The Senegalese actuality films presented at here were found in 2017 in Dakar in the abandoned building of the former Ministry of Information and are part of a more complex collection of audiovisual archives, those of the Ministère de la Culture et du Patrimoine historique – Direction du Cinéma, which preserves the newsreels of the first information service in independent Senegal in the 1960s, conceived of and organised by President Léopold Senghor.
The archive’s importance is both historical – it contains images representing the visual archaeology of independent Senegal – and cinematic. In fact, people who shaped the history of Senegalese, African and world cinema either worked at the Bureau Cinema or its technical equipment. The first director was Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, pioneer of sub-Saharan cinema and executive director of many of Ousmane Sembène’s films. The first cameraman was Georges Caristan, who worked with Sembène and Ababacar Samb-Makharam. Makharam also worked on actuality films and later became the first Secretary General of the Fédération panafricaine des cinéastes (FEPACI).
The Bureau Cinema can be considered as the only place in independent Senegal where the dream of making film could become a reality. Saving these actuality films means saving a piece of African cinema.
These four documents make their first trip outside the country and show us significant moments in the recent history of Senegal. In the first one, directed by Vieyra, Dakar is preparing to host an event as postcolonial Africa’s cultural capital, the first Festival mondial des arts nègres. At the event a global audience discovered Africa through the seven arts, and African culture, under the impetus of “negritude”, had the starring role.
On the centenary of his birth, we are celebrating Sembène with two newsreels about the director from Ziguinchor and his two films Xala (1974) and Ceddo (1977). All made more poignant by the fact that Ceddo was censored shortly afterwards and Sembène disappeared from Senegalese actuality films until the end of President Senghor’s last term.

Tiziana Manfredi and Marco Lena