Fact and Fiction in God's Bits of Wood

Abstract

With that in mind, this article examines various accounts of the 194748 railroad strike in French West Africa. The 1947-48 strike was a watershed event in colonial history that ended in victory over the colonial adminis? tration. The struggle furthered the formation of mass movements to fight for independence, and the setdement consolidated social changes that rendered colonialism unstable. The events ofthe strike have been preserved in colonial archives that contain French administrative records on legal and economic aspects of the strike, by eyewitnesses who provided their own recollections to in ter viewers in the early 1990s, and in the form of a histor? ical novel by Ousmane Sembene entitled God's Bits ofWood. God's Bits ofWood is not only a staple of world literature classes in the West, but it is also widely read in Senegal and Mali where the strike occurred. Its popularity in those countries creates problems for oral his? torians who wish to study the strike (Cooper, Our Strike 81). This article compares the two versions of the strike presented by Sembene and the French colonial authorities using archival documents, interviews with Sembene and strike participants, and new scholarship by historians of French West Africa. The purpose of this comparison is to describe points of convergence and divergence between the two accounts, and to evaluate discrepancies in light of events that occurred at the time Sembene's book