THE HYENA’S LAST LAUGH - A conversation with Djibril Diop Mambety

by N. Frank Ukadike, from TRANSITION 78 They said he was a UFO. “The most paradoxical filmmaker in the history of African cinema.” To some, he was “the African Dionysus,” or “the prince of Colobane.” Others simply called him “D.D.M.” On July 23, 1998, Djibril Diop Mambety died in the Paris hospital where he was being treated for lung cancer. Only fifty-three years old at the time of his death, Mambety was a director, actor, composer, poet, and orator, loved and admired by critics and aud