Our first book drop this month addressed the Pre-colonial conditions in Africa, and today, we have a revelatory novel that examines how colonialism affected West African workers, and the steps they took to liberate themselves.

If you’ve been following our month-long deep dive into African Cinema, then it is likely that you by now are familiar with the “father of African Film” Ousmane Sembène. But before Sembène revolutionized the filmmaking scene in his homeland of Senegal, he was one of Africa’s pre-eminent literacy figures, as well as a radical union organizer.

In God’s Bits of Wood, Sembène focuses the story on a historical railroad union drive in Senegal against the French overlords. Set in the 1940s and heavily informed by the author’s own life-long political project of bringing Socialist change to the African continent, the novel is a sprawling epic about how local action can set off a chain-reaction of class consciousness far beyond the bounds of city and state. Women’s role in revolution is also a major theme, as many of the workers’ wives stepped-up to march and demonstrate against the oppressors, altering not only African political history, but how they are seen in their community at large.

The railway itself almost becomes a character, a metaphor for the alienation of the workers who are laboring to connect their own land at the behest of foreigners who only seek to profit from a more extensive network. Sembène’s lyrical prose and radical outlook make this novel an absolute must read.