Journal of African Cultural Studies

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Returning home: Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyènes

Olivia Gabor-Peirce

To cite this article: Olivia Gabor-Peirce (2011) Returning home: Djibril Diop Mambety's Hyènes ,
Journal of African Cultural Studies, 23:2, 189-203, DOI: 10.1080/13696815.2011.638468

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2011.638468

Published online: 09 Mar 2012.

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Journal of African Cultural Studies
Vol. 23, No. 2, December 2011, 189 –203

Returning home: Djibril Diop Mambety’s Hyènes

Olivia Gabor-Peirce∗

Department of Foreign Languages, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA

This paper investigates how African filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety transforms the notable
Swiss playwright and novelist Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play Der Besuch der alten Dame (The
Visit) into a portrait of the universality of moral corruption in modernity. The title of his film
is Hyènes.
Keywords: African film; Senegal; modernity

Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety was never satisfied within the borders of his world
and sought to reach beyond them and cross the boundaries of present-day Senegal.
Mambety’s film Hyènes (1992), an adaptation of Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s
play Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit) (1956), is a powerful portrait of the universality
of moral corruption. Hyènes is a film imbedded deeply in the cultural and the sociopolitical
aspects of Africa, a ‘cinematic tapestry of Senegalese life in all its post-independence complex-
ities and contradictions, championing the dispossessed and marginalized elements of society’
(Petty 2003). Yet by the same token, it is a film of universal proportions: Hyènes exposes the
marginalized, corrupt individual and the bleakness of the modern world.1 We read Mambety’s
words in Questioning African Cinema:
My goal was to make a continental film, one that crosses boundaries. To make Hyènes even more
continental, we borrowed elephants from the Masai of Kenya, hyenas from Uganda, and people
from Senegal. And to make it global, we borrowed somebody from Japan, and carnival scenes
from the annual Carnival of Humanity of the French Communist Party in Paris. All of these are
intended to open the horizons, to make the film universal (Ukadike 2002, 124).
This paper argues that, through his film Hyènes, Mambety confronts the ideology of moder-
nity2 and allows its illusory permanence to break down in our presence. Mambety achieves this
stylistically and formally through the Dürrenmattian concept of the grotesque, through unsettling
juxtapositions and editing of the text. In a manner similar to Dürrenmatt in Der Besuch,
Mambety exposes unyielding, rigidified values and ideologies – in the urban subculture as
well as on a universal level3 – and deconstructs them, both thematically and formally.
Simona Cella, in ‘Rhythm, Image and Dream’, explains:
Diop Mambety, like a Cubist painter, decomposes the linear trend of the story and spatial and tem-
poral categories through an articulated and rhythmic composition of symbolic and dream-like
images and a free use of alternating cutting, collision and elliptical cutting. The narrative time is
de-structed [. . .], use of jump cuts and symbolic inserts (the images of the sea and birds flying in
the sky, the close-ups of the sacrifice [. . .] and oneiric inserts [. . .]) (1998, 35–6).
Mambety’s goal in the making of Hyènes is to create a continental film that reveals the
ideology of modernity in its ugliest form and exposes its insufficiencies. He does so by cross-
ing boundaries of continents, cultures, and reality. This paper contends that Hyènes begins

∗
Email: olivia.gabor-peirce@wmich.edu

ISSN 1369-6815 print/ISSN 1469-9346 online

# 2011 Journal of African Cultural Studies
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13696815.2011.638468
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190 O. Gabor-Peirce

‘being’ at the moment in which it goes beyond the boundaries of its world and becomes a
‘universal’ film.4 Through the act of repetition, Mambety’s film becomes a place of cultural
negotiation between two different consciousnesses – between Western Europe of the 1950s
and Colobane, Africa, in the 1990s – and between two genres, literature and film. In its
content and style, it becomes a threshold, a transition between time and location.
Mambety repeatedly emphasizes the universality of his message. Referring to the Asian char-
acter in his film, Mambety states:
The point is not that she is Asian. The point is that everyone in Colobane – everyone everywhere –
lives within a system of power that embraces the West, Africa, and the land of the rising sun. There is
a scene where this woman comes in and reads: she reads of the vanity of life, the vanity of vengeance
– that is totally universal (Ukadike 2002, 126).
Cella gives a precise portrayal of the film’s universality as it relates to Der Besuch:
Hyènes accomplishes the symbiosis between cultures [. . .]: Greek tragedy, a play by a Swiss-German
author, the Western and traditional Senegalese culture, are brought together in a profoundly modern
film. Diop makes maximum use of the polyphonic capacity of the cinema, contaminates narrative
genres, linguistic registers and cultures to produce a true hypertext of ethnographic modernity
(1998, 39 –40).
Mambety has no difficulty celebrating the intertextuality of his work and often emphasizes the
influence of Dürrenmatt’s work on him.5 He urges the spectators to enter into his message
yet allows them freedom to accept or reject what they experience. He explains: ‘When a
story ends [. . .] it creates dreams. It has energy and direction. [. . .] I do the audience justice:
they have the freedom to enter into my stories. They are free to take their own path’
(Ukadike 2002, 124). Mambety continues:
Earlier I focused on the notion of freedom, which includes the freedom not to know. That implies
confidence in your ability to construct images from the bottom of your heart. When artists converge
on these images, there is no longer room for ethnic peculiarities; there is only room for talent. [. . .] A
film is a kind of a meeting; there is giving and receiving. Now that I have made it, Hyènes belongs as
much to the viewer as to me. You must have the freedom and confidence to understand and critique
what you see (Ukadike 2002, 124).

