God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane, Sembene - 1976

Heinemann, 1976. Mass Market Paperback. Very Good. SEMBENE OUSMANE was born in Senegal in 1923. He started life as a fisherman. He then went to I'Ecole de Ceramique at Marsassoum, from where he went on to Dakar to be plumber, bricklayer and apprentice mechanic. He was conscripted and fought in the Italian and German campaigns of the European war. He became a docker and trade union leader in Marseilles, and out of this experience he wrote Le Docker Noir (1956). He has also published 6 Pays, mon beau peuple (1957), L'Harmattan( 1964) and a collection of stories, Voltaique (1962). In 1 947-8 the railway workers on the Dakar-Niger line came out on strike. This novel is an imaginative evocation of how those long days affected the lives of the people who lived along the hundreds of miles of track. One sees what ordinary workers and their families put up with. But from the moment they were successful, the strikers could live with the presence of the Europeans; it showed that they could regain control of their country. This is one of the most important experiments there has been in attempting to synthesize a traditional African narrative form with the European novel.