Sembène's road to a better Africa: a multicultural and multidisciplinary study of God's Bits of Wood

God's Bits of Wood, Ousmane Sembene's third and best-known novel, is a fictionalized account of a 1947 railroad workers strike of the Dakar-Niger railway line. Published in 1960, it conveys a feminist opinion far ahead of its time. The novel culminates in a "Women's March" in which the wives, sisters and daughters of the workers walk from one end of the railway to the other to bring the strike to victory. Unusually, the novel has no single protagonist. Instead, Sembene's many protagonists— men and women, Western-educated and traditional, old and young, Wolof and Bambara — band together into one cohesive force that finally prevails against their oppressors. The characters' understanding of the perils and virtues of education and their embrace of both tradition and modernity are two of the most important themes of this novel.