Hovels. A few rickety shacks, some upturned tombs, walls of bamboo or millet stalks, iron barbs, and rotting fences. Thiès: a vast, uncertain plain where all the rot of the city has gathered – stakes and crossties, locomotive wheels, rusty shafts, knocked-in jerricans, old mattress springs, bruised and lacerated sheets of steel. And then, a little farther on, on the goat path that leads to the Bambara quarter, piles of old tin cans, heaps of excrement, little mountains of broken pottery and cooking tools, dismantled railway cars, skeletons of motors buried in the dust, and the tiny remains of cats, of rats, of chickens, disputed by the birds. Thiès: in the midst of this corruption, a few meager bushes – wild tomato, dwarf peppers, and okra – whose pitiful fruits were harvested by the women. Bald-sided goats and sheep, clotted with filth, came here to graze – to graze on what? – the air? Constantly hungry, naked children, with sunken chests and swollen bellies, argued with the vultures. Thiès: a place where everyone – man, woman, and child – had a face the color of the earth.
Still a little farther on, at Dialav, there were houses made of wood. Unsteady houses, shored up with beams or trunks of trees, ready to fall down at the first gust of wind, but houses just the same. The roofs were held together by stones and iron bars and old jugs filled with earth, and the holes in the tarpaulin of the outhouses were plugged with rags and cardboard, but they were houses.
Beyond this were the homes of the more fortunate, who had acquired obsolete freight or passenger cars from the railway and mounted them on crossties.
From Randoulène to the watchmen’s barracks, from the outskirts of Thiès to Dialav, the houses, the trees, and the land itself lay buried in a thick coating of black dust spewed out by the locomotives. The maintenance and repair shops were located here, as well as the headquarters of both the railroad company and the union. Every inhabitant of Thiès, no matter who he was, depended on the railroad, and on the traffic between Koulikoro and Dakar.
SAMBA N’DOULOUGOU
One by one the stars faded into the light of morning, and the rising sun restored to objects their true outlines. The workmen rose early that morning. In truth, they had scarcely closed their eyes. The night before they had made a decision, and today they must abide by it, but there was not one of them who did not experience a feeling of uneasiness, a void in the pit of his stomach.
The first ones to go out pushed through the hedges and rapped lightly against a neighboring wall of wood or zinc, to be answered by a voice still heavy with sleep, and then another man would leave his house. Like a column of military ants they invaded the paths and streets, shaking hands with each other as they met, exchanging meaningless greetings. Little by little, the jangling of bicycle bells and the sputter of motor scooters roused them from their torpor, but they spoke hardly at all. Even the young men, usually noisy and exuberant, were silent; and what laughter there was was forced. No one dared ask the question that burned on all their lips – ‘What do you think of the strike?’ – because no one would have dared to answer.
When they came to the grade crossing they stopped, and Boubacar, who was one of the ironworkers, said, ‘Look – here comes “the station gazette.”’
Approaching them, at the head of a little group of men, was Samba N’Doulougou, who was known to everyone as a regular walking newspaper. He was a curious little man, and ordinarily the sight of him was enough to cause laughter among the others. He dressed always in old American khakis, with the shirt hanging out over the pants, and the pants, which were much too long, falling in pleats around his sandals. He tugged constantly at an old cap with a broken visor.
‘I don’t see why you are hesitating,’ he said, speaking to all the uneasy faces he saw before him. ‘Last night was the time to give your opinion. It’s too late to turn back now.’
It was Bachirou, ‘the bureaucrat’, a man who worked on the office staff of the railway, who answered. ‘Perhaps the night has made us wiser. We must look at things squarely; our union is still not very strong, and perhaps we have not examined all the consequences of a strike.’
‘What do you mean? Everything was examined, studied, and discussed last night! Look at things squarely, you say? Very well – squarely in front of us are the workshops. If you are afraid of blood you cannot be a butcher, but without butchers there would be no meat.’
‘That’s a lot of nonsense!’
‘And what you are saying is not?’ Samba was growing angry. A crowd had gathered around the two men, listening, knowing that this argument between two of their own number was an expression of their own troubled thoughts. ‘What you are saying is not nonsense? Then you should have said it last night, and not this morning – but last night you were not there. And why? I will tell you why – because you work in their office, and you think you are one of them. You go everywhere, saying, “I am part of the office staff.” That is why you want this strike to fail.’
