The Camp at Thiaroye is based on a true, if little publicized, incident at the close of World War II. Senegalese troops, having disembarked at Dakar, are held in a transit camp that is little better than the POW and concentration camps that some of them have just braved. Ostensibly a point of dispersion to their home towns, it is in this camp that the structures of white oppression, interrupted by the war, will be re-established. The film centers on the African Sergeant Major Diatta (Ibrahima Sane), who, with one foot in his native Senegal and the other in Europe, serves as a liaison between the beleaguered, angry troops and the colonial establishment. After the Senegalese soldiers are offered their final insult, the men resort to more traditional forms of negotiation, with tragic results. "An unwavering and beguiling work with a spine of steel..." (Piers Handling, Toronto Film Festival)