Fiction, Reality and Contested Memory in God's Bits of Wood and the "Marikana Commission Report".

What is it about?

This article is about official narratives of emotive history and painful pasts that governments would rather have either completely expunged from national memories or at least remembered from their own perspectives rather than on uncomfortable historical facts. It compares Ousmane's fictionalized narration of the West Africa Railway strike of 1948 in his novel God's Bits of Wood to the Farlam Commission's ''Marikana Commission Report" of South Africa in terms of how these narratives remember labor-related strike events and how each of them occupies a specific ideological posture predicated on prevailing sociopolitical and economic interests, sometimes at the expense of truth-telling and the prevention of repeat cyclical violence.

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Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This article is important as it relates history to present realities and public interest to private/official interests. The binary oppositional reality of truth versus fiction as manifested in labour-related strife has become a permanent feature of the relationship between labour and the modern African state/capital alliance, hence the sometimes contradictory nature of the democratic postcolonial state as a steward of the national interest while also acting as enforcer of oppressive and unreformed labour laws inherited from the colonial era. The article interrogates these complex relationships with a view to suggesting ways of preventing any recurrence of violence in the work place.

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