‘So you’ve been spying on me! If I didn’t come last night it was because …’
‘Listen, Bachirou. At heart, you are not even happy with yourself – you keep wondering where you really belong. With the workers? The bosses will get rid of you. With the bosses? Then you would be a foreigner to us. And in this strike that is what you are – you are more of a foreigner than Monsieur le directeur himself!’
In this way the discussion went on until the group of men had arrived at the market place. The air had grown very still. In the east the sun was climbing the slope of the sky.
The market place covered all of the station plaza, the square at the grade crossing, and the Place Aly N’Guer. A constant, hive-like buzzing and the clouds of powdery dust greeted everyone who entered the area. Almost anything could be found here: bread in whole loaves or portions; local pastries, and sugar, in crystals or in powder; cigarettes of every make, in packages or separately; smoking tobacco as well as snuff; even flints, and cigarette lighters made by the machinists in the railway shops.
On the Place Aly N’Guer were the stalls of the women who sold foodstuffs. Standing behind their counters, neatly dressed, they called out to the passers-by, trying to tempt them with the variety of their offerings: papayas, earthnuts, and fritters of all kinds; fish or meat balls; sweet potatoes, fried or raw; steaming porridges of maize and of millet; rootstocks of cassava, roasted in hot ashes or cooked in sauce like kidney beans and served to the customer in bowls. It could all be bought on credit – ‘on the back of the month’, as the saying went.
And everywhere swarmed the market’s most numerous denizens – the beggars and the flies. There were beggars of every age, crying their misery aloud, while the great, blue-green flies floated between the dishes on the food stalls and the sores on the faces and limbs of the beggars. If they were brushed away they simply went elsewhere, moving in small, black clouds.
Dieynaba had set up her stand a little apart from the market proper, on the corner nearest the workshops. Seated on her bench, her legs stretched out comfortably, she was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the crowd through half-closed eyes. On the stand before her was an enormous gourd filled with porridge. To her right there was a pile of smaller gourds, and to her left a bowl in which spoons were soaking in a bubbling, blackish water. Dieynaba never solicited customers, as the other women did, but simply waited for them to come to her, puffing calmly at her pipe, wreathed in a cloud of smoke. When one of the workmen came up, she would rise to serve him, and as he ate she would scratch out his name on her list and then go back to waiting.
Dieynaba’s neighbor was Maïmouna, and the two women got along well. Maïmouna was blind, but this is not to say that she was pitiable. Far from it. She held her splendid, smooth-skinned body like some goddess of the night, her head high, her vacant glance seeming to contemplate an area above people, beyond the world. Seated now, with her legs crossed, she had opened a threadbare cotton blouse and was nursing one of her twins. The other, held between her thighs, made little paddling motions with its arms, trying to reach her. No one knew anything about Maïmouna, except that she was blind, but everyone liked to hear her sing, and throughout the day there would be people who had stopped to listen. On this morning she was singing the legend of Goumba N’Diaye, the woman who had measured her strength against that of men, before she lost her sight. The rhythms of the old chant could be heard above the noise of the crowd.
Samba N’Doulougou came up, followed by his little band of workmen.
‘You are late, Samba,’ Dieynaba said. ‘The smelters and the ironworkers have already been here. Here, take the list and see the names I have marked.’
Samba took the list, and as Dieynaba filled gourds for the others he wrote down their names.
‘You seem to be scratching out more than you are writing,’ said Bachirou. There were beady grains of porridge dripping down his chin.
‘They have names that could derail a train.’
‘Do you want me to take your place?’ asked Boubacar, pretending to reach for the pencil.
‘You? No one would be able to read it,’ Samba replied, knowing very well that Boubacar could neither read nor write. ‘Ah, there’s Magatte! Come here, my boy, and rescue an old man.’
For a moment Samba watched the boy, whose wrist seemed hardly to move as he wrote, and then, as the others began to discuss the strike again, he walked over toward Maïmouna.
The whole body of the blind woman stiffened, her normally gentle features contracted, and hot tears seemed to well in the naked cavities of her eyes.
‘Don’t touch the children,’ she said softly.
Samba, who had not opened his mouth, drew back. Dieynaba had watched the fleeting little drama with astonishment, but she said nothing. Like everyone else, she had no idea who was the father of the twins.
