Guimba the Tyrant

Winner of the most prestigious award in African cinema, the Grand Prize at FESPACO '95, Guimba has been acclaimed as one of the most visually ravishing African films ever made. This epic allegory contrasts Africa's tremendous wealth and potential with its present poverty and plunder. Director Cheick Oumar Sissoko comments, "Guimba is a political film, a fable about power, its atrocities and its absurdities. I was personally influenced by what I experienced not long ago in Mali, but the ravages of power are, unfortunately, universal." The story has obvious parallels with the 1991 overthrow of Malian dictator Moussa Traoré, in which Sissoko was active.

Guimba tells the timeless tale of a tyrant's hubris and his downfall at the hands of his people, reminiscent of Macbeth or Richard III. The film's narrative embodies the process of revealing the truth from behind the facade of despotic power. For Guimba, the ruler of a once-prosperous trading city, the key to power is spectacle: humiliating court rituals, arbitrary displays of wrath, occult powers, and the terrifying mask that always covers his face. Guimba's authority begins to crumble when he demands that a nobleman divorce his wife so that his own son, the physical and moral dwarf Janginé, can marry her. This ludicrous demand reveals him to the townspeople as an unrestrained beast, not a prince; they jeer, defy him, and abandon the city to join a rebel force. Isolated, his magic powers exhausted, and driven mad, Guimba is left with no alternative but to commit suicide.

Guimba is thus a story of the restoration of truth and legitimate authority to Djenné, the legendary city where the film was shot, and, allegorically, of democratic, "transparent" government in Africa. In its opulence and epic scale, Guimba recalls, and calls for the return of, the continent's former greatness and prosperity. The film's striking costumes (themselves simultaneously veilings and statements) even occasioned the revival of several traditional Malian textile crafts.

Sissoko notes that in Guimba, he adapted to film two traditional Malian types of discourse used to "speak truth to power": kotéba, a popular form of satiric street theatre, and baro, a virtuoso kind of public oratory. Through his film, Sissoko creates not just an allegory of African politics, but a community of viewers prepared to mock illicit power whatever its trappings.