Jolting public transportation, whether horse-driven carts or diesel buses, has inspired Senegalese filmmakers, including Ousmane Sembène (Borom Sarret, 1963), Clarence Delgado (Niiwam, 1991), Moussa Touré (TGV, 1997), and more recently, Khady Sylla in Colobane Express. Using the vehicles as theatrical stages, the directors depict people from various social backgrounds and vividly present slices of life. Although most passengers are of low or middle income, the elite also take buses after sudden reversals of fortune.

Though now supplemented by modern buses, the precarious express minibuses, or cars rapides, still exist—small vans painted in vivid colors, like Haiti’s taptaps and the guaguas of Panama and elsewhere. Antiquated, overloaded, noisy, and often dilapidated, they hiccup clouds of smoke and are forbidden in parts of downtown Dakar where they might hamper traffic, as the cart does in Borom Sarret. They provide a very affordable, if not altogether safe, means of transportation linking the Plateau to popular exurban neighborhoods such as Fourrière, HLM, Colobane, and Grand Yoff, and are a testament to Senegalese craftsmanship and entrepreneurship. Imported from France, they are reconditioned, equipped with handmade seats and carved-out windows. The owners are usually members of the Islamic Mouride brotherhood, which explains the names of Allah and Touba (the Mouride holy city) painted on the buses amidst colorful designs.

Colobane Express captures the often comical societal microcosm in Dakar cars rapides, from joyous hand-clapping market women in local attire to chattering students in Western clothes. In her first medium-length docudrama, Sylla used a loose script to direct nonprofessional actors who are bus drivers, conductors, and passengers in real life. The actors improvised dialogues and skit-like scenes that lent creative spontaneity to the final production. “I learned this process from Jean Rouch,” declares the director, in Françoise Pfaff’s A l’écoute du cinéma sénégalais (L’Harmattan, 2010, 216). At one point a market woman tells the cameraman: “The tax collector, you must film him too!”—an actor’s unscripted contribution.

Khady Sylla, a writer before she became a filmmaker, often took cars rapides when she was short of money and observed how passengers interacted with one another, with bus drivers, and with young conductors who hawk rides and collect fares. The film’s title is borrowed from a drawing by the Senegalese cartoonist Moïse, whose satirical renditions of Dakar life are sold as postcards. It is also a homage to director Djibril Diop Mambety, who grew up in Colobane and filmed his lively neighborhood.

Colobane Express depicts the sunrise-to-sunset workday of a driver (Pape Touré) and his conductor (N’Diasse N’Doye), whose teamwork allows the bus to continue its route despite arguments with customers, accusations of cheating, equipment failure, complaints about late arrivals and forced offloading in unannounced places, the storage of large baskets of fresh fish, police harassment, and the hauling of a load of live chickens. To add to the mayhem, a portly woman chokes on a piece of meat when the bus hits a puddle and it must stop for her to recover. Brawls ensue over squabbles at lunch, and a passenger with only a large bill for the small fare is verbally abused by the conductor and other passengers before the driver attacks him, goes into a seizure, returns to consciousness…and resumes driving!

The film was shot over an extended period on different routes but gives an impression of events on a single day. Says Sylla: “I chose to depict one day to show how the poorest people are the first to rise, with the women fish sellers going to market on the car rapide, and the last to go to bed, with the female beggar who gets on at the end of the film” (quoted in Pfaff 2010: 217). She comments that the bus scenes were so realistic and the cameras so inconspicuous that regular passengers boarded and were filmed along with the actors!

Colobane Express offers the illusion of spontaneous, albeit reconstructed, reality through a rapid, well-crafted montage, a sustained rhythmic score of Senegalese music (Souleymane Faye, Maty Thiam Dogo, Omar Pene) mixed with natural sounds, and a variety of shots through bus windows and rearview mirrors. It invites us to share humorous slices of Dakar’s busy urban life and ignore occasionally underexposed images and somewhat tiresome jolting shots, probably meant to accent the sense of documentary style.

With films like Une fenêtre ouverte (An Open Window, 2005), Le monologue de la muette (The Silent Monologue, 2008), and Colobane Express, Khady Sylla illustrates personal experiences through innovative cinematic styles that very effectively blur lines between fiction and reality.

Following screenings on European television stations and at film festivals, Colobane Express is now available on DVD and will appeal to audiences interested in vibrant vignettes of African urban life.