Djibril Diop Mambety

Djibril Diop Mambety believed that ‘life is always in three stages: small, big, old. Life is a drama
and a drama is always in three acts: prologue, story, epilogue. I see myself in between the small
and big stages of life’s trilogy’ (Givanni 1995, 31).6 Mambety’s comments, as Sandra Grayson
argues in ‘Djibril Diop Mambety: A Retrospective’ (2001), offer a context within which to
locate his films, for he conceived of most of his films as trilogies. Mambety believed that the
role of the filmmaker was that of a griot, ‘a messenger of one’s time, a visionary and the
creator of the future’ (Givanni 1995, 31). Mambety was born in 1945 in the small town of Colo-
bane, Senegal. He studied theater in Senegal and worked as an actor at the Daniel Sorano
National Theater. In the late 1960s, he began making his own films. Mambety had not
studied in any film school in Africa, nor had he studied in European film schools, as do the
majority of African filmmakers today, prior to beginning his movie career. At a very early
age in Colobane he showed a great love for cinema. He explains this to June Givanni in an inter-
view for Sight and Sound:
I grew up in an area called Colobane where there was an open-air cinema called the ABC. We were
very young, eight years old, and not allowed out at night because the area was dangerous. But in spite
of this we escaped and went to the cinema. We had no money to buy a ticket so we listened to the
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 191

films from outside. They were mainly Westerns and Hindu films, and my favorites were the Westerns
(Givanni 1995, 30).
It is in the cinema where Mambety’s free spirit came to life and where he discovered his love for
international films. Ukadike writes: ‘Mambety departs from the linear and didactic patterns of
African filmmakers like Ousmane Sembene and Souleymane Cissé in order to pursue his artistic
freedom. This refusal to make concessions, even to the audience, enables Mambety to mature
into a director of international stature’ (Ukadike 1998, 141).
Mambety’s experimental style is unique. First, his cinema blends the narrative features of
cinema from the West with those of the oral tales of traditional African culture. It therefore
integrates cultural signs and practices from both cultures. The outcome is something very fam-
iliar, yet something completely new. Furthermore, as Sada Niang argues in Djibril Diop
Mambety: un cinéaste à contre-courant, Mambety exposes the ‘diversity of real life’ (2002,
49) in his films and breaks away from the familiar approach of African filmmakers of the
late 1960s and early 1970s that focused on ‘essentialist nationalist discourse’ (Petty 2003,
154). This diversity of real life, rich in animal and nature imagery, uncovers the uncanny
and the mysterious and exposes the paradoxical coexistence of two realities of the individual.
Additionally, the filmmaker states about himself in an interview at the Southern African Film
Festival in 1993 that he was a ‘maker of dreams’ who recognized the heart of his work to be
the marginalized individual whose identity must be reclaimed in the midst of displacement of
value and meaning, whether this is in Africa or the West. The main point is to present the
world in all its inconsistencies and insufficiencies. Mambety concludes his interview with
June Givanni in Sight and Sound with these words: ‘It is important to take seriously one’s
responsibility with the moving image, and to deal with all these historical and colonial handi-
caps’ (Givanni 1995, 31).
Mambety’s production began in the 1960s with the short Contras City (1968), the first
African comedy. Badou Boy (1970) is a critical, humorous work on the city of Dakar,
Senegal. Touki Bouki (1973) is his first full-length film, his masterpiece, ‘a tour de force of nar-
rative and technical sophistication’ (Ukadike 1998, 138) with the subtitle ‘The Hyena’s
Journey’. Another significant work is Le Franc (1994), a film about the life of Marigo, a poor
Senegalese musician who tries to change his life by playing the lottery. Social issues are also
the central theme of La Petite Vendeuse de Soleil (1998), which depicts the life of a small han-
dicapped girl who tries to conquer the macho world of street newspaper vendors.
Mambety rejects the realism preferred by most African filmmakers and shies away from the
polemics of the nationalistic/post-colonial search for the new African. His films are notable for
their allegorically rich style that leaves the interpretation to the viewer. Mambety always insists
on non-conventional camera movements and a non-linear narrative. Fragments of ideas or mess-
ages connect to generate the meaning of the story. In spite of the fact that Mambety completed
only a few short films and two full-length features, the quality of his small body of work has
given him celebrated status among African filmmakers and the international film community.
His short and full-length films deal with the social and cultural issues of Africa.7

The ‘grotesque’ in literature

A definition of the ‘grotesque’ will help support and articulate its implementation and necessity
in both Der Besuch and Hyènes. The grotesque, according to Wolfgang Kayser (1957),8 brings
about a breakdown in the tenets and the ideologies we construct in life in order to find our secur-
ity in the world. The essential nature of the grotesque is to trigger the insecurity of man in a
world only superficially ordered and understood, a world in which the irrational and frightful
may, at any moment, break through the facade of convention and complacency to reveal
192 O. Gabor-Peirce

fundamental and frightening truths. The grotesque is in many ways uncanny, unfamiliar, illogi-
cal, and strange (‘fremd’) – yet strangely familiar.9 Kayser further writes that ‘total alienation
and disintegration into chaos is a recurrent motif in the history of the grotesque’ (1963, 125).
Grotesque contrasts, according to Kayser, include the mixing up of separate conceptual
spheres, loss of identity, and the breakdown of historical chronology (Grimm 1962, 72– 83).
Two realities coexist simultaneously within the grotesque: the familiar and the unfamiliar or
uncanny. The grotesque draws the familiar, our present reality that we assume to understand,
into the unfamiliar and the unknown. It emphasizes inner contradictions, stratified structures
and elusive contents. The grotesque is a paradox: the seemingly logical is illogical, where some-
thing looks reasonable but is not. It is a contradictory statement that may nonetheless be true, an
assertion that is essentially self-contradictory, though based on a valid deduction from accepta-
ble premises. According to Kayser (1964), the ‘genuine grotesque’ is a work of art giving full
expression to a grotesque view of the world with elements of fear, anxiety, and black humor.
Our familiar and safe world is suddenly shattered. This paper offers a critical reading of
Hyènes as it relates to Der Besuch and argues that Mambety’s film Hyènes breaks down the illu-
sion of permanence in the modern world through the trope of the ‘grotesque’.

Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s notion of the ‘grotesque’ and Der Besuch

Friedrich Dürrenmatt calls himself a ‘writer in rebellion against ideologies [. . .] of all types’
(1996b, 122).10 Through the use of the grotesque, he exposes rigid traditions and ideologies.
Justice and freedom, evasion of responsibility, guilt by passivity, greed, and political decay
are all prominent aspects of Dürrenmatt’s dramaturgy. On the stage Dürrenmatt replicates
chaos and godlessness, the dominant characteristics of the world. His concept of history as a
series of senseless catastrophes expresses itself in a form of grotesque comedy that is a game,
the rules of which have meaning only on the stage.
In any discussion of Dürrenmatt, the word ‘grotesque’ is inevitable. Dürrenmatt has become
the foremost practitioner and theorist of the grotesque drama in German literature today. The
grotesque, in Dürrenmatt’s works, creates a distance, so that the spectator may grasp the
reality represented on the stage. Reinhold Grimm in Der Unbequeme Dürrenmatt writes:
‘How does the shaping of the grotesque, according to [Wolfgang Kayser], express itself? In
the mixing up of separate conceptual spheres [. . .], in the removing of the static, the loss of iden-
tity, the distortion of the natural proportions [. . .] the breakdown of historical chronology’ (1962,
72).11 In this work, Grimm proved, point by point, that all the typically grotesque phenomena
listed by Kayser are found in Dürrenmatt. In real life, the world, according to Dürrenmatt, is
a labyrinth-like structure that cannot be comprehended as an objective totality but only as gro-
tesquely created fragments of one. He writes in the essay ‘Dramaturgie des Labyrinths’ in Labyr-
inth (1981):
By portraying as a labyrinth the world in which I see myself placed, I try to gain some distance from
it, to step back from it, to look it in the eye like a trainer does a wild animal. I confront the world that I
experience with a counter world that I think up myself (Dürrenmatt 1981, 77).
In 1956, Dürrenmatt gained international recognition with his drama Der Besuch der alten
Dame. The play is a perfect representative of the grotesque and of the tragicomedy, even sub-
titled ‘A Tragic Comedy’. Commenting on his play Der Besuch in ‘Theaterprobleme’, Dürren-
matt states his own definition of the grotesque: ‘The grotesque is only a physical expression, a
physical paradox, the form of an un-form, the face of a faceless world, and, just as our thinking
does not seem to survive without the term paradox, neither can art’ (1996a, 122). Der Besuch is
not a soul-searching morality play, but a grotesque fable whose icy laughter and bizarre fantas-
tical characters (a half-artificial old woman, or a pair of blind eunuchs, for instance) reflect its
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 193

author’s universal message: the world has become corrupt. Like the pet black panther that mys-
teriously stalks the play’s progress, its characters lie in wait, then move in for the kill. That
horror remains fresh because the citizens of Der Besuch are the articulate champions of
justice of today who congratulate themselves on their civic virtues even as they take a vote to
rationalize murder. Dürrenmatt expresses his veiled criticism in the ‘Anmerkung’ to the play:
‘Der Besuch is a story that occurs somewhere in central Europe in a small town, written by
someone who doesn’t completely distance himself from these people and he isn’t so sure if
he would act differently’ (1957, 101).12
The small European (Swiss)13 town where the action takes place, Güllen, is a Swiss German
dialect word for liquid manure, ‘Gülle’. Güllen has decayed to the point of bankruptcy. The last
hope is the visit of Claire (Klara) Zachanassian, who, as a multi-millionaire, returns to her home-
town to implement justice. In Claire’s youth, Alfred Ill, her lover, abandoned her when she
became pregnant, and slandered her name. After living the life of a prostitute and experiencing
a car accident and a plane crash, she eventually married an oil tycoon. Upon his death, she con-
tinued to marry one rich man after another until she had amassed tremendous wealth. Now Claire
returns to Güllen as the widow of the oil magnate Zachanassian for revenge. Her entourage
includes the two eunuchs, the butler, a black panther, and an empty casket. She coldly offers
the town one ‘Milliarde’ (billion) if they kill Ill, who over the years had become one of
Güllen’s most popular citizens. The tragic comedy clearly portrays how Ill is slowly betrayed
and how justice can be bought.
Claire Zachanassian has been characterized by critics as an allegorical figure representing
absolute justice, pure revenge, or devastating wealth in a materialistic society. The secondary
characters are mostly stereotypes and referred to primarily by their profession or by a function
they perform. Claire is highly exaggerated, an amalgam of prostheses – having lost a leg in an
auto accident and a hand in an air crash. Her remarks are cold, like much of her body. This tech-
nique of exaggeration on the stage contributes to Claire’s total effect on the level of the gro-
tesque. To make a heartbreaking romance out of Der Besuch is to deny some of the most
essential features of Claire: her artificial appearance, her inhuman and exaggerated desire for
revenge, and her general hatred for the ‘moral’ society that drove her out of Güllen. Rather
than a human being, she is an aberration on the stage. Her whole entourage is a grim
comedy, far removed from human reality but tightly woven into the theatrical reality of the
piece, which, as Dürrenmatt insists, must not be played with heavy-handed realism, for the
comedic values must be heightened in order to make the final ‘tragic’ ending the more powerful.

Film vs play
At this point in the analysis, a question inevitably arises: how does a member of the audience
receive the performance as more than mere text? How can the audience be induced to
embrace the play with every performance as not only the author’s and characters’ experience,
but also as their own? Drama is poetry as action on the stage and is able to govern the spectator’s
response in ways that a written text cannot do alone, though one cannot and would not assume
that every performance will produce a similar response in the viewer. Film, on the other hand,
stands complete and unalterable in its final form, each performance remains the same. Nonethe-
less, with both film and theater, one must address the problem of how to maintain the spectator’s
status as a listener, how to ensure that one is addressing a true ‘listener’, not a mere theatergoer.
Hence, the problem of how to maintain the overall response of the message applies to both film
and theater.
Plays, compared with other artistic genres, are unique. In a play the paranormal can be
asserted in viable form. One might, of course, be tempted to ascribe a like capability to films,
194 O. Gabor-Peirce

