Ibrahima, a middle-aged unemployed man who lives with his two wives and seven children in a poor neighbourhood in Dakar, Senegal, gets an unexpected money order for 25,000 francs, from his nephew Abdou who had left for Paris to find work. With 2,000 francs of it for Ibrahima, his wives lay on a feast, wait on him, massage him. He sleeps, a man seemingly blessed by good fortune.
Over 50 years after its first release, this first-ever feature in an African language – Wolof – tracks the naïve, non-French-speaking, illiterate Ibrahima’s efforts to cash the cheque. In so doing we learn, as he does, hard truths about his country 10 years after independence from France. He’s a man in between the old and the new, who respects traditional community solidarity but is exploited at every turn by French-speaking bureaucrats and sharp-suited business types. At the post office he needs an ID card. To get that he needs a birth certificate, but he doesn’t even know his date of birth. Cheated by a photographer who never actually takes any photos, he’s then beaten up.
