Ousmane Sembène, Les Bouts de bois de Dieu

More than forty years ago, before I went to university, I was living in Paris and became an “organized sympathiser”, a candidate for membership, of the Trotskyist sect Lutte Ouvrière. The training for people like me consisted, of course, of reading some Marxist classics, but also of making one’s way through a list of novels that included, as I recall, Zola’s Germinal, Christiane Rochefort’s Les Stances à Sophie, Malraux’s Les Conquérants and La Condition Humaine, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, London’s The Iron Heel and certainly some others that I forget. One of the books that I never got round to was Ousmane Sembène’s Les Bouts de bois de Dieu, and I had more or less forgotten about it until a contact on social media with whom I share many mutual friends reported reading it after a trip to Senegal. So I thought I would give it a go.

It is one of the most remarkable novels I have read in the past several years and deserves to be widely knows as a classic. It is an epic constructed somewhat in the manner of a great Russian novel (think of Grossman’s Life and Fate, for example) and centres on a strike of African railway workers, against the French rail company and the colonial administration in 1947-8. The strikers are poor, many of them are illiterate, they are Muslims, many are in polygamous families and they are regarded by the French as savages and by their religious leaders as people who ought to be grateful and know their place. Yet they have their dignity and cannot accept that they are worth less than the whites who work on the railway, that they should have no entitlement to family support, or to a pension in their old age. So they strike, heedless of the advice of their elders who had done the same ten years before.

The hero, if there is one is Ibrahima Bakayoko, a charismatic leader with a complicated domestic and love life. Yet for a good half of the novel he does not feature, we are waiting for him. Instead, after the initial decision and some ensuing violence and death, most of the action focuses on three groups of households, in Bamako, Thiès and Dakar and on the struggle of the women to survive in the absence of wages. Sembène is a master of description and of set-piece scenes that capture the essence of the conflict: the killing of a ram belonging to a quisling character, the trial of a strikebreaker, raids by teenage apprentices armed with slingshots, the death of a grouchy old caretaker who is trying to catch rats to eat, the raids by colonial authorities and the resulting death and destruction, a march by the women of Thiès to Dakar to demand justice, the embittered ranting of the old colonials, the prison and the torture of detainees. He also conjures wonderful characters: Penda “the whore” who hates men but fights alongside them, N’Deye Touti who wishes she was white and suffers that harsh lesson that she is not, Maïmouna the blind woman with her twin babies that nobody knows the paternity of, Fa Keïta the elderly and devout railworker who preaches forgiveness and humanity in the face of colonial cruelty. In many ways the women, often the polygamous wives of the striking men, are the central characters: depicted with dignity, agency and not at all as they might feature in the white liberal imagination.

In brief, I cannot recommend it highly enough. There is an English edition in the Heinemann African Writer’s series (where the author’s name is given as Sembene Ousmane) but I haven’t checked the translation which seems to have many fewer pages than the original (but maybe the print is small). It would make a great movie on the scale of Dr Zhivago, but they don’t make them like that any more.