Abstract
In his 1968 film Mandabi, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène warns of the consequences for sovereignty of unrestrained appetite and the easy credit that facilitates it. Sembène’s depiction of a poor man whose windfall gift of a money order leads ironically to increased debt, dependency and indignity is a cautionary allegory for his own newly postcolonial nation, which had received its first World Bank loan in 1966. Drawing on work by Frantz Fanon, J-F. Bayart and others, this essay examines the film’s critique of the “politics of the belly” in Africa and the effects of credit-fuelled consumerism on subjectivity, sovereignty and aesthetics in a postcolonial context.