The Marxist Ideology in Sembène Ousmane’s The Money Order, God’s Bits of Wood, and Guelwaar

Abstract

The most salient principle of the politico-philosophical essay by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels - the Communist Manifesto - refers to society as being made up of constant struggles between two major social classes, oppressors and the oppressed; that is, between the capitalist class and the working class - and that the capitalist class shall be overthrown and eliminated wherever it finds itself in a revolution to be undertaken by the working class and replaced by a classless society. The principle extends to posit that the class division results from the control of the means of production by the capitalist class, leading to socio-political upheavals. To test the Marxist assumption, society in three randomly-chosen novels (Le Mandat, Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu, and Guelwaar) written by one Senegalese author, Sembène Ousmane, has been observed. The project is very important - the apparent collapse of communism notwithstanding - due to the continuous existence of society and, for that matter, the need to study the upheavals - if there be - to determine the authentic sources and effects so as to resolve the socio-political contradictions to a very large extent. Truly society, in each of the novels, is observed to have been bedeviled with the constant struggles between the two major classes under reference to the extent that determining which of the classes really oppresses the other becomes compelling. In the end, do events in the society in the three selected novels confirm the salient Marxist principle?