The Rejection of Men’s Exploitation by Fellow Men: A Literary Approach in Les Bouts De Bois De Dieu

Abstract

The scramble for the partitioning of Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 in Germany created the ground for the colonialists to make Africans the victims of social alienation and mental dehumanization during that era of colonialism. Thus, African writers that flayed these social and economic vices armed themselves with different approaches both theoretically and stylistically, for the purpose of engagement littéraire. Reading the Senegalese Sembène Ousmane’s Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (1960), published few days after the independence of most of the African countries, this paper extrapolates the writer as a Marxist, with the prevalence of Marxist tendencies in his literary creation. The paper seeks to establish the fact that women too could be relevant in the nation’s building as they play pivotal roles in the rejection of men’s exploitation by fellow men from the perspective of Marxist Theory. With the methodology of textual analysis, the paper gives the synopsis of the novel before the theoretical approach adopted, the Marxist Theory. This is followed by the Marxist deconstruction of the novel on the rejection of men’s exploitation by men which also sees the women complementarities of men in the modern African society. The paper concludes by recommending how the oppressed could gain a total freedom from the oppressors.