Ousmane Sembene: la lutte continue! A personal tribute.(In memoriam)

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-DEC-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Indiana University Press

In 1972, I was an eleventh-grade student at the Lyc6e Faidherbe, in the Senegalese city of Saint Louis, in northern Senegal. That year will remain deeply cast in my memory because it was the year a single book made me lose my political innocence and changed my worldview. God's Bits of Wood, acclaimed around the world as Sembene's masterpiece, was my first ever contact with "African" literature. Sembene's 1960 novel has an epic dimension, in that the 1947-1948 railroad workers' strike it dramatizes took place in a vast geographical area, along a railroad line that stretches over 1,287 kilometers from Dakar (Senegal), headquarters of Afrique occidentale francaise--AOF (French West Africa) on the Atlantic, all the way to Kayes and Bamako, on the banks of the Niger River. A myriad of peoples, cultures, histories, religions, and, of course, languages melt into each other in the heat of industrialization and urbanization generated by the Machine. God's Bits of Wood is a story about revival through struggle of millions of people, all compelled by a desire for change, reaching across all imagined lines, and, as Sembene himself would put it, "a demonstration that...

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