Senegal

I. Feeding as the hidden supply line

The historical strike on the Dakar–Niger line began on 10 October 1947 and lasted until March 1948, more than five months. The African railwaymen demanded the same rights as their French colleagues, including family allowances. Sembène tells it from three towns at once, Bamako, Thiès and Dakar, and very early in the novel the problem moves from the locomotives to the cooking pots. When there are no wages, the women must find rice on credit, beg, sell what they have, and walk further and further for water once the supply is cut. The men hold meetings; the women decide every evening whether there will be a meal. The title itself comes from the custom of not counting people aloud, calling them instead the bits of wood of God, and it is the women who know, house by house, how many bits of wood there are to feed.

In Songs of Dust and Water the same division appears on the first morning of the road. When Edrisa organises the work from the kafo, the age groups who “had always turned out together to clear land or roof a house” (p. 112), the narrator gives the men their teams of quarry, breaking, hauling and grading, and then a single short sentence for the women: “Isatou and the women’s kafo saw to water and food” (p. 112). The shortness is the point. The work of the women is written into the novel in the same way it is usually written into history, as one line. Even the evening music depends on it: a balafon player comes from Talawol to play at the quarry, “and the women fed him” (p. 114).

What I find most true in Hydara’s portrait is how well Isatou knows the cost of things. She runs “the cooking at every funeral and naming ceremony in Nafawol” (p. 112), and knows how many bowls a burial takes. The narrator gives her a body marked by this work: “The backs of her hands were spotted pale where forty years of cooking oil had spat at them” (p. 112). Every Senegalese girl has seen those hands on her mother or her aunt at Tobaski, behind the pots, while the men sit under the tree discussing the price of the ram. When Isatou reads her list, she says “each number under her breath in Mandinka before she said it in Nabari” (p. 113). Here too I recognised something: my grandmother counts in Wolof even when she is speaking French to the pharmacist. The numbers live in the mother tongue because that is the language in which they were first earned.

The first answer of the men is also familiar. Mamadou, the senior elder, frowns and says: “The women have always fed the work” (p. 113). He means it as a description, almost as a compliment. Isatou turns it into an accusation: “And the work has always forgotten it by the time the road is finished” (p. 113). In Sembène, the men of the union are at first suspicious when the women decide to act, and many oppose the march. In both novels the women’s work is accepted on condition that it stays invisible. Both novelists therefore have to find a way to bring it into the light, and here they part company.

II. Two forms of action: the march and the list

Sembène chooses the epic. In Dakar, Ramatoulaye, who heads a large family compound, kills Vendredi, the ram of her rich brother El Hadji Mabigué, after it has eaten her family’s rice, and shares the meat with the hungry households; she is arrested and refuses to apologise. In the fighting with the police that follows, the blind Maïmouna loses one of her twins. The climax is the march from Thiès to Dakar, led by Penda, a young woman the respectable people despise. She is killed near Dakar when the soldiers fire on the marchers, together with Samba N’Doulougou. The women arrive, there is a great meeting, Bakayoko speaks, and soon afterwards the company gives way. The women’s labour becomes visible by leaving the kitchen altogether and taking the road. Their bodies, and Penda’s death, are the proof of what they have been carrying.

Hydara’s women stay in the kitchen and make the kitchen count. Isatou’s demand is precise: “I want it written down who fed them while they built it, and what it cost, so that the grandsons can read it for themselves” (p. 113). This is an argument about history, and it reminded me of the griots. In our culture the griot keeps the names of the men who fought and ruled. Isatou asks for a different kind of record, one in figures, which the grandsons can check. Fatou, the trader who keeps the ledger, enters the list “line by line”, and then she does the sum, “and the sum was not small” (p. 113). The litotes is typical of this novel, which almost never raises its voice. Fatou decides that “The common fund pays for the stone” and “It can pay for the millet”, and Isatou immediately adds: “And the oil” (p. 113). That small addition made me laugh, because it is exactly what a woman of the kafo would say: a promise that forgets the oil is not a promise.