especially since films with a plot are based, as it were, on a ‘screen-play’. Through double
exposures, camera angles, lighting, close-ups, music, and various devices, films have, almost
from their inception as an art medium, proven their ability to give the intangible a form that
is just as tangible as every other image on the screen. At the same time, characters in a film
never have the same claim to a tangible existence in the world of the viewer as that exercised
by everyone and everything on the stage of the so-called legitimate theater. In fact, today’s
endless computerized images of the imagination of the mind or of an imaginary world can no
longer be distinguished from the ‘real’ ones of our world. Film, because of its mimetic qualities,
can produce near-perfect imitations of empirical reality. Consequently, as Theodor Adorno
argues, ‘reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication’.
‘Imagination’, he continues, ‘is replaced by a mechanically relentless control mechanism
which determines whether the latest image to be distributed really represents an exact, accurate
and reliable reflection of the relevant item of reality’ (Adorno 1991, 55, quoted in Dovey 2009,
19). In turn, the audience in the cinema can and often does distrust its senses to a far greater
extent than the theatergoer has the freedom to do. Film, therefore, as Adorno affirms, cannot
offer a critique of society precisely because of its mimetic qualities. Ultimately, what dis-
tinguishes a play from a film is, among many things, the unique need and capability of the
former to evoke a feeling of trust in the action on stage that may well transcend the sensory
world we have brought with us into the theater – yet does not openly conflict with it.
As film, Mambety’s Hyènes intentionally distorts the natural proportions of the realm of our
reality. Through the power of imagination, through a disturbing and perplexing use of form,
Hyènes takes advantage of the capabilities of film to bring the intangible image to the viewer
and cause the viewer to distrust his senses of what is real and accepted, thus calling into question
its mimetic disadvantage. The visual potential of the film allows Hyènes to shatter its own illu-
sions of permanence. Mambety asserts: ‘What is said is stronger than what is written; the word
addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image
creates cinema, so we are in direct lineage as cinema’s parents’ (Ukadike 2002, 129). Hyènes
is a paradox: it dislodges the viewer from the world he believes he understands and draws
him into a completely new sphere. It is a film that represents the tragic world of the marginalized
individual in a grotesque, surreal style that is imbued with African imagery and symbols.
Hyènes is mimesis in an Adornian sense, yet as Lindiwe Dovey argues in African Film and
Literature, it is a type of mimesis that ‘allows for the possibility of a different kind of relation-
ship between subject and object – an adaptive or correlating behavior in which the subject
attempts to be like the object, rather than control the object by identifying it. [. . .] It allows
for identification with the object/Other [. . .] rather than an identification of the object/Other
through the reifications of abstract thought’ (2009, 18). Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory:
‘Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive
values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the
expressed substance’ (1984, 164). Through the act of retelling and re-presenting, Hyènes con-
fronts its viewers with their false reality and destroys it before their very eyes. Mambety’s
film reaches out to Der Besuch and goes beyond the rational and seemingly reliable realms of
this world. Alexie Tcheuyap writes in De lécrit à l’écran: ‘The concern is [. . .] not the subjuga-
tion of a medium or a text, but that of the various creative, poetic and ideological processes
implied in the repetition that brings change to any rewriting’ (2005, 30– 1). He rejects film adap-
tation approaches focused on fidelity and medium specificity, and argues instead for a ‘poetics of
repetition’. Mambety states in an interview with Pardo News:
That’s why I always said that the creation doesn’t exist, that there has never been anything but rep-
etition. That, for that matter, is what makes the nobility of the work, because it belongs to the first
man (Wynchank 2000, 410).
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 195

Similarly, Walter Benjamin, like Martin Heidegger, proposes in Illuminationen the necessity of
bringing to light the new as present in the repeatedly same, for only so can one project a revolu-
tionary programme that produces a consciousness of the present and explodes the continuum of
history (1977, 261). Through the act of repetition, Hyènes identifies with its Other, appears as an
original, and creates a powerful catalyst for the universal message. Through the new medium of
presentation – through a new location, image, and stark symbolism – Mambety transforms the
Western narrative into a dynamic tour de force of universal proportions.

Hyènes: destruction of permanence

Hyènes is the result of a series of circumstances and strange coincidences in the life of the African
director as they relate to ‘home’.14 The notion of home in Hyènes is inseparably linked to birth-
place. Through the medium of the film, ‘home’ often becomes a place of inexpressible beauty,
lost security, nostalgia, remembering, and regret, much beyond the more Dürrenmattian
notions of apprehension, recognition, and compensation.15 Mambety’s film underscores this:
The motivation is always the picture, and for me it is always the pictures from the place where you
were born, the place you come from. I never dream about some other world, away from home. What I
have always wanted to explore is my relationship with images, with the cinema; I want to see it,
make an image of it, from the perspective of eternity [. . .]. For me, filming is remembering
(Ukadike 2002, 130).
The imagery of the scene in which Linguère Ramatou enters her tomb is cinematically perfect.
One hears the wind and can almost feel the hot desert sun as the camera focuses on the immen-
sity of the sea in the background. This scene comes at the moment Dramaan is devoured. The
disharmony between the two scenes elicits intense associations with the notion of ‘home’: it
remains conscious of the ever-present mysterious, unnerving idea of the home as a place of
dichotomies, of both dread and desire. Home, the place where the dread is subordinate to the
desire, now becomes the place of dread tightly interwoven with desire. On the other hand, the
mood of the entire play with its distancing coldness and disturbing gestures is more closely con-
nected to the Freudian ‘Unheimliche’, the ‘unhomely’, the subjective place of dread where only
fear and uncertainty exist.16
Linguère Ramatou, the previously scorned woman of Hyènes who returns home to attain
justice, reveals and substantiates in her symbolic gestures, actions, and overall presence the
notion of returning ‘home’ as it pertains to identity and remembering. Her character is deeply
rooted in the culture of storytelling, an important feature of African oral tradition.17 She is a
surreal mix of the highly grotesque and a dignified queen, a ‘Reine Unique’, as her name testi-
fies. Mambety himself states: ‘Linguère, in our language, signifies Unique Queen. Ramatou is a
red bird from the legend of Egypt of the black pharaohs. A sacred bird [. . .] the soul of the dead’
(Wynchank 2003, 71). She is a paradox: a blend of prosthetic devices and a mythical, goddess-
like presence with an aura of power and the supernatural.
Sigmund Freud, in Das Unheimliche (2003), quotes Ernst Jentsch’s essay, ‘On the Psychol-
ogy of the Uncanny’ (1906). Jentsch’s definition of the uncanny corresponds perfectly with the
character Claire:
One of the surest devices for producing slightly uncanny effects through story-telling is to leave the
reader wondering whether a particular figure is a real person or an automaton, and to do so in such a
way that this attention is not focused directly on the uncertainty, lest he should be prompted to
examine and settle the matter at once, for in this way, as we have said, the special emotional
effect can easily be dissipated (2003, 135).
Claire is uncanny in the strongest sense of the word. She is a perfect fusion between a personage
and an automaton18 and the stage manipulates her presence for exactly this purpose. There can
196 O. Gabor-Peirce