*
When they had finished eating, the men began to gather in front of the gate, and soon there was a tangle of bicycles and motor scooters leaning against the fence that surrounded the yards. On a normal day they would have gone quickly to their respective shops, but today they just hung about at the entrance. They were all there – the men who worked on the trains themselves and the laborers from the marshaling yards, the switchmen and the office workers – those who should have been on duty and those who were not.
The great gate was open, but in the main court there was just one man. Leaning heavily on his cane, Sounkaré, the head watchman, surveyed the crowd with an expression of astonishment on his face and then made his way, in his awkward, crab-like gait, toward a group of the old men, who were standing by themselves.
‘This is strange,’ he said, after greeting them.
‘Very strange, indeed,’ Bakary replied, between two fits of coughing. ‘But soon we will know what is going to happen.’
Bakary was tuberculous, and no one who saw him could have failed to know it. The years behind the firebox of the trains had turned the skin of his face to gray and covered it with tough film, like callus.
‘So they are not going to work?’ the watchman muttered. ‘They have short memories, these children! But you …’ He turned to the group of old men. ‘Surely you will not follow them?’
‘That’s just what we were talking about. Some of them came to see us this morning, to ask if we agreed with their demands.’
‘What demands?’ asked Sounkaré. ‘I have demanded nothing.’ He paused and laughed. ‘But then, I don’t have much longer to live.’
‘You are not as ill as I am, Sounkaré,’ Bakary said. ‘The sickness in my chest will be with me always. I thought they were talking just about salaries, but I went to their meetings, and I found that they were talking about a pension, too – a pension that would affect us, and not just the young ones. Look around you …’ he coughed and turned his head to spit a little ball of black phlegm into the dust. ‘Look around you. There are not very many of us any more. Where are all the others – Aliou Samba, and Abdoulaye, and Coulibaly, and the Davids who came from the island of Gorée – they had no pension, and now they are dead. Soon it will be our turn, and what are we to live on? And the fathers of the white men, the ones who taught us our trade – the Edouards and the Henris and the Delacollines – where are they? They are living at home again, and they have their pensions. Why should we not have this pension, too? That is what the young ones are asking.’
‘Ha! I can see that these children have led you astray. God in His wisdom may help you, Bakary, but the toubabs may refuse. From here to Koulikoro, everything that moves belongs to them. Even our lives belong to them.’
‘Don’t mix religion in this. Perhaps it is true that it is the will of God, but we must live. And it is not written, “God loves to help him who strives to help himself”!’
A new fit of coughing racked Bakary, and he was forced to stop. He squatted on the ground, hands pressed against his temples, looking like a little old toad.
At this moment Boubacar, the ironworker, came over to greet the old men.
‘Is it true, Boubacar, that you are not going to work today?’ the watchman asked.
‘Don’t you see, père Sounkaré, that no one has passed through your gate?’
‘But if you aren’t going to work, why did you come here?’
The question was unexpected, and it perplexed the old men as much as it did Boubacar.
And then the waiting began; a long wait, broken into minutes, into seconds. The words that had been spoken were spoken again, and all the words that had been heard were pondered and studied again. Little by little, anxiety came, and a fear that settled heavily in their stomachs. It was a fear not unmixed with an ill-defined hope, the sort of hope a man who does not believe in God might place in divine intervention. As the time ran on they became a prey to the minutes and the seconds, and the great gate, standing open before them, seemed to be waiting, too.
The intolerable silence was broken by Bachirou, ‘the bureaucrat’. He was wearing a white linen suit, which fitted badly over a crooked left shoulder. The pockets sagged beneath the constant weight of his hands.
‘When you think about it,’ he said, ‘the thing has been badly done. We should never have started a strike in the middle of the month.’
‘That is true,’ said one of the workmen, whose name was Sow. ‘I cannot even pay my debts. I have been ill, and already I owe all of my salary for four months. This is not the time to start a strike.’
‘That is a special case, a personal thing; but what of the rest of us? Where does it get us?’
A man who was sitting on a motorcycle spoke up. ‘Last night we were lucky that the soldiers didn’t interfere, but now the whole place will be surrounded, and there is sure to be fighting.’
In the midst of this uneasiness, of these doubts and conflicting questions, Samba N’Doulougou moved from group to group, rallying those who were undecided, rebuking the defectors. He deserved the nickname of ‘station gazette;’ he knew everyone, and he had the latest news on everything.
He rejoined Boubacar in front of the gate. The enormous smith and the little carpenter were old friends.