The most important sentence of the episode, in my opinion, is not a speech. After the decision, “Some of the men grumbled about it for weeks. The women of the kafo did not mention it at all” (p. 113). They only make sure that “Isatou’s list was read out at every accounting, by Isatou, before anyone else’s” (p. 113). Sembène’s women conquer the road; Hydara’s women conquer the order of speaking. In a Senegalese meeting, who speaks first is never a detail, as anyone who has sat through a family council knows.

But the list is only the first stage. Nine chapters later, when the Union of villages is dividing its surplus, “six to the fields and four to the workshops” (p. 178), Isatou asks one question, and the narrator reports it flatly: “Before the council rose, Isatou asked where, in six and four, the cooking fires fell” (p. 179). The question is written down for a later meeting. Her sister asks her why she bothers, and she answers: “One day I would like to sit through a council and have nothing to ask” (p. 179). At the next council the question is “held over again” because the Kumbawol delegates have a lorry to catch. So at the meeting after that, the novel says simply: “At the meeting after that, no food came” (p. 181).

This is Hydara’s version of the strike, and I think it is the most original scene in the book. The pots are washed and turned upside down on their stones, and “The fires had not been lit” (p. 181). Isatou sits on the largest pot shelling groundnuts with a dozen women of the kafo. When Fatou comes out and tells her that twelve villages are waiting inside, Isatou corrects her: “Twenty-four people, and the elders,” and then, “I count the bowls” (p. 181). Like Sembène’s bits of wood, the people are counted by those who feed them. Fatou understands at once: “So this is how you ask” (p. 181). And Isatou’s reply is the summary of the whole method: “I asked at the last council. And the one before. It’s written down” (p. 182).

The difference with Sembène is clear. In God’s Bits of Wood the women’s strike is part of the men’s strike, directed outwards against the railway company and the colonial administration. In Songs of Dust and Water the women strike against their own council, inside a community that has already stood up to the Minister and now runs its own Fund. There are no soldiers. The weapon is the empty basin, and the reaction is comedy: Mamadou laughs “until he had to wipe his eyes” (p. 181), Fatou has to put a hand over her mouth, and Alkalo Yaya asks the hall whether Nafawol has stopped eating. Sembène needed a martyr because the enemy was armed. Hydara’s enemy is forgetfulness, and against forgetfulness an unlit fire and a good memory are enough.

III. What each action wins, and its limits

It would be wrong to say that one of these strategies is better. Each one wins something and each one has a price.

Sembène’s march wins the strike. Historically the railwaymen obtained an important part of their demands in 1948, and in the novel the company gives way soon after the women reach Dakar. But the price is Penda’s life, and the child of Maïmouna, and months of hunger in every striker’s compound. The women are heroines, yet the story still belongs above all to Bakayoko. One can ask whether the women’s sacrifice was entered in anybody’s ledger. My grandfather knew the names of the union leaders. He did not know Penda’s name until I read it to him.

Hydara’s method wins something smaller, and the novel is honest about how small. After arguing until nearly midnight, the council fixes a fee for the kafo, “at a little over half what Isatou had asked” (p. 182). Then comes the sentence I will remember from the whole novel: “The line above it, for the projector’s bulbs, was bigger” (p. 182). The women have entered the ledger, and the ledger immediately shows that the bulbs of the council’s projector cost more than their cooking. Hydara does not comment. The novel lets the figures speak, which is the method of the whole Union and also, I think, a criticism of it. A public ledger makes injustice visible; it does not correct it.

The second limit is the one Isatou herself sets. When Fatou asks whether the fee should cover funerals and naming ceremonies too, Isatou answers: “Those are ours” (p. 182). This is the most Senegalese moment in the book. In our society, the cooking at a baptism or a death is an obligation of honour between families, part of what we call teranga. To be paid for it would turn a gift into a service, and the women know that a service can be cut from the budget. So Isatou draws a frontier: the public works are paid; the life of the families stays outside the money. It is the same logic that makes her refuse, earlier, to put the kafo’s osusu into the Fund, because a pot that “goes home with somebody every month” is controlled by the women, while a fund with “three names” is controlled by “whose names the households go by” (p. 145). Sembène’s women, I think, would have understood her very well.

