God’s Bits of Wood

Ousmane Sembene

Taking as his subject one of the first major and successful acts of political protest by Africans in the area of organised (unionised) labour, Ousmane Sembene, a Senegalese author who is now also widely acclaimed as one of the continent’s foremost filmmakers produced one of the masterpieces of African Europhone writing.

Sembene wrote this novel in French and it was first published in 1960 as Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu, and two years later in the English translation.

The expression Sembene uses as his title is a saying in one of the extended families whose lives he so vividly depicts: considering it disrespectful to count family members, they prefer to refer to them as “God’s bits of wood”. Of course this practice is an early pointer to the communal ethos and the ex unitate vires theme of this account; in which Sembene succeeds so admirably in making his reader aware of the ordinary, valid cause, the familial values, that so often fuel political resistance.

That the author is a filmmaker is perhaps discernible in the panoramic sweep of his descriptions: the account with which he presents us here could also be described as having an epic dimension. For Sembene’s narrative is strung out along the full length of the Dakar-Niger railway line, and in telling the story of the eleven months it took the striking workers (and their suffering families) to succeed in their cause, the author concentrates on the lives of affected communities in three main centres: Dakar, the great port city and capital of Senegal; the neighbouring centre of Thiès; and the much further inland city of Bamako, located beyond the border of Mali.

In Sembene’s account he makes clear, however, that there is a powerful sense of solidarity among all these people, bound as they are by a common cause — but this commitment is severely tested during the weary, deeply stressful months of their struggle. Their loyalty to their cause (and to one another), he shows, has deep roots, for not only is it founded on socialist principles and a deep indignation against the racist, culturally bigoted and exploitative tendencies in their French bosses, but it harks back to ancient African unities, long preceding the divisions of the national borders established in later times.

Sembene’s writing is vividly, even brilliantly detailed, and what used to be called “pregnant” — ie filled with many implications and references, as well as deep feelings of empathy.

Here is how he evokes the City of Thiès at the beginning of his second chapter:

Hovels. A few rickety shacks, some upturned tombs, walls
of bamboo or millet stalks, iron barbs, and rotting fences. Thiès:
a vast, uncertain plain where all the rot of the city has gathered —
stakes and crossties, locomotive wheels, rusty shafts, knocked-in
jerricans, old mattress springs, bruised and lacerated sheets of
steel. And then, a little farther on, on the goat path that leads to
the Bambara quarter, piles of old tin cans, heaps of excrement,
little mountains of broken pottery and cooking tools, dismantled
railway cars, skeletons of motors buried in the dust, and the tiny remains of cats, of rats, of chickens, disputed by the birds. Thiès:
in the midst of corruption, a few meagre bushes — wild tomato,
dwarf peppers, and okra — whose pitiful fruits were harvested by
the women. Bald-sided goats and sheep, clotted with filth, came
here to graze — to graze on what? — the air? Constantly hungry,
naked children, with sunken chests and swollen bellies, argued
with the vultures. Thiès: a place where everyone — man, woman, and child — had a face the colour of the earth. (13)

The above description applies to the condition of the people affected by the strike before the punitive measures of the French colonial labour authorities have taken hold — so the reader has a clear sense of the indigence of the people affected by those measures — which will include even the cutting off of their water supply, after the effects of starvation have begun to make themselves felt.

What is also discernible in that description, however, is that despite the quite obvious squalor of the Bambara people who live here, Sembene has not even an inkling of contempt for them, but only a profound sympathy. Moreover, one can discern here, in his reference to the women of the community harvesting the “pitiful fruits” of the bushes growing there, an early sign of Sembene’s focus on and equal recognition of the contribution of women to the anti-colonial struggle — a feature of his work for which he has been justifiably praised.

To say this is not to suggest that Sembene is merely a maker of vaguely feminist gestures, suspect concessions to a gender “lobby” of some kind. On the contrary — his social vision is convincingly inclusive and as balanced as it is various.

To concentrate for the moment on his female characters: these range from the precocious child Ad’jibid’ji to Ramatoulaye, the motherly, somewhat severe but powerful head of the Dakar family compound. Then there are N’Deye Touti, the initially “Frenchified”, haughty young beauty who eventually undergoes a crisis of “cultural loyalty”; Maïmouna, the blind woman of proverbially deep insight; Dieynaba, the pipe-smoking mother who heads another extended household; Penda, the feisty young prostitute who ends up organising and leading the final stage of this struggle — the days-long women’s march to Dakar from Thiès; and Awa, the fat, lazy, jealous troublemaker of that march. What the author abundantly illustrates is what reserves of courage, ingenuity and (above all) endurance the women have to draw on in order for the extended strike action to succeed — and how crucial their contribution is.

Not that Sembene neglects or overlooks the role of the men in the three communities.

There is the predictable traitor, Diara, and the earnest, almost buffoon-like Tiémoko, who makes the political advance of organising a trial to determine the guilt of and the punishment due to Diara; Samba N’Doulougou, who is a human news gazette; the youth nicknamed Beaugosse for his handsomeness, who eventually also betrays the strike; and many others.

For Sembene’s text feels to the reader like the experience of participation in a number of densely social occasions: the strike meeting; the trial; household confabulations; the women’s revolts on several occasions; tense encounters with the French colonial business leaders; the march of the women; and so on. The author’s vision is so inclusive and so much the gaze of one familiar with the whole social gamut, that this is not a novel of “heroes” or “heroines” (or, indeed, of villains) in any conventional sense. Indeed, he depicts also a wide spectrum of ages — from a little newborn baby to the very old — with such intense interest that the reader is familiarised, even from a wholly different social sphere, to feel “at home” in these characters’ company.

Two or three characters are perhaps, if slightly, outstanding — they are Old Niakoro, the devoutly Muslim, aged family and community leader respectfully known as “the Old One”, and his nephew Ibrahim Bakayoko, the chief organiser of the strike, who is considered the intellectual giant of the entire effort. Bakayoko is not idealised, as his somewhat harsh ways are frequently exposed, but Sembene shows the reader that, without the addition of his energy and insight, all the other contributions were unlikely to have delivered the eventual successful outcome of the demand for a fairer employment dispensation for the Senegalese and Malinese (Mandingo) workers.

And yet, the text ends with the words of one of Maïmouna’s songs: “But happy is the man who does battle without hatred” (245). When Bakayoko is shown in the aftermath of the strike inviting his long-suffering, “inherited” wife out for an evening’s entertainment, the reader approves the consideration of her feelings he shows here (at last), but one recalls also his earlier courting of N’Deye Touti and his later decision to make the courageous Penda his second wife (she is shot down by colonial police as the women’s march enters Dakar — one of the numerous casualties of the strike period). Bakayoko is contrasted — also in his sexual conduct — with the deep purity of spirit of the men of an earlier time. But then, Sembene has shown, harsher times breed harder people. In the aftermath, something of the more humane values can be retrieved, but everyone concerned is irretrievably altered by the process of political change.

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