be no tragedy or greatness in a figure like Claire, who evokes a blend of both tragedy and
comedy. Through Claire and through the entire presentation, the realistic and the familiar of
the stage is set against the unfamiliar and strange, leading ultimately to a breakdown of the
knowable.
Through the use of camera angles, lighting, and close-up shots, Mambety formally maintains
Ramatou’s image throughout the film as an exaggeration, a contradiction, a fantastic represen-
tation of something painfully artificial, yet simultaneously something regal, admirable and enig-
matic: her face is hardly visible behind her mysterious head covering, yet the camera focuses our
attention, draws us in on it repeatedly and forces us to see what is not there. Ramatou is surreal in
all senses of the word, the woman whom all men fear. There is no trace of comedy about her
presence.19 In her role, Ramatou is, as Nike Morganti states in Ecrans d’Afrique, ‘a mythical
essence similar to that of the Phoenix arising from the ashes: a goddess, surrounded by her hand-
maidens’ (1998, 58). As a result, the viewer’s attention is drawn to distinguish between the real
and surreal, prompting participation in the search for the ‘implicit’ message. The question
becomes here less the realistic portrayal of actual events and more how Hyènes takes advantage
of different elements of the storytelling technique in order to create fantastic suggestions reflec-
tive of a society’s shortcomings. It effectively demonstrates how creative use of oral tradition in
the construction of cinematic narrative structure can accentuate the level of viewer participation
and association.
The final act of the play is an absolute necessity for its structure. Appalled and alienated, the
audience is forced to observe the coldness of the communal murder that is replete with cameras
and reporters. Finally, the restoration of order in the community, presented through the highly
grotesque form in the final chorus of the villagers, a parody of the Sophoclean chorus, serves
to remind the spectator that the world of the stage that has succumbed to the lure of money is
his own. The directions appended to the play make it clear that the playwright wishes to rep-
resent our modern world, yet with as little realism as possible.20 We read: ‘[Der Besuch] is a
malicious play, but just for that reason it must be presented without anger and in the most
humane way, for nothing hurts this comedy that ends tragically more than brutal seriousness’
(Dürrenmatt 1996b, 103). The artificiality and coldness of this final scene allow no room for ten-
derness and attachment. Claire orders her men to uncover Ill’s face and place him into the coffin,
hands the Gülleners the cheque, and leaves. The comedy has evolved into a serious indictment.
The scene of the protagonist Dramaan Drameh’s death in Hyènes is a fantastic display of
magic realism. Since magic realism mixes up fantasy and fact, bizarre and ordinary events
are presented as equally real (Palencia-Roth 1987). The townspeople have literally consumed
Dramaan.21 As Patrick Williams states, ‘[w]hen Dramaan is murdered [. . .], his body bizarrely
vanishes, just as if his fellow citizens were in fact hyenas who had eaten him. All that remains is
his jacket on the ground, a visual echo of the huge flap of animal skin trailing from a hyena’s
mouth in one of the inserted sequences’ (2000, 132). This scene – and many others – are jux-
taposed against actual images of hyenas roaming and howling in the wild, symbols of the citizens
of Colobane.22 The death scene reaches its climax as the citizens, moving in a pack, consume
Dramaan. The mayor, the priest, and the professor – government, religion, and education, the
major social institutions – approve and lead the village in its action. They are all hyenas,
going for the kill now that the lion has been wounded, lowly animals that have lost their
dignity and fallen for the lie.23 They carry communal blood on their hands. The imagery is fan-
tastic: they are dressed in rice bags and wear white wigs and masks. In silence, they surround
Dramaan. Mambety asserts:
The mask is what makes it impossible for the townspeople to recognize good and bad. That is why
we made them animals, because animals commit this kind of murder. For that reason, their hair is
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 197

done as that of the buffalo – the laughing stock of the savanna – and the rice bags they wear sym-
bolize their objective (Ukadike 1998, 148).
The hyena-like pacing of the villagers in the desert of Hyènes, their absurd make-up and judge
wigs, their sack-like clothing and their chorus-like chanting, ‘[n]ot for money, but for justice’
(Mambety 1957), and, finally the empty clothes of Dramaan blowing in the wind, create a
surreal, strangely magical, yet condemning atmosphere. As the pack narrows in, the spectator
is encouraged to feel Dramaan’s claustrophobia through the tight, narrow framing of the
camera angle. As a result, the spectator experiences their gestures, their strange costumes and
their chanting as a unity. Mambety states:
Movement creates its own internal dynamic, and the different effects of a film – text, music, image –
arise from this dynamic; they are never separated. So costume is not an ornament, it is the reflection of a
situation. In Hyènes, the people of Colobane would not have been able to enact a collective murder if
they had each kept their individual clothing. If the mayor had dressed like a mayor, if the professor had
dressed like a professor, then they would have felt individual responsibility. But the instant of murder
required collective responsibility, and this required a mask (Ukadike 2002, 127).
This communal act is both ironically conciliatory and a severe indictment of the individual’s
weakness. The restoration of order in the community, presented in a grotesque, surreal form,
serves to remind the spectator that the world he has just seen succumb to prostitution is his
own – different, yet much like the world of the original.
There is no music in this scene. Only the wind can be heard. Mambety allows the sounds of
the desert to play a major role in the film, most prominently here. Mambety expresses this:
I do not choose the music, I choose the sound. All movement is accompanied by a sense. I like wind
very much. Wind is music, just as music is wind. I try to make the image illustrate the movement.
Wind, like music, is the breath of movement and life. It has to do with stimulation: from the images I
do the music, from the music I do the sound. But sound is not something foreign to adorn the film. It
is intrinsic to the film; it magnifies the action (Ukadike 2002, 127).
Slowly, music blends in with the wind as the camera then focuses on Ramatou, who, as we have
noted, is watching the death scene from above a tomb-like cement building overlooking the
ocean. Ramatou’s words ring, for the first time, immensely sad: ‘Die in peace, then come and
join me’ (Mambety 1957). She descends slowly into the darkness at the moment when
Dramaan is devoured. Her gaze into the distance is cold and leaves the viewer both moved
and uneasy. The camera affords the spectator one last close-up so that he may see her sad
eyes penetrate the immensity of the sea. Both the gaze and the sea are heavy with inner
turmoil. The coldness is absent. This is a most crucial, most paradoxical moment in the film:
as the spectator is tempted to reject in repulsion such a grotesque, surreal ending, he cannot,
and if he may be tempted to identify emotionally with the characters, he cannot. At the
height of what could be the grotesque and uncanny, the viewer is drawn in by the sadness
and the surreal. At the height of what could be a moment of emotional identification with the
character, the viewer is alienated and disturbed.24 Overwhelmed at this climactic moment by
his emotions, his repulsion and his inability to understand, the spectator sees his world with
its ideologies begin to disintegrate. At this moment, the spectator is open to envision a different
world. This moment allows for the subordination of the mimetic at the hands of the imagination
and consequently gives the spectator the opportunity to rethink his attitude toward the world.
By contrast, the death scene in Der Besuch is as artificial and grotesque as ever. It is ‘more of
a media spectacle, complete with radio reporters and bystanders’ (Uraizee 2006, 318) who watch
as Ill walks the line into a crowd of people and then suddenly drops dead. The doctor pronounces
Ill dead of a heart attack: he died from joy. Such visual estrangement leaves now no room for
comedy or identification with the characters’ emotions, only for the disturbingly tragic. In Dür-
renmattian manner, it enhances the potential of the theater and forces the viewers to experience a
198 O. Gabor-Peirce