The last episode confirms this. When the multinational TransGlobal offers fifty thousand dollars to every family of the Union, one young wife at the cooking fires has already spent hers twice, on a roof and a sewing machine. Isatou, cutting onions into a basin, asks only: “Into whose hand?” (p. 190). Fatou has to admit that the money goes to registered households, and when Isatou asks who signs for a household now, the narrator answers for everybody: “Fatou knew, and so did every woman at the fires” (p. 190). When Fatou insists that it is still fifty thousand, Isatou answers, “I didn’t say it wasn’t,” and tips her onions into the pot: “I asked whose hand” (p. 190). When Kadiatou wants to use the question in her campaign against the offer, Isatou refuses to become an argument: “It’s a question” (p. 191). And if the money were written to the women, she says, “I’d go to Port Walada and carry it home myself” (p. 191). “On foot,” she adds. “Slowly” (p. 191).

This line made our class laugh when I read it aloud, but I think it contains the whole comparison. Isatou, too, is ready to march to the capital, like Penda. But she will march only for a cause that has been written correctly, with the women’s names on it. Sembène’s women march so that the men’s demand can be won; Isatou would march for her own. That, for me, is the distance between 1947 and the novel’s imagined present.

Conclusion

To conclude, God’s Bits of Wood and Songs of Dust and Water both show that a collective struggle eats, and that someone, usually a woman, has to feed it. Sembène makes this labour visible by taking the women out onto the road from Thiès to Dakar, where they become heroines and where Penda dies. Hydara keeps the women at the fires but forces the council to read their labour in figures: first with a list, then with a question asked at two councils, and finally with fires left unlit. Isatou’s victory is partial, half a fee and a line smaller than the projector’s bulbs, but it is entered in a ledger that the grandsons can read, which was exactly what Isatou asked for.

Many details of Hydara’s novel ring true for a reader from Thiès: the kafo counting the bowls, attaya made “three rounds from the small pot, each sweeter than the last” (p. 193), Tamkharit children with “their faces painted white, beating on tins and singing for coins” (p. 163), and Fatou answering “Mangi fi rek” (p. 116) to the buyer who, she later learns, paid men to break the village’s culvert. At the very end of the novel, a train stops in Nafawol on an old freight line “dead for forty years until the national rail authority reopened it for the Union’s trade” (p. 226). In Thiès we still wait for ours. If it comes back one day, I hope that somebody will think to ask, as Isatou does, who will feed the people who rebuild it, and write their names down.

Introduction

In 1755 Rousseau wrote that the true founder of civil society was the first man who fenced off a piece of land, thought of saying that it was his, and found people simple enough to believe him. In the Sahel the question is older and more urgent than land, because it concerns water. M.J. Hydara’s novel Songs of Dust and Water (2026) gives the question to Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper of the fictional village of Nafawol, on the evening of her first meeting with the foreign engineers about their machine: “A well has no gate. Anyone with a rope may draw from it. A machine like that is kept behind a fence, and somebody holds the key” (p. 92). For a reader from northern Senegal this sentence is not abstract. In the villages of the Ferlo, the open well with its rope and pulley has given way to the motorised borehole, the forage, and with the forage came a pump, a meter, a fee, and an association that holds the key.

The subject is therefore the following: can a rural community really own its water, and what does such ownership consist of? I will argue that the novel, like the Senegalese experience, shows ownership to be less a title than a set of rules designed to make a common thing difficult to take, whether by the state, by an outside company, or by the community’s own members. Nafawol’s institutions answer all three threats, but the novel is lucid about their cost and about the conditions that made them possible. In a first part I will study the passage from the open well to the key, and compare it with the reform that created Senegal’s borehole user associations. In a second part I will analyse the rules that keep a common fund common: the three names, the public ledger, and the osusu, which our grandmothers call a tontine. In a third part I will examine the risk that Minister Sulayman names, and what the Great Green Wall in the Ferlo can teach us about ownership of the land that water depends on.

