Sembene’s first comedy, his first film in color, and first work in Wolof—the language spoken by most of the population of Senegal—Mandabi is the deceptively simple story of a man whose initial good fortune leads to encounters with an intimidating barrage of Third World bureaucracy and an ancient civilization in the throes of change. Ibrahima Deng, a fifty-year-old Muslim with two wives and seven children who has been out of work for four years, one day receives a money order from a nephew in Paris with specific instructions on its division. As news of the money order circulates through the neighborhood, Deng’s troubles begin.