shattering of their own illusions of permanence. It presents the chaotic structure of the world in a
distorted manner and confronts the audience with the repulsive reality of their own modernity.

A conclusion through imagery

Strange, surreal images and techniques mix with painfully alienating images in Hyènes to reveal
an aesthetic quite distinct from the Western and Hollywood world and from other African films.
In a 1999 interview Mambety addresses the power that the film holds through its imagery: ‘[. . .]
the future belongs to images. [. . .] Imagination created the image and the image created cinema’
(Ukadike 2002, 125). Hyènes’ depiction of the urban subculture and its parody underscores the
filmmaker’s desire to recoup images and experiences marginalized in African cinema by the
narrow focus on nationalism of other African filmmakers (see Niang 2002) and expresses pol-
itical, cultural, and moral independence through the use of imagery. Mambety states: ‘Africa
is rich in cinema, in images. Hollywood could not have made this film, no matter how much
money they spent [. . .]. The future belongs to images’ (Ukadike 2002, 125). Mambety relies
heavily on the imagination and urges his viewers to do the same: ‘Making films is not difficult.
When you close your eyes, you see the darkness, but if you close them even more tightly you can
begin to see tiny stars. Some of these stars are people, others are animals, horses or birds [. . .].’25
The animal imagery provides a powerful case for the filmmaker’s desire to reawaken the
viewer to a world outside of his false modernity. Images and meanings, sustained through the
film by continual cutting from people and the narrative to the animals, distinguish the film
aesthetically and thematically and contrast them to the world of the humans. Elephants –
which, as Wynchank explains, are symbols of life and hope and of a powerful, eternal Africa
(2003, 85) – appear most prominently at the beginning and at the end of the film. Hyenas –
viciously predatory animals that prey on the weak, the wounded or corpses, and lurk in the
shadows of the desert waiting to make their kill – appear as stark interruptions and as visual
comparisons throughout the film. When asked at the Southern African Film Festival (African
Film and TV Magazine 1993) about the animal imagery, Mambety states:
You know in the beginning I kill [the elephants]. You have elephants going away with the wind.
They are the time. They are the life going on, and between the elephants at the beginning and the
elephants at the end, you have the kingdom of Hyenas. Hyenas are not the time, elephants are the
time and during that time Hyenas like you and I will try to survive. You know the Hyena is a terrible
animal. He is able to follow a lion, a sick lion during all seasons. And during the lion’s last days it
comes down and jumps on him and eats him, eats the lion peacefully. That is the life of the World
Bank. They know we are sick and poor and we have some dignity. But they can wait, wait for the last
days when you say OK, I know my dignity is meat. I want to survive. Please take my dignity and kill
me with your money.
The animal imagery and symbolism is further juxtaposed with those of people, such as the old
man (the ‘griot’) who wanders through the film telling the truth,26 the townspeople dressed in
cloth sacks in the judgment scene, the Asian woman in the desert in uniform with handcuffs
who reads The International Herald Tribune, to name but a few.
The bizarre representation of Colobane as an amusement park towards the end of the play
echoes the Dürrenmattian use of modernization to critique its very nature. This image creates
a visual labyrinth.27 The bright colours of a Ferris wheel glowing with illuminated lights in
the dark, the carnival-like music, and the laughter and excitement leave the viewer struggling
to comprehend and internalize the contrast. On the other hand, the bright ‘Welthappy-end’ (Dür-
renmatt 1957, 98) with its billboards and neon lights at the renovated Güllen train station that
affront the spectator of Der Besuch is by far less of a contrast, since it only slightly heightens
the already grotesquely artificial atmosphere of the entire play. Mambety augments the level
of the Dürrenmattian grotesque with contrasting camera shots of the desert and of images of
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 199

