“They Drew an Entire People after Them”

Ousmane Sembène’s 1975 film Xala, a searing satire about the post-independence Senegalese elite, has received wide scholarly attention for its critique of crony capitalism masquerading as African socialism. This essay seeks to examine how Xala approaches under-studied question subjectivity under these circumstances, seeking trace film’s key concern with effects such neocolonial conditions upon wider populace. Proposing that central allegory – native elite complicit against and/or unable spearhead national decolonization is not final but starting point analysis it offers relationship between and arrested decolonization, this argues centres land dispossession primary issue in Senegal, both because sabotages redistributive promise independence, strips people material moorings their sujectivities. In three interconnected discussions sartorial self-fashioning, politics La Francophonie, kinship networks broken by theft, I propose an exposé structures subjectivities are inseparably bound neocolonialism, futurity dependent on transforming both.