ABSTRACT
The work of Sotigui Kouyate has become an important marker of the global influence on diaspora African cinema. Sotigui moved to Europe where he worked with Peter Brook. Brook saw in him the quintessential figure of the African griot, a figure Haroun bizarrely evokes with a distant baobab (Kouyate is tall and thin)! As Lindiwe Dovey puts it so well, Sotigui is the Other for them, and that sense of his Otherness was no doubt what Brook was looking for in having him play Bhishma in his Mahabharata. With his stature, dreadlocks, striking Malinke features, Kouyate lineage, and embrace of the djeli role as synecdoche for “the African,” he easily conveys his Otherness within the theatrical world of Paris as well as of Belgium. These values carry over to his role in Little Senegal as Alloune, the curator of the African Slave Fort at Gorée, who undertakes to trace his ancestry across the Atlantic to New York. There another kind of Otherness manifests itself, that of the successful historian who undertakes to support his African-American distant relative Ida, played by Sharon Stone, whose world in Harlem appears infinitely distant from Dakar.
