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As a complete my senior year at USC there was a lasting thematic overview Francophone African films that I wanted to offer to the class. Unlike Hollywood, these flux of African art cinema were far from glamorous, escapist or jungle melodramas present colonialism of American films and French films. African Art cinema  like Black Girl were realistic thoughtful low budget films that reflect a variety of issues affecting contemporary Africa.  As tribute to the films political issue and colonial possession given the mood of the character Diousana she fights with domestication and with the Madame over a mask that threatens her losing her identity, I believe the director Osamene Sambene highlighted the cultural identity of many Africans repressed by colonial attitudes. In the film as Diousnana packed her masks, her clothes, braids her hair, gives back the apron and the money given to her for her services then proceeds to commit suicide in the bathtub with a razor. Her naked black body floats in the bloody bath water as the last shot of the sequence is of her back suitcase and African mask. Next the film’s perspective shifts subsequent scene of French white people on the beach eagerly sun bathing to darken their skin like Diousana. As they read her article Others are untouched by her death.   Sembene color schemes of Diousana blood and the sunbathing as the African essence that is still suffering from the post colonial repression by the French.  Maybe her transformation back to her African identity and the blood stands for the blood spilled as she is liberated from her French employers rule.  In this matter Ousmane displays the visual medium to comment on the social and political conditions still not resolved in Senegal by the French occupation.  But what stands more as a sufficient motif in the film is the mask.  

As Diosana's French male employer return Diousana’s suitcase and mask to Dakar the theme of the music transport us back to African.  As he travels in the sun’s heat through the African village, native culture surrounds his white European stature as he carries the burden of the mask and suitcase through the slums of Dakar.  As the mother refuses his money and the young boy dons the mask the voice of distrusted seemly follows the Frenchmen back from where he came.