God's Bits of Wood

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.

The strikers and the women

Bamako, the eastern terminus

Bamako

The story opens far up the line in the eastern railway town of Bamako, in the French Sudan that is now Mali. Here an old man and a watchful girl stand for the families who keep the strike alive along the whole length of the track, before the action swings west toward the sea.

Bamako sections

explicit Bamako is named as one of the three towns of the strike. It sits about twelve hundred kilometres east in what was then French Sudan, today Mali, so it lies well outside the western Senegal frame; this marks the city centre.

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