God’s Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane

God’s Bits of Wood is a fictionalized account of the Dakar-Niger train strikes which took in the 1940s. The novel looks at both the political and personal sacrifices the strikers and their families made. The political balance of power is portrayed here as the strikers try to win back pensions, annual paid vacations, and family allowances from the Europeans. The novel can be seen as a shift of power between the African strikers and their European bosses.

The Europeans have the political process and violence as a leverage of power, which they use both insistently and mindlessly. One of the European delegates for the railway company accidentally shoots young boys who are playing along the tracks. The delegate isn’t charged with their murders. The Europeans also prevent the strikers and their families from having access to water. Yet the strikers also have the masses as their power.

The strikers gain powerful allies in their own women. In the beginning of the novel, the women are not told the details of the strike, though they are asked to support their men. Only the small child, Ad’jibid’ji, shows any interest and insists that her grandfather take her to a meeting of the strikers. Yet as the novel continues, the women become more and more involved in the strike. This is because the strike has hit home to them in a literal way.

There is no water nor food to eat. The women and children begin to starve. The women suffer in silence until they begin to fight back. Two of the more striking sequences in the novel are the siege between the women of N’Diayene and the policemen who have come to arrest Ramatoulaye, and leads to the burning down of the village, and the march the women go on to Dakar to protest their treatment and to support the strikers. The strike breaks down the barriers which cause inequality between men and women, black and white.

Sembene’s novel explores the lives of many of the strikers, their families, and others who are affected by the strike. This serves a socialist purpose because it reveals how the community comes together to win the strike. The theme of unity is one that figures prominently in the novel.

This occurs when the strikers decide to put Diara on trial for betraying the strike and returning to work. The trial was meant to use Diara as an example to the other men. There are also divisions among the strikers on how to handle the strike and who should be its leader. Ibrihim Bakayoko, who is seen as the leader, floats in and out of the action, very rarely getting involved in the strike in the way that the men and certainly the women are involved. He is the intellectual who is needed to delegate with the Europeans.