlighting the elements that represent wrestling as a genuine expression of the Black African civilization. However, wrestling had been transformed in Dakar during French colonialism. The film Lamb registers an expression of Senegal's multiethnic popular culture through the lenses of an African public intellectual who was one of the founders of postcolonial African cinematographic aesthetics. The sequence of Lamb reveals the "myth of transparency" (Wollen, 1969), that is, the idea that a film communicates a rich signification, an accessible truth, which spectators can immediately seize. Lamb is not merely a documentary about Senegalese wrestling. Its diegesis contains many temporal, spatial, and sound elements that remit to a mythical imaginary and a postcolonial political ideology. If Senegalese wrestling turned into a national sport (Wane, 2012), Lamb conceivably is a "document/monument" because it records a historical phase of such metamorphosis in the urban environment.