‘I can smell out the cowards a hundred meters off,’ he said. ‘It’s too bad Bakayoko isn’t here; if he were, they wouldn’t talk like that! I’d like to crack their stupid skulls for them!’ He waved a tiny fist, and the giant Boubacar laughed.
Not far from where they stood, Bachirou was going on with his harangue. ‘Suppose they refuse everything: the pay raise, the pensions, the auxiliary workmen, everything? What can we do? It would be madness to go on – it would just be stupidity!’
Samba hitched up his pants and tugged at the visor of his cap. ‘Why are you trying to discourage them, Bachirou? Because you are on the staff, and the idea of any of the rest of us being on it, too, is enough to make you piss in your pants? Because you’re jealous of everyone, and think only about yourself? Sow – you were sick, weren’t you? And who gave you money when you needed it? Bachirou, your boss? Do you know what he did when Gaye and Lahbib were on the night shift? He made them pay a kickback to him, on their overtime! He only hands out money when there’s a collection for a death, because everyone would know if he didn’t. This is our first strike, and we’re going through with it! Bachirou is a coward!’
‘Me, a coward! No! But don’t forget about 1938. Let’s wait for the delegates …’
It was Boubacar who interrupted now. ‘We have thought about 1938, but that was before the war! If you ever came to the union meetings you would know that we had talked about it, and we know everything that happened.’ The blacksmith’s voice was harsh. Without quite knowing why, he hated Bachirou from the bottom of his heart – hated his posturing and his obsequious manners.
‘We have to hang on,’ Samba said. ‘We have to know what we want, and we have to stand together.’
‘And we ought to pull up our pants!’ Bachirou laughed.
Samba refused to be annoyed by the joke. ‘Bakayoko has told us: “It isn’t those who are taken by force, put in chains and sold as slaves who are the real slaves: it is those who will accept it, morally and physically.”’
‘Oh yes, I know. “The Bambara” is a great one for theory, but we’ve got to be practical, too. He goes around making speeches, but where is he now?’ Bachirou looked at Boubacar. ‘It doesn’t matter to me, though. I don’t belong to the lowest classes.’
‘And you think that I do? I am a smith, by birth and by trade; and even if my parents did have to accept a menial place, that doesn’t mean that I will be anyone’s slave.’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Samba said. ‘Can’t you see that this pen pusher is afraid?’
‘You’re both out to get me,’ Bachirou said.
Boubacar thrust his great body toward him. ‘If you ever try anything, I’ll kill you!’
*
But at that moment a noise which they had all noticed a moment earlier grew suddenly louder, and every head turned to watch, putting an end to the quarrel. With a rhythmic thudding of boots and a clash of metal, a troop of soldiers was marching in from the highway. Above the ordered ranks of men the steel of bayonets flashed, reflecting the rays of the sun, like some great, upended harrowing machine; and the workmen’s eyes were caught by the gleaming movement. In the market place, before the workshops, and in the streets, all other noise had ceased. The shopkeepers hastily gathered together their merchandise, without bothering about what they left behind, and even the beggars had vanished. Bakary withdrew into the crowd, and Magatte, the apprentice, began herding the other young men toward the grade crossing. Only Maïmouna, the prisoner of her infirmity, queen of her shadowy realm, had not moved. She was singing a new verse in the legend of Goumba N’Diaye:
‘I have come to take a wife,’ the stranger said.
‘My bridegroom must be stronger than I,
There are my father’s fields,
And there are the abandoned scythes,’ replied Goumba N’Diaye.
And the stranger took up a scythe.
Two days each week, and still they came not to the end,
But the man could not vanquish the girl.
In the midst of the abruptly silent crowd, only the voice of Maïmouna was still heard, muting the sounds of spiked boots and the shuffling of naked feet. The men were going round in circles, huddling together like frightened animals being led into a trap. With their weapons held ready, the soldiers spread out in a thin line, stationing themselves between the fence and the crowd of workers.
‘There are the delegates!’ cried Bachirou suddenly, as if even he had been hoping for the arrival of some savior.
At the sight of their own leaders, the crowd seemed to forget its anxiety, the tense faces relaxed, and the closed fists opened. As one man, the workers rushed to greet the seven newcomers, holding out their hands to them, frenziedly.