I. From the open well to the key

1. Kadiatou’s well and the end of free water

At the beginning of Part Two, Nafawol’s only water is an old well that has been going bitter for six years. It is kept by Kadiatou, the Yaara-Jaxo, a title passed through the women of her family, but keeping does not mean owning. Anybody may draw. This is the condition that the American ecologist Garrett Hardin, in “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968), considered fatal: a resource open to all will be over-used by all, because each user gains from taking more and shares the loss with everybody. Nafawol’s well does not fail because of greed, however. It fails because the river has left the floodplain and salt has come up into the water. Hardin’s model does not fit the situation; the open well was not destroyed by its users.

The harvester and the borehole that Dr Arramata brings change the nature of water in the village. It becomes the product of a machine, which must be paid for, maintained and protected. Fatou, the trader, sees the danger immediately, in the language of her trade: “When one man owns the only lorry on the road,” she says, “he’s kind all through the planting. At harvest he names his price” (p. 92). Both women understand that once water comes out of a machine, the important question is who controls the gate.

2. The ASUFOR reform: the same problem in real life

Senegal answered this question for its rural boreholes in the reform called REGEFOR, piloted from the late 1990s and then extended across the country. Instead of the state running each forage, the users of a borehole formed an association, the ASUFOR (association des usagers de forages), which represents the users, sells water by volume and pays for operation and repairs from that income. The principle is close to the agreement Nafawol signs. The committee receives a key; the harvester, the borehole and the common account “would open to it” (p. 100), with a second key kept by the Proxima Fund for ten years. Hydara takes care to show how small this key is: “black plastic, no longer than the top joint of a finger” (p. 101). Elder Ousman turns it over and says, “It’s lighter than a groundnut” (p. 101). Then the alkalo hands it to Fatou, who puts it “in her purse, with her coins” (p. 101).

I find this scene very accurate. The power over water is concentrated in a small object, and the person who receives it is the one who already handles money. In many ASUFOR, from what I have heard in my mother’s village on the Linguère side of the Ferlo, the real authority sits with whoever keeps the cash book and pays the pump operator, not with the president whose name is on the papers. Elder Mamadou sees a second problem, the ten years of Proxima’s key: “In ten years a heifer is a grandmother” (p. 101). The novel shows that this delay was itself the result of an argument. Before the project begins, Adam Sterling, now working at Proxima’s review desk, rejects Dr Arramata’s first proposal because it keeps every important decision in the Fund’s hands for ten years, and tells her: “Write it so it doesn’t need you. Then it won’t need me either” (p. 84). At the end of the tenth year Fatou receives the second key and remarks: “It was always ours. This is only the receipt” (p. 213). Ownership, in this novel, is established on the first day and only confirmed on the last.

II. The rules that keep a common thing common

1. Three names and a wall

If the first threat to a common resource is the stranger, the second is the neighbour. The most interesting chapter of the novel from this point of view is “Three Names”, where the villagers write the charter of their trust, which they call the Coffer Fund. A young lawyer from the capital writes it, and the villagers make him rewrite it until “Disbursement” becomes “taking money out” (p. 128). The central clause states that “no sum above the price of a young bull could leave the fund without three names on it” (p. 129), from three different households. When Alkalo Sankung asks whether the alkalo will count as a household like any other, it is Mamadou who insists that the rule apply especially to himself: “One day, when I am older and more tired, somebody I love will come to me with a good reason and a sad face. I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129). Earlier he had asked that the trust be built “so that it does not need me to be honest” (p. 128).