rows and rows of televisions that are on display at this fair. Further perplexing images appear
throughout the film and play against each other, such as a television set (an unusual commodity
in Colobane) in the church that shows images of starving African children, and sofas in the
middle of the desert, set up for the comfort of the well-known personalities of Colobane.
These images cut into and out of the scenes and shock the viewer with their alienating represen-
tation of various spheres of modernization.
Mambety saves the most bizarre and grotesque image for the end. Once the hyenas have
dined and the lion has been devoured and once Ramatou has descended into her tomb, we are
presented with close-up shots of a bulldozer that is in the last stages of demolishing the town
of Colobane.28 In the next image, Mambety allows our eyes and emotions to look for signs of
life in such devastation. There appears to be hope in this gloomy portrayal of the world: a
lonely Baobab tree remains standing as an inherent presence in the town. Most disturbing is
the death of the same tree in the next image, as it is cut, along with any remnant of our reliance
on the visual and established beliefs, ideologies, and illusions of permanency. Speciale addresses
this: ‘The wound of the baobab cut down in the last frame will not heal’ (1998, 10). In this last
contradiction, the bitter symbolism clashes with the beauty of the land and its animals. Giuseppe
Gariazzo spells this out most poignantly: ‘Realism, militancy and political gestures [. . .] are trig-
gered off by a mimic discourse which has its roots in surreal signs, in the deconstruction of the
linear narration and in the syncopated rhythm of a symphony of sounds and images [. . .]’ (1998,
21 –2). In a grotesquely distorted manner, Mambety confronts his viewers with their reality one
last time. He leaves them exposed, searching in the destructed city and deconstructed text for
anything to grasp. In the openness of their questions, they can begin to dream of a better
place and culture outside the false world of concepts.
Mambety’s friendship with the Swiss playwright Dürrenmatt,29 his love of and commitment
to his birthplace, and his grotesque, surreal style, all create a film that identifies with its Other
and rewrites it in order to point toward a subjective place, a new definition of home, a ‘location
of culture’30 that encourages a recognition of the universal corruption of the world and moves
towards an increased consciousness of a better one. Mambety explains this best: ‘[H]yenas
are frightened and elephants follow the wind. They follow the wind and follow the life. [. . .]
My last hope is that my children become elephants away from hyenas. For me a film should
be a bomb, a bomb of emotion like a rush – not a joy for forgetting reality, but a joy for
opening your sweet dream for the reality’ (African Film and TV Magazine 1993). This was
Mambety’s life-long passion and dream. A few months before his death, Mambety was asked
in an interview about his future projects. He states: ‘I will finish the third part of [a] trilogy
about ordinary people. [. . .] Then I will consult God about the state of the world’ (Ukadike
2002, 131).
This paper ends best in the words of the Tunisian producer Mohamed Challouf. In an inter-
view shortly after Mambety’s death (1998), Challouf states: ‘Djibril was a brother who had no
prejudices, whether of race, religion or politics: he saw the world his own way [. . .]. Djibril was a
genius because with his reactions and his reflections, he helped people to understand things
better, he threw light onto the wall of mutual ignorance [. . .]. After I met Djibril, I too discarded
clichés and discovered a world I love very much.’31

Notes
1. Mambety states in Frank Ukadike’s Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers: ‘I
am interested in marginalized people, because I believe they do more for the evolution of a community
than the conformists. Marginalized people bring a community into contact with a wider world’
(Ukadike 2002, 124). The interview that began at the Pan-African Festival of Film and Television
200 O. Gabor-Peirce

of Ouagadougou in 1991 and that was concluded during the African Literature Association Conference
held at Michigan State University in 1997 is recorded in Questioning African Cinema: Conversations
with Filmmakers.
2. Marshall Berman explains the dual nature of modernity best: ‘To be modern, is to find ourselves in an
environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world
– and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything
we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of
class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind.
But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disinte-
gration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish [. . .]’ (Berman 1983, 15,
quoted in Williams 2000). It is within this context and definition that Mambety negotiates modernity in
Hyènes and forcefully unsettles all conformity. Hyènes thrives on the modern paradox.
3. Hyènes presents the filmmaker’s views with regard to the universal condition of modernity while also
displaying the life of Africa. Mambety tells us: ‘While Hyènes tells a human story to the whole world, I
also wanted to pay homage to the beauty of Africa’ (Ukadike 2002, 125).
4. ‘A boundary’, in Heidegger’s words in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ (1971), as Homi Bhabha also
quotes them in The Location of Culture, ‘is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recog-
nized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing’ (1994, 2).
5. Mambety recounts Dürrenmatt’s reaction upon hearing about his intentions to make a film based on the
play: ‘The master had laughed a lot at the title Hyènes [. . .]. To make advances to the good old lady of
Güllen! And to paint her black and gold on top of that! Africa is so far from the Güllen train station
where Claire Zachanassian stopped one day’ (Wynchank 2003, 74). This was part of an interview
for Pardo News at the Locarno Film Festival.
6. Quoted in Grayson (2001, 136).
7. Cella elucidates Mambety’s style: ‘It is through [. . .] images with rhythm that art brings out the surreal
and makes it visible and comprehensible through beauty and formal language. And it is these symbol-
images with rhythm that return to the screen, each time from a different point of view, that characterize
Diop’s films’ (1998, 34– 5).
8. Kayser, in this influential work, Das Groteske, established the relevance of the concept ‘grotesque’.
9. The uncanny (Ger. ‘das Unheimliche’ – literally, ‘un-home-ly’) is the Freudian situation in which
something seems familiar, yet foreign at the same time. This results in an uncomfortable feeling of
strangeness and estrangement. Its paradoxical nature causes one to be attracted to yet repulsed by
an object at the same time.
10. All translations of Dürrenmatt are the author’s.
11. Author’s translation.
12. The term ‘Swiss malaise’ had been used to describe this state of being whose symptoms are irritating
uneasiness. Dürrenmatt’s relationship to his ‘Heimat’ is hardly straightforward. He loved the beauty of
the Alps and the peace of the scenery, yet he was discontent with what he saw as the narrow-minded
mentality of the Swiss people. At the same time, he felt that in his situation as the citizen of a small,
supposedly neutral state, he was in a position to analyze and criticize the events of the larger world that
surrounded him. This critical analysis of global politics was especially directed at the two superpowers,
the United States and the USSR, during the days when the Cold War was at its height. His situation in
Switzerland also gave him an insight into the hypocrisy and material self-interest of his own and neigh-
bouring countries.
13. Switzerland, a neutral European country, has a history of being a country of ‘solid and self-satisfied
prosperity, of petty bourgeois, of bank and office clerks. Its vices and virtues are those of the
middle class: preference for stability and security over intellectual daring, for common sense over sen-
sitivity, for careful handling of public and private funds’ (Tiusanen 1977, 11).
14. See also Wynchank 2003.
15. The word ‘home’ comes charged with subjective meaning, reminding us that we are bound by our birth,
our childhood, our language, our earliest experiences, our gender and identity, all of which somehow
shape us into who we are.
16. Freud, in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche), describes the uncanny as ‘that species of the
frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’ (2003, 124).
Referring to Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 essay ‘The Psychology of the Uncanny’, Freud writes that the
uncanny includes ‘persons and things, the impressions, processes and situations that can arouse an
especially strong and distinct sense of the uncanny in us’ (2003, 135). He also considers the
German words ‘heimlich’ (homely) and ‘unheimlich’ (‘unhomely’) (2003, 124–5, 132). Loosely
 Journal of African Cultural Studies 201

