Touki Bouki was Mambéty’s third film and first feature; in the course of his life, he produced only seven films. Initially drawn to the theatre, he took up the camera for Badou Boy in 1965 and thereafter never left its main protagonist’s perspective and the critique of the established order it offered. “Touki Bouki is also a bold film in the way that it subverts the tropes of the oral tradition, at a time when many of the continent’s filmmakers preferred to re-evaluate it,” wrote Sada Niang in Djibril Diop Mambéty, un Cinéaste à Contre-courant.

Fatou Kine Sene, Chair of the Senegalese Cinema Critics Association, tells me: “Touki Bouki is also a metaphor for Africa, especially in the abattoir scene where the animal symbolises Africa’s struggle to escape the butchers’ grasp.”

Often considered as the African Godard (they never actually met), Djibril Diop Mambéty stood out from his peers, who were influenced by Russian and French cinema, through his appeal to the Italian Neo-realism of Visconti and Pasolini. According to Olivier Barlet, founder of Africultures, “Mambéty’s magical films juggle derision and allegory… weaving burlesque characters into hyperbolic images, finding their unity in a cyclical and repetitive montage and a music that links the shots together in true symphony.”

Migrating muse

Today, thousands of young Africans are caught in a wave of relentless emigration in pursuit of a dream of a better life in the west, even if it means risking their lives. Mambéty’s work, created 45 years ago, is still as relevant as ever. With ruling-class incompetence and the disdain of the rich minorities, African youth today are as disillusioned as Anta and Mory in the early 1970s. They are the hyenas of today. Many, like Mory, refuse to leave the continent.

Djibril Diop Mambéty succumbed to illness in July 1998; at his death, journalists, friends, colleagues and cinema professionals paid tribute to this revolutionary of African cinema. Ten years later in 2008, their tributes focused on Mambéty’s posthumous influence on ensuing generations. Today, 20 years on, Touki Bouki is still the seminal reference of African cinema. As the Mauritanian film-maker Abderrahmane Sissako tells me, “Touki Bouki is the one African movie that will survive the test of time and forever be relevant. It is a unique film, as unique as Mambéty himself.”

A tribute book to the filmmaker’s work will be published imminently: Mambéty ou le voyage de la hyène (“Mambéty o il viaggio della iena”, in Italian) edited by Simona Cella and Cinzia Quadrati, in collaboration with Alessandra Speciale and prefaced by Martin Scorsese.

Read more about BBC Culture’s 100 greatest foreign-language films:

- The 100 greatest foreign-language films

- What the critics had to say about the top 25

- The full list of critics who participated – and how they voted

- Why are women film-makers 'excluded' from history?

- 12 great foreign-language masterpieces you may not know

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