God's Bits Of Wood
SynopsisPlot
God’s Bits of Wood is a powerful novel about the 1947–48 railway strike in Senegal and Mali, showing how African workers and their families unite to fight colonial exploitation. Through vivid storytelling and strong female characters, Sembène Ousmane portrays solidarity, sacrifice, and the collective struggle for dignity and justice.
Story
About this book
God's Bits of Wood by Sembène Ousmane is a novel based on the real railway strike that took place along the Dakar-Niger line in 1947 and 1948. Workers on the colonial railway in French West Africa walked off the job to demand better wages and equal treatment. The strike affected communities across Senegal and into Mali, and the novel follows several of those communities as the stoppage stretches on for months.
Ousmane builds the story around a large cast of characters rather than a single protagonist. Women play central roles, organizing support networks and confronting both colonial authorities and local resistance to change. The novel tracks how hunger, repression, and isolation test the solidarity of the strikers and their families, while also reshaping relationships within the communities themselves.
First published in French in 1960 under the title Les bouts de bois de Dieu, the book draws on a real historical event to explore questions of labor, collective action, and colonial power in West Africa. Ousmane, who was Senegalese, later became widely known as a filmmaker as well as a novelist.
