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Copyright © 2000 by The Indiana University Press. All rights reserved.
Research in African Literatures 31.2 (2000) 117-131


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Fact and Fiction in God's Bits of Wood

James A. Jones

The history of a complex social movement is probably unknowable. Eyewitnesses provide the most vivid impressions, but they lack the broad perspective that places individual events in a wider context. Scholars who examine history "after the fact" benefit from a broader perspective, but are forced to select from the "facts" that eyewitnesses choose to record or remember. Neither approach combines first-hand knowledge of events with a complete understanding of how those events are interconnected.

With that in mind, this article examines various accounts of the 1947-48 railroad strike in French West Africa. The 1947-48 strike was a watershed event in colonial history that ended in victory over the colonial administration. The struggle furthered the formation of mass movements to fight for independence, and the settlement consolidated social changes that rendered colonialism unstable. The events of the 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 interviewers in the early 1990s, and in the form of a historical novel by Ousmane Sembene entitled God's Bits of Wood.

God's Bits of Wood 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 historians 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...