Mapped
God's Bits of Wood
Ousmane Sembène
The long railway strike of 1947-48 seen from the line itself. The workshops of Thiès stop, and from there the walkout runs west to the capital and port at Dakar and east along the track to Bamako. When the men are starved back toward defeat, the women take up the fight and march the road from Thiès to Dakar. The map holds the western Senegal stretch of that strike.
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So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ
Newly widowed, the Senegalese schoolteacher Ramatoulaye writes a long letter to her lifelong friend Aissatou, taking stock of her marriage, her husband's taking of a young second wife, and the choices open to educated women in post-independence Senegal. Mariama Bâ's landmark of African women's writing is set in the real Dakar: the widow's house through the confinement of mourning, the mosque and the rites, the schools where the two women trained as pioneers, and the wider world Aissatou escapes to.
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