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Johnny Sekka (born Lamine Secka, 21 July 1934 – 14 September 2006) was a Senegalese actor.
During the Second World War he found employment as an interpreter at an American air base in Dakar. He then worked on the docks. When he was 20, he stowaway on a ship to Marseille, France, and lived for three years in Paris.
He arrived in London, England in 1952, and served for two years in the Royal Air Force, where he first received the nickname "Johnny", but then Bermudian actor Earl Cameron persuaded him to become an actor, and he attended RADA. He became a stagehand at the Royal Court Theatre, and appeared on stage in various plays from 1958.
He had a small part in the 1958 film version of Look Back in Anger, directed by Tony Richardson, who had seen him on stage. He took a leading role in the 1961 film Flame in the Streets, playing the boyfriend of the (white) daughter (played by Sylvia Syms) of a liberal working-class (played by John Mills). He also had a leading role in the 1961 film for ITV, The Big Pride, by Guyanese writer Jan Carew and Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter. The film was set in then British Guiana; Sekka's character was a young prisoner who broke out with his older mentor.
He lived for a period in Paris, where he met his future wife, Cecilia Enger. He continued in British films during the 1960s, portraying stereotypical roles, such as a manservant in the film Woman of Straw (1964), and in other films, such as East of Sudan (1964), Khartoum (1966) and The Last Safari (1967). He also appeared on television, in programmes such as The Human Jungle, Z-Cars, Dixon of Dock Green, Gideon's Way, Danger Man, and a 1968 episode of The Avengers.
In 1968, he also played the lead role in a West End production of Night of Fame. According to his obituary in The Times, this was the first time that a black actor had played a role written for a white man in English theatre. He was seen as a British equivalent to Sidney Poitier, and was frustrated that actors who started out at around the same time as him – such as Sean Connery, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and John Hurt – had become stars, and he had not. In 1970, the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was turned into a film of the same name - also known as Bullfrog In The Sun - directed by the award-winning German filmmaker and producer Hansjürgen Pohland de and starred Princess Elizabeth of Toro, Johnny Sekka and Orlando Martins. In 1965, Nigerian co-producer Francis Oladele founded Calpenny Nigeria Limited, the first film production company in Nigeria after independence. Things Fall Apart - his second production - was considered lost for decades until more than 2,000 stills by Stephen Goldblatt, production documents, correspondence, contemporary newspaper clippings and more were found in a satellite storage of the Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin in 2019. This led to the development of an extensive research and digitisation project on Nigerian film heritage, with exhibitions and screenings in Lagos, Kampala, Abidjan, Accra and Atlanta, among other places. In his essay When The Bullfrog Jumps In The Sun - Why Things Fall Apart is still a very relevant Black film till this day, Lagos-based contemporary artist Mallam Mudi Yahaya describes the complex background of the production.
He was not cast in Roots (1977), being considered insufficiently American, but secured a role in the sequel, (1979), playing an African interpreter. Sekka is widely known among science fiction fans for his role as Dr. Benjamin Kyle in the television series Babylon 5's pilot movie, (1993).
Recurring health problems forced him to decline a future role in the series, and ultimately were the reason he retired from acting altogether.
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