God's Bits of Wood
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God's Bits of Wood is a novel by Ousmane Sembène that concerns a railroad strike in colonial Senegal of the 1940s. The book deals with several ways that the Senegalese responded to colonialism. There are elements that tend toward accommodation, collaboration, or even idealization of the French colonials. At the same time the story details the strikers who work against the mistreatment the Senegalese face.
The action takes place in several locations (an interesting filmic term)--primarily in Bamako, Thiès, and Dakar. The map at the beginning shows the locations and suggests that the story is about a whole country and all of its people. There is a large cast of characters associated with each place. Some are featured players--Fa Keita, Tiemoko, Maimouna, Ramatoulaye, Penda, Deune, N'Deye, Dejean, and Bakayoko. Others part of the populace. You could say that the fundamental conflict is captured in two people, Dejean (the French manager and colonialist) and Bakayoko (the soul and spirit of the strike.) In another sense, however, the main characters of the novel are the people as a collective, the places they inhabit, and the railroad.
The evolution of the strike causes an evolution in the self-perceptions of the Africans themselves, one that is most noticeable in the women of Bamako, Thies, and Dakar. These women go from seemingly standing behind the men in their lives, to walking alongside them and eventually marching ahead of them. When the men are able to work the jobs that the train factory provides them, the women are responsible for running the markets, preparing the food, and rearing the children. But the onset of the strike gives the role of bread-winner-or perhaps more precisely bread scavenger-to the women. Women go from supporting the strike to participating in the strike. Eventually it is the women that march on foot, over four days from Thies to Dakar. Many of the men originally oppose this women's march, but it is precisely this show of determination from those(the wives marching) that the French had dismissed as "concubines" that makes clear the strikers' relentlessness. The women's march causes the French to understand the nature of the willpower that they are facing, and shortly after the French agree to the demands of the strikers.
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