This is, in my opinion, the philosophical heart of the book. Mamadou does not trust himself, and he is right not to. The American political scientist Elinor Ostrom, who received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009, showed in Governing the Commons (1990) that many communities in the world manage shared resources successfully for centuries, contrary to Hardin’s pessimism, provided they have clear rules, monitoring by the users themselves, and sanctions that increase step by step. Nafawol’s charter contains all three. The monitoring is the ledger posted on a wall in the square every Friday. The test of the system comes from Mamadou’s own grandson Lamin, a clerk of the Fund, who for months enters payments to a carter who owns no cart, each one just under the limit. He is caught by a schoolgirl, Mariam, adding the figures in chalk: “Why does the carter always stop just under the line?” (p. 168). Lamin’s defence is the eternal defence of small theft: “Each one was small,” and “Nobody went without because of any of them” (p. 169). Mamadou, after arguing for his grandson, accepts the rule he asked for: “Then write mine under it, as the one who asked for the rule” (p. 169). The sanction is graduated: the motorbike is sold and Lamin works off the rest on the road crews. He is not expelled.

Even the honest make mistakes. When the national banking regulator sends an inspector, she finds a payment entered twice and a purchase of stone signed by only two people because the third was at the port. Her judgement is the best definition of an institution I have ever read: “If you let it be two when it is convenient, it will be two when it is not” (p. 138). Fatou, who made the first error, writes the correction with her full name and pins it on the wall herself.

2. The osusu and the tontine

The novel does not present the Fund as the only form of collective money in the village, and this is what makes it credible to a Senegalese reader. Beside the Fund there is the women’s osusu, managed by Isatou, a rotating savings group exactly like the tontines of our mothers’ markets. Each woman pays in on market day, Isatou counts aloud, and “If anyone counted with her, she began again” (p. 131). The pot goes to a different woman each month. Isatou’s principle is the same as the Fund’s, publicity, but at a smaller scale: “A pot everyone can see into does not empty in the night” (p. 132).

When Fatou proposes that the women put the osusu into the Fund, which has become a savings society, Isatou refuses. Fatou argues that a pot kept in a house can burn or be stolen; Isatou replies, “Twenty years. No fire” (p. 145). Then she points to the real issue. The Fund requires three names from three households, and Isatou says: “I know whose names the households go by” (p. 145). In other words, a rule that is perfectly fair between households can still exclude the women inside them, because the household is represented by its head. Her money “goes home with somebody every month” (p. 145), always a woman. This scene shows that Nafawol contains several communities, and that a common institution can be owned by all and still be controlled by some. Many Senegalese women keep their tontine for exactly this reason. The bank is safer, but the tontine is theirs.

III. The risk Sulayman names, and the land beneath the water

1. The state’s argument

The third threat comes from above. In chapter 17, Minister Sulayman of Rural Development comes to Nafawol and orders the Fund’s signatories to sign “temporary administrative control” over to his ministry (p. 135). Hydara does not make him a caricature. The narrator admits his political interest: a pool of money outside his office “bought him nothing” (p. 134). But at the meeting in the capital he names a real risk: “In nine years I have watched four community funds grow in this Republic,” and “Two were emptied by the men who ran them” (p. 136). The depositors came to his ministry, and he “had nothing to give them but my regret” (p. 136). He concludes: “You will forgive me if a ledger on a wall does not settle the matter for me” (p. 136).

This is precisely the argument that has been made in Senegal. In 2014 the state created the OFOR, the Office des Forages Ruraux, and began to delegate the production, maintenance and distribution of water in many rural areas to private operators under affermage contracts, leaving the ASUFOR mainly the role of representing the users. I do not claim to know whether the reform has succeeded; reports disagree, and it is still being applied. But the reasoning behind it is Sulayman’s: associations of users can be badly managed, their accounts can disappear, and the state is the one called upon when the pump stops. In the novel the village wins, because Fatou and the lawyer have the trust re-registered under the banking law, “so that the Ministry could not simply seize it without the regulator” (p. 135), and because the inspector finds the books better than half the banks of the capital. When Kadiatou asks what “supervision” means, the minister answers, “Administrative oversight” (p. 137). Kadiatou’s reply is short: “That is not an answer” (p. 137). His second answer, “It means order” (p. 137), is hardly better.