Doudou, the secretary-general, was preparing to make some kind of an announcement, but his voice was suddenly drowned out by the shrieking of the siren, and immediately the anxiety returned: sweat ran down their faces and oozed in the hollow of their hands, their eyes went dull, their thick-lipped mouths hung open. The first blast of the siren seemed longer than usual. The silence gripped them again; a silence which rendered movement, and even thought, impossible.
The great entrance gate still stood open, but no one moved toward it. When the siren screamed again, a shudder went through the crowd. The sound seemed to enter into their bodies, to mingle with their blood. For as long as they could remember, that sound had meant obedience. As children they had seen their fathers, and even their grandfathers, begin to run when they heard it call. It had always told them when to leave their houses, and to walk up here and pass through the gate, and it had punctuated their working day.
Sounkaré, the lame watchman, went back into the courtyard and disappeared. Bakary was not even coughing any longer, as if his illness had suddenly left him. Bachirou, the hesitant; Boubacar, the smith; and Doudou himself remained silent. Magatte and the other apprentices studied the supply of pebbles they had gathered together between the rails. But Maïmouna, the mother of children without a father, continued to sing:
For two moons they cleared the land,
And neither the stranger nor Goumba N’Diaye
Would confess to being vanquished.
Beat on all the drums!
‘Stranger,’ demanded Goumba N’Diaye,
‘From what country do you come?’
And the stranger replied, ‘I am from every country.
I am a man like every man.’
‘It is not true,’ said Goumba N’Diaye.
‘For many seasons, men have fled from me.
Men are not alike.’
And while Maïmouna sang thus, in praise of living, one of the twins left her lap and began to crawl toward the bicycles.
*
It was Samba N’Doulougou – a difficult name to remember, but more difficult still to forget – who was the first to recover. Jumping up onto Boubacar’s shoulders, he cried out, ‘Hurrah for the strike!’ – and then, perched on his friend’s back, he began shouting to the crowd in Bambara.
That was when the soldiers charged.
The battle was joined in an instant, and with every available weapon: the butt ends of muskets, the tips of bayonets, the soles of heavy boots, and tear-gas bombs. Cries of rage, of pain, and of fear mingled in single clamor, rising to the morning sky. The crowd fell back, breaking into terrified segments, then regrouped, wavered, and fell back again. Dieynaba had rallied the women of the market place, and like a band of Amazons they came to the rescue, armed with clubs, with iron bars, and bottles. From the grade crossing, Magatte and the apprentices had opened up a regular barrage of pebbles. Everything that could be picked up was flying through the air. The officer in command of the detachment of soldiers had lost his helmet, and his forehead was bleeding. One soldier had been caught by a group of workers, and his screams could be heard above the tumult. In the market place itself, not a single stall remained standing; the conflict was everywhere at once.
Maïmouna no longer sang. The twin which had escaped from her lap was playing with the spokes of a bicycle wheel, when a fleeing man seized the handlebar and tried to pull the machine away. The child screamed, and the man dropped the bicycle, which fell across the baby’s body. At this moment Bachirou came running up, pursued by some militiamen. He cleared the bicycle with a single leap, but the heavy boots of the soldiers came down on the frame and the rear wheel, whose axle rested squarely on the child’s head. With a little cry, like that of a wounded animal, the wailing stopped.
Holding the second baby in one arm, and with her other hand stretched out before her, Maïmouna heard the cry, but just as she did she was knocked from her feet by a running man. She fell forward, clutching the child against her breast, and stayed there, on hands and knees, her arched back forming a shield, her head moving swiftly from left to right, like an animal seized by panic.
Farther on, two soldiers had driven Demba, the smelter, up against the fence and were raining blows of their rifles and bayonets on his head and abdomen. In his flight, Bachirou collided with Dieynaba.
‘Where are you going, coward?’ she said, handing him a rock to throw; but he just stammered something and ran off again.
From the height of the roadbed at the grade crossing, Magatte and the apprentices were still launching salvos of stones. The riot had spread through all of Thiès. Other men had come from the market to help the workers, but more armed men had also arrived, from the airfield and the watchmen’s barracks. Finally, toward the middle of the morning, the conflict stopped, but not the turmoil. The strikers held the market place, the grade crossing, the station square, and the fringes of the marshaling yards, but the station and the workshops themselves were guarded by soldiers, ready to shoot. The noisy mass of people was so dense that carts and automobiles were forced to detour around the center of the city and rejoin the highway farther on.