Senegalese, or African society (I’m talking about the francophone countries) is no longer secreting values for the next generation. Take myself, father of a family, and others like me: we are no longer typical, living examples for our children. It’s the cinema, the TV, the video which are the channels for the new cultures, the new values: we, the older generation, are absent in our own families. I was born in the colonial era. I witnessed all the humiliation and self-abasement my father had to put up with in order to survive. But in the evenings, when we came home to our huts, we rediscovered our own culture. It was a refuge: we were ourselves again, we were free. Nowadays, the TV is right there inside the hut where, in the old days, the father, the mother, the aunt held sway and the grandmother told her stories and legends. Even that time is now taken away from us. So we are left with a society which is growing more and more impoverished, emptying itself of its creative substance, turning more and more to values it does not create.

[Fìrinne Nì Chréacháin interviewed Sembène in African Affairs, vol. 91, no. 363 (1992)]