Les Bouts de bois de Dieu Reading Order

Les Bouts de bois de Dieu (God's Bits of Wood, 1960) by Sembène Ousmane is the great Senegalese novel of anticolonial resistance — an account of the 1947–48 strike on the Dakar–Niger railway by African workers demanding equal pay and benefits with their French counterparts. Sembène, who himself worked as a docker in Marseille after the war before becoming a filmmaker (he is the father of African cinema), wrote a novel that is simultaneously a historical reconstruction of the strike, a portrait of the communities (Dakar, Thiès, Bamako) along the railway's route, and a meditation on how collective action transforms the individuals who engage in it. The novel's most striking quality is its focus on the women — the wives, daughters, and mothers of the striking workers — who organize, march, and bear the costs of the strike as much as or more than the men. The women's march from Thiès to Dakar that forms the novel's climax is one of the great set pieces of African fiction. Sembène was a Marxist and a griot (West African oral historian) simultaneously, and Les Bouts de bois de Dieu combines the novel's analytical scope with the griot's responsibility to remember and celebrate collective struggle. The title refers to a Wolof expression for children — 'God's bits of wood,' the human material that grows from the labor of parents — and the novel's strike becomes a birth: the making of a new kind of human being who can resist colonial domination.