related to heimisch (native), heimlich can mean familiar, intimate, and cherished, but its other defi-
nitions can have apparently opposite significations, such as weird, concealed, and secret: ‘heimlich
is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very
different from each other – the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what
is concealed and kept secret’ (2003, 132). Linguistically, what is heimlich can also become unheimlich,
and for Freud this ambiguity is a constitutive feature of the ‘affective nucleus’ that characterizes the
uncanny (2003, 123).
17. In creating Ramatou, Mambety used memories of his childhood. He tells of a mysterious woman, a
prostitute, in his small town of Colobane during his childhood. This prostitute was named Woolof
(the queen) because she did not work the lower parts of the port, but rather the high spheres of
finance and the business world. Every Friday she descended toward the port in order to share her
riches with the lower classes and the poor. One day, she stopped coming and never appeared again
(Wynchank 2003, 71– 3). Mambety begins to tell a story of his imagination, a story of this Ramatou
as a girl accused by the village people of placing a magic spell that caused a terrible drought on the
land. She becomes a scapegoat, a victim, burned to death in her home along with her family. When
her body cannot be found, the villagers begin to fear, but it is too late. This memory serving as a cat-
alyst, the longing to return to the original place of belonging and being, combined with Mambety’s
appreciation of Dürrenmatt’s work Der Besuch, led to the creation of this fantastic figure Ramatou.
18. Wynchank writes that ‘Claire Zachanassian was a farcical figure with a series of extraordinary hus-
bands that she married, her manners quite vulgar, her clothes loud, her hair red, the wedding gown
that she sports for her eighth marriage. Mambety excluded all that from his film. Of Linguère
Ramatou he makes a very distinguished character, a “Unique Queen”’ (2003, 80).
19. In his article ‘Hyenas’, Richard Porton argues that ‘Ramatou herself does not embody moral probity of
any sort. [. . .] Ramatou is not an icon of empowerment. She can offer only the negative freedom of
ruthless demystification’ (1997, 51). Porton is correct that Ramatou does not symbolize morality or
power in a positive sense. It is, however, most interesting to note that her very presence, though
clearly a force of ‘ruthless demystification’, is shrouded in mysticism and the supernatural.
20. Dürrenmatt writes in the notes to the play, for example, that ‘the theater scenes are to be changed
without the use of a curtain, also just play the car scene, if possible, with a stage car which only has
the basics necessary for the play: car seat, steering wheel, bumper [. . .]’ (1957, 102).
21. Joya Uraizee, in ‘Subverting the Status Quo in Sénégal’, gives a vivid, accurate analysis of this scene:
‘In Hyenas, Dramaan’s death scene begins when men (mainly peasants) walk very slowly toward “no-
man’s land”, the cliff outside the city limits where the final judgment is to take place. They avoid sur-
rounding Dramaan at once, and walk instead as a pack, with their hands behind their backs, as if they
have become predatory bodies rather than thinking men. [. . .] We notice for the first time that all of
them are dressed in long, flowing but tattered robes, many are barefoot, and many are wearing
strange, ill-fitting wigs. The wigs seem to be shabby replicas of the headpieces that the French
judges wear, but look oddly out of place on these men and in this setting. [. . .] The men slowly
move closer to Dramaan, and finally, converge on him, but since medium shots are used, we cannot
clearly discern their method of attack. Then, they gradually disperse in different directions as the
camera closes in on what is left of Dramaan – his jacket’ (2006, 318).
22. Williams explains: ‘In Hyènes [. . .], the emphasis is firmly on the negative, predatory, murderous, cow-
ardly-except-when-in-a-pack nature of the animal’ (2000, 132).
23. Sandra Grayson, in her article ‘Djibril Diop Mambety: A Restrospective’, sees Ramatou as the great
hyena, even more than the villagers themselves are hyenas: ‘Linguère [is] a hyena. She does not kill
Dramaan; rather she follows her prey, moves into town, and waits for his death at the hands of the
people of Colobane’ (2001, 138).
24. Alessandra Speciale writes in Ecrans d’Afrique: ‘In the end [. . .], the splendid colours and extravagant
costumes [. . .], the touches of humor here and there are not enough this time to conceal the sadness and
cruelty of the story’ (1998, 10).
25. Quoted in Speciale 1998, 6.
26. In this context, Dovey, in African Film and Literature, emphasizes ‘the impact of performativity on the
form and aesthetics of African screen media’. She continues: ‘Although the filmmaker is, of course, not
present in bodily form in a film, many techniques are used so as to mimic the presence of the film-
maker/griot, including the use of voice-over, opening and closing the film with a griot, or having
the filmmaker act in the film’ (2009, 14). The griot is a recurring presence in Hyènes, and Mambety
himself plays the role of the professor.
202 O. Gabor-Peirce

27. Mambety admits that he got the idea for this from observing a Communist state fair while in Europe
(Ukadike 1998, 144).
28. Porton makes a poignant observation in reference to this image: ‘Hyena’s final shot – a bulldozer
plowing through the residue of the town’s short-lived consumerist orgy’ (1997, 51).
29. In ‘De la scène à l’écran’, Wynchank (2000) writes that Mambety deeply regretted that the ‘great
Dürrenmatt’, as Mambety referred to him, died before the premier of Hyènes. At the premier, at the
Festival de Cannes in 1992, Mambety left one chair empty next to him for Dürrenmatt.
30. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha (1994) argues that cultures can be understood to interact, trans-
gress, and transform each other in a much more complex manner than the traditional binary oppositions
can allow. From Wikipedia.
31. Quoted in Bianchi 1998, 11.

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