God's bit of wood by Ousmane Sembane

About Ousmane Sembane

God's bit of wood by Ousmane Sembane

The real 1947–48 Dakar–Niger railway strike, told through the workers and especially the women who keep their communities alive through it. Sembène dramatizes a genuine colonial-era labor strike along the Dakar–Niger railway, moving between several towns and a wide cast of strikers, union organizers, and family members enduring starvation wages, food shortages, and colonial repression. The novel is especially noted for centering women's growing political agency as the strike drags on, and is widely considered Sembène's literary masterpiece and a landmark of postcolonial African fiction.