Carmen in Africa: French Legacies and Global Citizenship’

Nowhere is it more evident that Carmen has become a product of a global cultural imagination than in two early millennial African adaptations of the French nineteenth-century story about the so-called gypsy Carmen by Prosper Mérimée and Georges Bizet.¹ Much further south than the original setting in Seville, Spain, the African Carmens have made a critical migration. No longer just looming close to Africa in the Moorish culture of southern Spain, both of these Carmens now inhabit the sub-Saharan heat of the continent with settings in Senegal and South Africa. The two films, the Senegalese Karmen Geï (2001), directed by Joseph Gaï Ramaka, and the South African U-Carmen eKhayelitsha (2005), directed by Mark Dornford-May, are both the first feature-length films by each director and, amidst the vast array of Carmen adaptations, the only ones to put the Carmen story on the African continent.² In these two versions, the story of Carmen is given a new articulation. More directly, both films of the opera reimagine Carmen and reinvent her in each sub-Saharan African country. Carmen has become a global citizen: an amalgamation of her French roots is reconfigured in Dakar, Senegal, and Khayelitsha, South Africa.