L’Almamy Samori Touré – An Unmade Film by Ousmane Sembène, decomposed, disarranged and reproduced by Chimurenga
As part of the 14th edition of Partcours, RAW Material Company is pleased to invite you to the launch of a research installation titled L’Almamy Samori Touré – An Unmade Film by Ousmane Sembène, decomposed, disarranged and reproduced by Chimurenga, on Monday, December 8, 2025, at 5:00 p.m. at RAW Material Company, Zone B, Villa 2A.
This research installation is part of a long-term inquiry by Chimurenga, a pan African research and publishing collective based in Cape Town, into the political, artistic and epistemological implications of Ousmane Sembène’s unrealised film on Samori Touré, a major historical figure of anti-colonial resistance whose story remains deeply rooted in collective memory throughout West Africa.
Chimurenga reads Sembène’s film project on Samori Touré as a milestone in Pan African thought and practice, and a unique example of rewriting the history of Africa’s resistance to colonisation; an attempt at counter-cartographic and historiographic narration that unsettles the chronological and territorial frames established by the 1884-85 Berlin Conference.
Even though the project could not be completed during Sembene’s lifetime, it provides an important platform to investigate questions such as the forms required to tell African history, especially our histories of resistance; the possibility to reproduce territory through storytelling, territories erased by colonialism; and, crucially, the means required for collective self-actualisation by African peoples.
Indeed, Sembène’s film project is part of what Chimurenga calls “The Archive of the Unfinished”: projects that invite us to study “process” more closely because “product” never or hasn’t yet arrived; projects that operate as liberated zones, where an imagination of another world, a decolonised world, can be rehearsed and practiced.
Fittingly, Chimurenga’s research takes the form of a roving and evolving installation across the geography Sembène imagined for his film, the old Samorian empire.
Following a presentation in Conakry during August 2025, on the aesthetic dimensions of Guinea’s Socialist Cultural Revolution, this gathering at RAW Material Company (Act II) brings together writers, artists and historians, to produce new knowledge on Sembene’s historic project. More broadly, the Dakar iteration of Chimurenga’s research, which takes the form of a bibliographic installation and live broadcasting studio, is a collective reflection on the production of an African historiography through creative practice, including film, music, theatre, visual arts, oral and written literatures, and more.
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Acknowledgements /
/ Throughout the research process, RAW Material Company and Chimurenga were supported by generous contributors, without whom the Dakar stage would not have been possible. We would like to name them here and express our sincere thanks: Maimouna Diouf (DCI), Ndiaga THIOMBANE - Head of the Film and Audiovisual Heritage Office at the Film Department of the Ministry of Culture, Crafts, and Tourism (DCI), Oumy Diakhaté (Sorano), Nafissatou Bakhoum (IFAN), Yves Eric Elouga (CODESRIA), Madame Hélène Diedhiou (Fondation Senghor), Oumou Sy, Aboubacar Demba Cissokho, Professeur Ibrahima Wane.
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image 1 :Poster (or related illustration) for Sembène Ousmane’s unfinished film project L’Almamy Samori Touré. Developed by his production company FILMI DOOMIREW, this project represents a major milestone in Sembène’s reflections on African history and resistance. © Ousmane Sembène Estate / Sembène Family.
image 2 : Portrait of L’Almamy Samori Touré on the cover of Issue 1 of the journal Afrique Histoire, January–February–March 1981. See the article by Sékéné Mody Cissoko, “A Stunning Victory of Almamy Samory: The 1885 Check to the Colonial Occupation of the Sudan,” pp. 17–21. © Afrique Histoire.