Senegalese filmmaker Moe Sow hadn’t heard of Thierno Souleymane Baal — the religious leader and revolutionary historical figure at the center of his latest docu-fiction — 1776! Thierno Souleymane Baal— until he attended a lecture about Baal’s life. The lecture, which took place at the University of Dakar, was not only eye-opening for Sow, it fought strongly against the lopsided history lessons he was taught as a child, lessons that intertwined and situated the beginning of Senegal’s documented history with the arrival of French colonialism.
Many facets of Baal’s life stood out to Sow. The Islamic scholar and visionary led the Fouta Revolution, a resistance against colonialism around the same time as the American Revolution. But the history of the man, who wasn’t hungry for power despite his pivotal role in bringing about change, is not well known. This is what Sow aims to correct with 1776! The film, filled with heart and compelling acting from Oris Erhuero, Mentor Bâ and others, captures the angst and restlessness of a generation hungry for change. Combining real-life anecdotes with fast-paced scenes that amp up excitement, Sow embarks on an ambitious mission to make history, specifically African history, deliciously interesting.
“I was amazed by the person that I was told about. He was a scholar who built a country from the inside,” Sow says. “He built a proper democratic state and if you read the constitution that he wrote, it is pretty much the same thing with today’s constitution.”
Sow, who is an NYU-trained filmmaker, has since found himself digging into largely unacknowledged African history in a bid to understand the continent’s contentious past and make sense of where it is going. “What I'm trying to do is re-establish our historical proof,” Sow says. “To know where we come from and that we have a solid history with democracy and country-building.”
Reframing history
Discovering an under-discussed part of one’s history is one thing, translating that into a story and then presenting it as a film is another, if herculean task. With a slim budget of £100,000 ($130,000), Sow was faced with the challenge of building a set that closely mirrors the times Baal lived in. This challenge faced roadblocks from landmark sites that had been reconstructed, villages that no longer existed and thus couldn’t be filmed at, and artifacts that may have been lost to history or too expensive to replicate.
“So what we did was bring in a green screen, but the problem with that is that African cinema is not well-funded at all, so we could only go to the limits of our funding,” Sow says. “So we tried to be creative so we could bring the film to people.”
Sow says that despite budget constraints, the film managed to hit all its right marks and the intention behind the work shone through after it received praise from Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko, who attended a screening of the film and promised to extend support towards Sow’s future projects.
Sow says making the film in the docu-fiction style — introducing high-energy fight scenes and dramatizing history — was so that it could appeal to younger audiences.
“People my age or older know about this because they read books that are edited by Africans trying to establish historical proof,” he says. “But the problem is that now we are faced with a generation that doesn't read very much, but you have to bring the stories and put them in the platforms they understand.”
“If you take, now a young Ghanaian and try to make them watch this story in documentary style, he might not have the attention span. So we try to reconcile a little bit of the fiction and we put the documentary part to establish the historical value and historical truth so that they can consume it much easier.”
Photo courtesy of Moe Sow.
Moe Sow says making ‘1776! Thierno Souleymane Baal’ in docu-fiction, was to appeal to younger audiences.
The road ahead
Sow names Senegalese directors Ousamane Sembené and Djibril Diop Mambéty as primary sources of inspiration, saying that he is working to revitalize the strong, innovative language that defined his country’s cinema.
For Sow, the future involves finding and telling many more forgotten African stories, while examining institutional rot and socio-economic nuances through film, just as his predecessors did. “As a French colony, we studied the French Revolution and I can tell you more about that than about Senegal,” Sow muses. “We didn't even know that we had revolutions. We didn't even know that we had people that wrote constitutions. We never knew that we had people at that level that we can look up to today and be proud of ourselves. That's why today, my biggest fight is to establish the African narrative.”
The vision, as Sow puts it, is to move beyond Senegal, unearth forgotten histories from across West Africa, and contest the skewered notion that Africa existed without systems, democracy, customs or fully realized cultures until the colonialists set foot on the continent. The goal, as with his latest work, is to revive forgotten histories many never knew existed in the first place.