Senegalese writer and film director, a modern griot, storyteller and chronicler, best-known for his historical-political works with strong social comment, Sembène Ousmane (1923 – 2007) often turned his short stories and novels into films. Considered one of the founders of the African realist tradition, Sembène's image of sub-Saharan Africa was more self-critical, less romanticized than Léopold Sédar Senghor's, who more or less glorified the past.

Months later, the slave-hunters returned to the village; they captured Iome but let her go again. She was worth nothing, because of the blemishes on her body.

The news spread for leagues around. People came from remotest villages to consult the grandmother. And over the years and the centuries a diversity of scars appeared on the bodies of our ancestors.

And this is how our ancestors came to have tribal scars. They refused to be slaves.

"Tribal Scars" (or "The Voltaïque")

In an unspecified past, the Ceddo try to preserve their traditional culture against the onslaught of Islam, Christianity, and the slave trade. When King Demba War sides with the Muslims, the Ceddo kidnap his daughter, the beautiful, defiant Princess Dior Yacine, to protest their forced conversion to Islam.

Banned in Senegal on an absurd technicality, Ceddo, Sembène's most ambitious film, uses the story of the princess's kidnapping to examine the confrontation between opposing new cultural forces, as the Ceddo cling desperately to their customs and their religion. Ceddo ranges far and wide to include philosophy, fantasy, militant politics, and a couple of electrifying leaps across the centuries to evoke the whole of the African experience.