Lee Gillette

Michael Wood writes that Dieng, the hero of Ousmane Sembène’s film Mandabi, likes to walk the streets of Dakar ‘in his best outfit, a shirt-dress called a boubou, about ten sizes too large, more like a tent than anything else, and he has to keep flopping the folds over his shoulders, and nipping them in at the back as he walks’ (LRB, 17 June). Judging from the cut of boubous all over West...