I think the novel is fair to both sides. Sulayman is right that a ledger on a wall is no guarantee: Lamin’s theft passed through the ledger for months. But the novel also shows that it was a girl reading the wall, and not a ministry, who caught him. Sulayman’s risk is real, and Nafawol’s answer to it is to give more people the means to check the managers. Later, when an inspector seals the mill of the neighbouring village with a rule that had never been enforced north of the river, Fatou sums up the danger of power from above: “Sulayman cannot take the Fund,” and then, “So he has taken the mill” (p. 160). Hydara gives Fatou the answer too, in the argument for a charter between villages: it “would have stopped him choosing which of us he came for” (p. 165).

2. The Great Green Wall and Nafawol’s green belt

Water in the Sahel does not only come from machines; it depends on the land. The Great Green Wall, launched by the African Union in 2007, was planned in Senegal as a belt about 545 kilometres long and 15 kilometres wide from Louga to Bakel, passing through the Ferlo, with sites such as Widou Thiengoly near Linguère. Millions of trees have been planted, but a 2025 inquiry in Le Soleil described the project as stalled and reported, citing the FAO, very high mortality among the young trees in some areas. A common criticism is that the trees were planted by agencies and volunteers who left, and that the people who live there did not see them as their own.

Nafawol’s trees are different, and the novel explains why. The shelter belt is planted with neem and gmelina, then with baobabs and tamarinds whose fruit the women will sell, and families begin to plant mango, orange, guava and cashew trees “between the rows, claiming pieces of the green belt for their children to inherit” (p. 126). The stone lines across the dead river channels are built by old men who know they will not see the result: when a boy asks why their grandfathers built such lines, an old man answers “For us,” and “set another stone” (p. 126). Before the first line is laid, Mamadou has to go three times to the herders’ camp with kola, because the cattle had crossed those beds for generations and “nobody had asked them about stones” (p. 126). As a Pulaar reader I noticed this detail with pleasure. In the Ferlo, any project that forgets the herders and their routes to the forage fails, whatever its budget.

The carbon in the trees raises the same question of ownership. When Dr Arramata explains that only new growth can be sold, Mamadou answers: “So the cow in my yard is worth nothing to them,” and “Only the calf she has not dropped” (p. 127). Fatou decides that this money must not go “in the same box as the cotton money”, because “This belongs to the land, and to everyone who carried stone for it” (p. 128). The novel thus distinguishes two kinds of property: private property in what one person grows, and common property in what everybody has restored. The Great Green Wall would perhaps have more trees standing if this distinction had been made in every village of the Ferlo.

Conclusion

Songs of Dust and Water shows that a community can own its water only if it agrees to watch itself. The key that is “lighter than a groundnut” means nothing without the rules around it: three names from three households, a ledger on a wall, corrections signed in full, and a separate pot for those who do not trust the households to speak for them. These rules answer the three threats of the stranger, the neighbour and the state, and the novel does not pretend they are sufficient. The harvester never gives more than about seventy per cent of what it was built for, the borehole draws on water that belongs to the grandchildren, and in the last chapter the village of Kerewol repays its loan, sells its mill to a company and leaves: “The charter allowed it, and nobody had been able to tell Kerewol it was wrong” (p. 225). Ownership includes the right to stop owning.

Senegal’s experience with the ASUFOR and the OFOR shows that these are not literary questions. One of the last images of the commons in the novel is a photograph from a distant village whose committee has painted its own wall of figures. When Halima says “They copied our ledger,” Kadiatou corrects her: “They wrote their own” (p. 227). If the novel has a lesson for us, it is perhaps this one: the rules of ownership can be copied for free, but each village has to write and keep them itself.