‘There are rhetorical games, theatrical turnabouts, negotiations and oaths, declarations and rights of response: speech is always binding. [...] In this way, Sembene’s film becomes an extraordinary document on the African body (today’s actors and yesterday’s heroes), upstanding in its language (here, Wolof), as though the voice, accent and intonation, the material of the language and the content of the speeches, were solid blocks of meaning in which every word, for the one who bears it, is the last word’. (Serge Daney, ‘Ceddo,’ 1979)

Daney’s essay on Ousmane Sembène’s Ceddo fundamentally reorients its interpretation away from Western expectations of ‘dancing and singing cinema of liberation’. Instead, Daney spotlights the film’s radical originality in its adherence to oral tradition and storytelling, emphasising its ‘literal (and not metaphorical), discontinuous (not homogenous) and verbal (rather than musical)’ nature. Central to his analysis is the theme of the loss of the right to speak – a dispossession of speech as a fundamental right and duty, caused by the intrusion of written religious texts which transform binding African speech into perceived ‘babble’. For Daney, Ceddo is a polemic against the ‘reign of ideology’ and a tragic exploration of a people condemned to sing their condition after losing their voice.