This Day in Labor History: October 10, 1947

On October 10, 1947, African workers on the Dakar-Niger Railway in modern Senegal went on strike with the demand that they be treated equal to French workers. This is a hugely important moment in both African labor history and the anticolonial struggle in west Africa.

Postwar Africa was not prewar Africa. Decolonization was coming and the European powers proved unable to stop it. A lot of this anticolonial sentiment found itself into the workplace. In 1946, workers in Dakar, Senegal walked off the job in a general strike. This did not include rail workers, but did include many other workers in this key city. It was a victorious strike. Workers won significant wage gains, housing allowances, new wage tiers, and seniority bonuses. This success meant the next year workers around west Africa started striking, with at least 164 strikes in French West Africa in 1947.

Among the most important sectors of the French West African economy was the railroad. The Fédération Syndicale des Cheminots was the union of the rail workers and it received recognition from the colonial government. But said government also tried to repeal much of what it had given up to workers in the previous year. One move was to move the administration of the railroad out of the state (civil servants were the key victors in the 1946 strike) and into a quasi-private arrangement so that these workers could make no claims to higher wages and benefits. Moreover, the job divisions meant a form of segregation between French and African workers existed, with French workers at the top level and African workers at the bottom level. What this functionally meant was white workers getting good wages and housing and African workers getting peanuts. A postwar economic slump also negatively impacted rail workers’ wages.

These were poor workers and they were fed up with the oppressive treatment they faced. They soon moved to strike. Their leader was Ibrahima Sarr, who was the Federal Secretary of the Railway Union. A lot of the specific issues are a bit opaque to the American–mostly about when workers could move into permanent positions and thus be eligible for higher wages, basically. Others included test scores for promotion, how furloughs would be set up when necessary, and housing issues.

The strike began on October 10 on the railroad, and also on some of the docks on Benin and Ivory Coast. By October 17, upwards of 20,000 workers walked off the job. It started in Senegal, but soon expanded to Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Benin. The French did nothing. They thought it would disappear. So they did not respond for three months, happy to let workers starve.

As often happened, Marxist ideology turned out to be completely wrong about the strike. This was mostly a rural strike and Marxists noted this, realized that their theoretical ideas of proletarianization was really not in touch with reality in terms of how political change would happen. Amusingly, Marxism was so prominent that the employers often saw it as influential as well, so for both employers and the French left, who thought this strike would go one way based on theory, it instead went a very different way based on reality. Part of the reason that the strike worked was massive community support, as these towns and villages came together in a collective way to make sure everyone got fed. There was some ill feeling from the 1946 strike, as some of the unionists at that time were irked that the rail workers had done nothing for them. But mostly, everyone got over that. But also, other workers were not asked to strike here, so solidarity actions were more passive than going on strike yourself.

In December, the French rail system proposed a few minor concessions, but there was no way these workers were going to settle for a pittance, except the Ivory Coast workers, who did settle. From what I can tell, this seems to have had as much to do with workers wanting to go to the cocoa harvests as much as anything else, plus perhaps some less than great leadership. But that was an exception. It’s also worth noting that there was a very different political situation than before World War II. In the 20s or 30s, the French would have just crushed the workers. But they knew they couldn’t do that anymore. They could have kicked the workers out of their housing. But they didn’t feel that was a good idea in 1947. So they just let it ride. Meanwhile, the union was hesitant to expand the strike too much because it wanted to take advantage of the new possibilities the French colonial labor regime offered, particularly the idea that the colonies would have trade unions that would be respected and deals hammered out. So this is one of those strikes where there was great militancy among the workers and that’s what made the difference, but also where both the employer and the union had other interests in mind.

The railroad tried to hire new workers but couldn’t get enough to make a difference. Moreover, the political leadership in French West Africa proved completely useless, really just unable to be decisive in any way here. It seems that they were just shocked this went on so long and so didn’t take it seriously. The company had a boatload of spies in the strike and they assured the powerbrokers that it would soon collapse. Nope. So in February 1948, it cut a deal. Basically, a high commissioner sent to work all this out split the difference between the two sides with a slight preference for the union. So it was a real victory for the workers. All strikers were hired back. Most of the issues around classification were worked out in favor of the workers, which meant real wage and housing gains. Workers returned to the job on March 19, 1948.

The aftermath of the strike was in many ways far more important than the strike itself. It became part of Senegalese lore, a key moment in the anti-colonial struggle. The great Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene (Black Girl at the very least is a much see for anyone who cares about film at all, but his last film Moolaade is a fantastic look at the female genital cutting issue from an African feminist and anti-colonial stance, a useful change from the position of white feminists thinking they should “save” Africans without understanding anything about African society) used the strike as the key turning point in his early novel God’s Bits of Wood, one of the key African nationalist novels of the period. It is worth noting that the anti-colonial elite really did not make the strike their own, nor did they really think of the strike as a foundational moment as they moved to control the new nations after French withdrawal. But every nation develops its own mythology. Moreover, there’s little question the strike did tap into a general bitterness over colonization that spawned other effects lasting to and after independence for these new nations.

I borrowed from Frederick Cooper’s 1996 article in Journal of African History, “‘Our Strike’: Equality, Anticolonial Politics and the 1947–48 Railway Strike in French West Africa,” to write this post.

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