A case in point: when she was 13, Sy opened Bagatelle Couture, a dressmaking workshop in St. Louis, the colonial city in the north, where her mother had moved with her new husband, a teacher. Having already refused one arranged marriage when she was nine—again Sy credited her father’s indomitable will, internalized—she wasn’t slowed down by her mother’s objections to her starting a fashion career. At first, Sy used recuperated fabrics; soon her mother came around and bought her a sewing machine. With seamstresses now working three shifts of eight hours, Bagatelle Couture ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, “because the client can’t wait,” Sy said. Even then, Sy worked in both traditional Senegalese dressmaking, with its dramatic and colorful volumes, and sleeker Western trends. ”The Beatles were popular then,” she recalled. ”Les Copains. I always knew how to do traditional, but I kept the two styles apart.” Decades later, as her sensibility evolved through her own couture collections and additional film and stage work, Sy would become known for how artfully she blended the two.

When Sy married at age 16, she began to split her time between St. Louis and Dakar, whose arts scene under the president, the poet Léopold Sédar Senghor, was thriving. Once established in Dakar as a dressmaker, giving classes at the École des Beaux Arts in Dakar, Ousmane Sembène, Senegal’s premiere filmmaker, put Sy in touch with the Tunisian director Brahim Babai, where she did her first wardrobe work on his film La nuit de la décennie. A year later, when Mambéty hired her for Hyenas, Sy ran her first wardrobe department. Due to sudden budget cuts and a stop-and-start shooting schedule, Sy soon took on hair and makeup duties too. “It was a huge responsibility and I couldn’t let Djibril down,” she said. ”You had to have a lot of nerve to handle him, but I couldn’t refuse him anything. He was really special. We wanted to Africanize a Swiss story, but there was also a Western movie style. I watched Westerns and gladiator films for inspiration, and then to move [the visual references] closer to Africa, I looked to Egypt.”

Among other things, Hyenas is a scathing critique of the postcolonial economic order. Sy has had her own experience with the tortured politics of multinational institutions. Shortly after Senegal became the second African country after South Africa to connect to the Internet, Sy wanted to extend connectivity beyond the elites and intellectuals in Dakar. “I wanted to do the Internet my way, for people who never went to school,” she said. “We used to have a postman who would deliver letters to people on a bicycle. He’d read them aloud, take down people’s replies and then go back to the post office and send them.” Sy adapted that model to Metissacana, the Internet café and service provider in Dakar she founded in 1996. Like at Bagatelle Couture, she hired aides to work in three shifts of eight hours, showing people how to use the computer, and helping them send and receive emails around the clock.