Cine wanderer: post-colonial Dakar

In writing and reading about walking in cities, time and time again I find myself stumbling upon a critical obliviousness to the reality that the often-romanticised figure of the flâneur is a racialised and gendered construct. For the non-bourgeois class who are not male or white, the prospect of urban wandering is fraught with violence and anxiety. Made in the final years of his life, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s free-wheeling Le Franc (1994) beautifully complicates the myth of the flâneur, probing the complexities of journeying through metropolitan spaces as a post-colonial subject.

Shot as part of a planned trilogy on the shocking 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc – a currency thrust upon African French colonies, which remained in use long after decolonisation – the vibrant comedy featurette opens in the style of a city symphony film. Sounds of morning prayers, grains being shifted through sieves and jazzy tunes from a street saxophonist conjure up an aural tapestry of Senegal’s capital city, Dakar.

Yet, as the scholar Vlad Dima astutely notes in his book on sonic spaces in Mambéty’s films, this use of diegetic and non-diegetic sounds creates an “acousmatic panopticon”, where the film’s soundscape approximates the intricate web of cultural and colonial influences that envelop Senegal. Throughout Le Franc, dialogue in the native language Wolof freely mingles with snippets of songs sung in French and Western pop culture references. Most importantly, booming over Dakar is a recurring radio news report covering both the cursed devaluation and the lottery: a winning ticket promises to pluck ordinary citizens out of economic misery.

In a film supremely guided by its sound mix, it is fitting that Marigo (Dieye Ma Dieye), the lovable protagonist, is a musician whose otherworldly daydreams fantastically fuse the regal and the everyday. A particularly striking sequence has Marigo in a classic get-up of white ruffle shirt and long black coat as he plays his congoma – a relative of the mbira, or thumb piano – while treading across a dusty landfill piled high with plastic bags. In reality, however, the penniless dreamer is behind on his rent and his beloved instrument has been confiscated by his landlord. After chancing upon a dropped banknote, Marigo buys a lottery ticket, which wins him the jackpot. He glues the ticket to the door of his shanty, then embarks on the comical ordeal of carrying the heavy object through Dakar to collect his life-altering prize.

When I first saw Le Franc in a university class, what struck me most was the similarity between the architecture of Dakar and that of my hometown of Hanoi in Vietnam. This peculiar recognition was bittersweet. I had never been to Senegal and yet, due to a shared history of French colonisation, I felt a strange intimacy towards the buildings and streets of Dakar.

The first pang of familiarity occurred near the beginning when the film whizzes through Dakar railway station, its façade of imposing columns, high ceilings and French windows recalling those of the station in Hanoi – both were designed by French architects, and erected a mere ten years apart. Such grandeur serves as a painful reminder of how, under colonisation, the construction of railroads was a physical manifestation of French imperial power and exploitation, their existence symbolising the empire’s ‘taming’ of its colonies’ ‘barbarism’.

Le Franc tacitly acknowledges the colonial legacy of the railway with a subtle sound cue: the image of a train coming into the station is juxtaposed with the voice of a radio broadcaster condemning the devaluation of the CFA franc as an “international swindle”. Decades after independence, Senegal was still being cheated out of its economic autonomy.

The Marché Kermel, a central market and a colonial artefact, also gets a subversive twist under Mambéty’s gaze. Once a simple storage space for agricultural products, it was renovated in the early 1900s as a grand edifice. In addition to the neo-Moorish influences and a horseshoe-shaped entrance arc styled after North African religious architecture, the building is also supported by iron grids reminiscent of Les Halles in Paris.

In the aftermath of a devastating fire in 1993, what remained of the Kermel made for a striking wasteland, laid squarely in the middle of a bustling Dakar. The ruins are featured prominently in Le Franc; in one particularly poignant shot, its burned-out rubble foregrounds the sky-high modern headquarters of the BCEAO (Central Bank of West African States). The foundation of post-colonial commerce is intricately bound with the wreckage of imperial exploitation.

Flanked by architectural vestiges of colonisation and financial marginalisation, Marigo only fully experiences the joy of a city wanderer when he destabilises or breaks free from the city’s colonial trappings. An enchanting sequence has him lying atop a city bus with the treasured door in his embrace; here, his body appears to soar above Dakar with an irrepressible vivacity.

The film’s final scene takes place at the city’s coastal edge, where Marigo frantically tries to soak the door in the ocean water to unstick the golden lottery ticket. When the deed is finally accomplished, his happiness is undercut by shots of a poster depicting Yaadikoone Ndiaye, a famous Senegalese bandit with the charitable principles of Robin Hood. Worshipped by Marigo, and formerly used to cover the lottery ticket, the poster is now floating out to sea, hinting at the possible moral sacrifices that come with the acquisition of wealth. It is this ironic uncertainty about economic prosperity under neocolonial conditions as well as a reimagination of the flâneur figure that makes Le Franc such an enriching work – one that stands head and shoulders above Mambéty’s more famous Touki bouki (1973).