I went with Ram and Samba to Ousmane Sembène’s Camp de Thiaroye. I first met Samba at his table on 40th Street and 7th Avenue where he sells hats and scarves, the hot pink NY baseball hats heavy with a clear glittering crust of rhinestone. Women from Texas, Istanbul, France, Argentina, they all love Samba and his hats. He sells $2,000 of merchandise every week and he takes home $30 a day. His employer is an elderly Senegalese woman known to the vendors as La Mamie. Recently, the African sellers have been undercut by the Latino vendors, who have found a way to sell the $10 hats for $5. Samba doesn’t know how. He says that most people leave the job after a few weeks and once he gets his work permit he’ll leave, too. He’s making plans with the Ghanaian security guard at Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Resort, the multi-story restaurant in front of which Samba sets up his table. The two stand face-to-face while they work, with a flow of international tourists streaming between them on the sidewalk. He packs up every night at around 1 AM and heads two blocks north to the 24-story shelter in Times Square where he lives.
Samba arrived after the movie had already begun, calling me from outside the theater. I whispered the premise to him as I showed him back. The film is novelistic, beginning with short and rich vignettes of African infantrymen known as tirailleurs in a transit camp after World War II, awaiting payment before continuing back to their cities and villages. There are scenes of soldiers buying dresses from the camp tailor for their wives (“One big and one small — she’s lost so much weight worrying about me and she’s about to gain it all back!”); one soldier teaching another to ride a bike in exchange for kola nuts; the arrest and assault of an African commanding officer when he tries to go to a segregated French bar near the camp.
The characters of these vignettes slowly coalesce into a clear and urgent struggle when they learn that the French army will exchange their French francs from the war at half the standard rate, effectively stealing 50% of their promised wages. When the tirailleurs revolt, the French army feigns concession, flees the camp, and then sends back tanks in the dark of night, massacring tirailleurs in the hundreds.
After the film, we stood outside the theater to talk for a while. Sembène styles the transit camp as a concentration camp, with barbed wire fences and lookouts on wooden towers. When the soldiers exchange their American-issued uniforms, they toss their combat boots in a big mismatched pile.
Samba said, “That’s a true story. The only thing they got wrong was the grave.”
The morning after the massacre, survivors drop the dead bodies of their fallen compatriots into a long mass trench.
“It’s not like that. The graves are individual.”
Camp de Thiaroye is just outside of Dakar, where Samba grew up. “Each person has his own grave. The grandfather of my mother. His full name is written on his grave. It’s the same as my name. It’s there on his grave.” He made a motion with his hands towards the square of cement before him to indicate a plot of land where his great grandfather lay.
SAMBA MBOW the elder was a Senegalese tirailleur who fought for France in World War II. He survived the war and the Nazis and the concentration camps and he was killed by the French in the Thiaroye massacre. His name is on a gravestone at the cemetery.
Outside Lincoln Center, his great grandson wore a baseball cap with a black jaguar stitched into the front, a golden watch, skinny blue jeans, and a short brown boubou with a multicolor shape like a cathedral across his chest.
As we walked down Broadway, Samba cried, smiling weakly, saying, “That’s why I don’t like the French.”
It was his first time in a movie theater.