Moolaade

                                                Moolaade by Ousmane Sembene

            In Moolaade a woman named Colle takes in a group of four girls who ran away from their genital cutting ceremony. They ask Colle to protect them as she protected her own child years ago from the genital cutting ceremony much to the village elder’s displeasure. She wraps colored rope around the entrance to her house and invoked Moolaade or magical protection so no one can enter the house to steal the little girls away.

            Colle is the second and favorite wife to her husband who is away at the beginning of the story.  The first wife does not agree with Colle’s plan to protect these girls because everyone else in the village is against her. The first wife does nothing to stop Colle because the four girls are taking residence inside Colle’s house so it is of little concern for her. She gradually comes to help Colle protect the girls but does it without anyone knowing for she fears what will happen if people find out.  Colle’s daughter Amastaou asks her why she is against the genital cutting ceremony and she tells a story of how she had two miscarriages and a painful childbirth with her only daughter where they had to cut her open.

            Amastaou’s fiancé Ibrahima returns from France and they both find out that they are forbid from marrying each other because Amastaou is not cut like the other women are. Ibrahima also witnesses the funeral of two small girls who drowned themselves in a well to avoid the genital mutilation. He finds it horrifying that the villages and relatives do not revolt against this practice, which has driven their children to their death.

            Colle’s husband returns from his trip and finds out from his brother a village elder of his wife’s deeds. The brother convinces him that the village considers him a laughing stock. He gives the husband a whip and tells him he must whip his wife in the town square to regain his lost manhood as well as end the magical protection spell she has cast over the household. As the husband whips Colle in front of the villagers she holds strong and refuses to utter the words to end the magical protection. Other women start cheering her on telling her not to fall. Her struggle has awoken something inside them all. When she is just about to fall to the floor the merchant Mercenaire rushes out and stops the whipping.

            Mercenaire who overcharged everyone in the village for the cheap goods he brought them was run out of the village not because of this but because he stood up for Colle and was a bad influence on the other women as well. He is killed off screen and the men steal all of his money. The village elders have the opinion that the radio has also influenced their women so they collect all of the radio’s that belong to the women and they burn them.

            The women unite over the pains caused to them, from the loss of their children to genital mutilation, the pain they themselves have suffered from it as well as the indignity of having their radio’s taken away from them. They watch their possessions taken from them and destroyed before their very eyes. The women stand up and disarm the women who cut the genitals and disarm them of their knives. They then take the knives to the village elders and tell them they are done watching their children get cut. Ibrahima and Colle’s husband both stand up and take the women’s side and leave the village elders. Ibrahima goes over to Amastaou and tells her that he wishes to marry her and he is proud of her for standing up and not getting cut.

            Moolaade was a very intense and powerful movie with a very important message at the center of it. Female genital mutilation is a practice that is horrifying to me in that it seems barbaric and yet it still exists today in our modern world. In certain areas of Africa this practice is commonplace. The reasons why people still go through with this practice are many, some said that it was good to protect ones virginity while there say that it will increase the chances of marriage and increase the pleasure of the husband.

            I have a friend who emigrated from an African country and he spoke of this practice before but he told me that most of the continent had moved beyond it and become more modern and more so some place he could be proud to come from. This movie was made fairly recently so I find it startling that this practice has yet to go the way of the dinosaur.

            Although you talked about how hard this movie was to get through for students in class, I found it to be possibly my favorite of all the films shown to us in class. It moved a little slow but it was so compelling a story that I barely noticed it and although the topic is grim and cringe worthy  (at least in my opinion I get queasy around subjects like that) it also contains a decent amount of humor, wit and charm from the characters.  The film was so well made and well shot it makes me want to investigate African cinema further, Tsotsi and this film are the two only African films I can recall watching as of now.