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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
This article is concerned with the portrayal of law in colonial conflict in the work of Senegalese author Sembene Ousmane, focussing in particular on the novel Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu. There Ousmane dramutises an actual strike of railway workers in 1947 in order to mount a prophetic critique of post-independence Senegal. In convening a tribunal to try strike-breakers, the workers demonstrate the constitutive, law-creating power which, Ousmane implies, still resides in newly independent peoples. This alternative legality is achieved in spite of the twin pressures of orthodox universalism, on the one hand, and passive traditionalism, on the other. As such Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu prefigures a radical, emancipatory legal pluralism in the colonial and post-colonial context.
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