If there is one term that contemporary cinema has emptied of meaning, it is “militant.” We use it to describe any work that dares to have an opinion, a faint stir of social conscience. But to understand what militant cinema really means—not as propaganda, but as a philosophical act, as a gesture of necessary aesthetic belligerence—we must return to Ousmane Sembene. Moolaadé (2004), his last, flamboyant masterpiece, is not a film: it is a testament, a weapon, and a spell. It is the J'accuse of an artist who, at eighty-one, still had the urgency of a debutant and the lucid anger of a prophet.

Sembene, the ‘Griot’ of African cinema, the man who literally moved his art from the (French) novel to the (Wolof) film in order to speak directly to his people, does not offer us a pacified vision of Africa. He throws a village in Burkina Faso (symbolically isolated, a microcosm) in our faces and forces us to look. But at what? Not poverty, not hunger, not the clichés of the colonial eye that Western cinema uses to absolve itself. Sembene shows us the battlefield of Tradition. And the war is fought on unthinkable terrain: women's bodies.

The film opens with an act of escape. Four girls run away to avoid “purification,” the ritual of female genital mutilation (FGM). They find refuge with Collé Ardo Gallo Sy, the second wife of an elderly man in the village. And here, Sembene sets off his semiotic bomb. Collé does not protest with a megaphone. She does not quote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She makes a much more powerful gesture and, for the power structure of the village, a much more scandalous one: she invokes the Moolaadé.

The Moolaadé is an ancient form of spiritual protection, a sanctuary. Collé stretches a colored rope in front of her door. This rope, a piece of string, becomes an impassable border, a magical-religious “safe space.” As long as the girls remain behind that rope, no one can touch them. Sembene's absolute brilliance lies here: he does not contrast Western “modernity” (human rights) with African “barbarism” (FGM). That would have been easy, paternalistic, and false. Instead, Sembene pits Tradition against itself. Collé uses an ancestral power, the Moolaadé (protection), to combat another ancestral power, the Salindana (purification/mutilation). It is a masterful intellectual judo move. He does not reject his culture; he uses it to expose its deadly contradictions.

Aesthetically, Moolaadé is an open-air Kammerspiel, but painted with the chromatic violence of Technicolor. Sembene rejects the aesthetics of “grainy documentary” that we often associate with cinema verité. Cinematographer Dominique Gentil immerses the scene in saturated colors: the women's boubou (robes) are chromatic arsenals, flags of defiance against the dusty, masculine ochre color of the village and the mosque. This is not a decorative choice; it is a political statement. The visual opulence deliberately contrasts with the moral dryness of the debate, suggesting that life, beauty, and vitality (embodied by women) are on Collé's side, while the Salindana is a gray and sterile death ritual.

The film is a remarkable allegory about the structure of power. The guardians of tradition—the elders, the Imam—are not “bad” in the Hollywood sense. They are terrified. Their authority is based on a closed system, a consensus that cannot be questioned. Collé's challenge creates a bug in the system. Her “No” is an act of such magnitude that it threatens to bring down the entire social edifice. And what do men fear more than anything else? Not the wrath of God. They fear radios.

Here Sembene inserts his second Trojan horse: modernity, not as an ideology, but as information. Small portable radios are the real antagonists of the elders. They are the voice of the outside world penetrating the village walls, the echo of other possibilities. In one of the most powerful and grotesque scenes, the men of the village stage a “radio-cide”: a pyre on which all the devices, seized from the women, are burned. It is an act of pure iconoclastic desperation. The elders, who control the logos (the spoken word, the sermon), cannot tolerate a medium they cannot control. They burn the radios as witches were burned, because they understand that information is a form of power that renders theirs obsolete. Moolaadé protects bodies; radios free minds.

Moolaadé arrived in 2004, a crucial moment for African cinema. The “cinema of the fathers” (that of Sembene, of Med Hondo) was giving way to the faster and cheaper digital explosion of Nollywood. Nigeria was churning out thousands of hours of direct-to-consumer videos, stories of love, witchcraft, and business, which were taking the continent by storm. Sembene, by comparison, seemed like a dinosaur: a stubborn Marxist who still shot in 35mm and believed in cinema as an educational tool. But Moolaadé is not pedagogy; it is dynamite. While Nollywood reflected (and often reinforced) the anxieties and dreams of neoliberal capitalism, Sembene did what he always did: he used cinema to dissect the structures of power.

His cinema, here more than ever, is deeply Brechtian. Sembene does not want our empathy (a passive emotion); he wants our understanding (a cognitive act). Collé is no saint; she is stubborn, difficult, at times arrogant. But she is a heroine in the purest sense: she is someone who acts according to an internal moral necessity, even at the cost of her own destruction. Sembene forces us to see the “why” behind the actions, not just to “feel” for the characters. This is not a feel-good movie about sisterhood. We are faced with a complex political negotiation in which the stakes are life itself.

The ending is a bonfire. But it is not a bonfire of despair. It is the Salindana, the hut where the ritual knives and symbols of mutilation are kept, that burns. It is the fire that purifies tradition, not the bodies of the girls. As the flames rise, the women, led by Collé (who has meanwhile been publicly whipped), free themselves. It is the Apocalypse, in the etymological sense of ‘unveiling’. Sembene, the old lion, does not give us a happy ending. He does not tell us that the problem is solved. He simply shows us that resistance is possible.

Ousmane Sembene died three years later. Moolaadé is not only his last film; it is his last word. And it is a word, like Moolaadé itself, that once spoken cannot be taken back. It is an act of absolute faith in the power of cinema not just to reflect the world, but to have the audacity, the anger, and the love necessary to change it.