Mechanical Africa

"I was here when all of these machines were installed...They have a big advantage over us - they can be repaired, recast, made new again. I knew the ones that were here before these; in the days when the line from Dakar only came as far as this. People said that some day the "smoke of the savanna" would reach as far as Bamako, but no one really believed it. But you could never swear that a thing wouldn't happen, if those red-eared men wanted it to happen! I remember my father telling me the story of Mour Dial, the tribal chief everyone called Greed. He swore that the rails would never cross his lands and make him lose the tribute he collected from travelers, but the re-eared men weren't interested in anything he swore or anything he lost. Their chief - the one who wore a round cap with a flat crescent of black leather at the front to shield his eyes from the sun - just put some of his soldiers in the railway cars and took them to where Mour Dial's lands began. When they got there they fired a few shots and there were bodies stretched all over the ground, but they were on Mour Dial's side of the ground because the shots cam from only one direction. Mour Dial was arrested and taken to Saint-Lois and then to Dakar, to the big council hall of the toubabs. People who saw that hall said that it was entirely red. After that, people never talked about Mour Dial any more, except with their mouths glued to their neighbor's ear, and no one ever knew what had become of him."

A single example, such as the one shown above, is suitable enough evidence to contrive a working behavioral theory on the automated view of humanity. Particularly when it comes to the book from which this quote is taken, where the fictional/cultural interaction between the French "toubab" masters and the entire native population of French West Africa collide in very estranging ways. Briefly put, their masters are overworking and underpaying the natives who work on the railroads and in the surrounding shops, when a strike is called against them and held. When seen from this perspective the whole ethos of the book, as it were, is mechanical.

The inception of this argument can stem from a number of its chapters, but one must go no further than the above paragraph on the bottom of page 129 to establish a broad view of the underlying psyche of the natives and their French masters. It was spoken by Sounkare, the watchman, a man who felt that he was deeply intertwined in the symbiotic relationship between his fellow workmen and the railroad machines they worked along side of. So magnanimous was the appearance of the railroad during his lifetime that he hadn't taken part in the strike that would paralyze them. He saw them not as machines, but as semi-human extensions of the biological. This point of view is expanded in another paragraph on the top of page 129 when he recalled the sight of a now-empty workstation that had been swarming with sweating bodies in the months prior to the strike.

Perhaps the gravity of this connection is felt to its highest degree when a middle-aged villager, Ramatoulaye, is forced to take drastic measures to ensure the survival of her town by killing her brother's ram for food as a result of the strike on page 69. The implication of this action, based on the villager's initial reactions to it, is that it was almost an unimaginable solution to the problem of hunger. They had abandoned a hunting life-style generations ago, which only compounded the anxiety surrounding the need to revert to such measures. Seen from a mechanical perspective, their taproot (the railroad) had been severed, and those natives feeling the effect of this were compelled to re-integrate into a position that placed them at odds with the mechanical schemata.

Though, undoubtedly, the people's positive connection to machinery is dwarfed by the big-ended view of their foreign bosses. To individuals such as Monsieur Dejean, the French regional director of the railway company at Thies, workers and their families are the machines themselves. From his reflection on the events of the strike it is obvious that it never occurred to him that they were alive in the sense that he is. Even when he has knowledge of the natives who died in the strike he brushes it aside and lies in a report to his supervisor on page 29 by saying "Dead? No, there are no dead. The soldiers have been ordered just to frighten them." Regardless of whether they are dead or wounded, content or starving, the over-all sense is that the natives are aware of something which the toubabs aren't...that they aren't machines but living people. As the heading line of the above paragraph insinuates, they "can be repaired, recast, made new again." Although this is a reference to Sounkare's take on the immortal quality of the rusted machinery of the railroad, the philosophy becomes interchangeable with the natives due to their tight connection with it. The toubabs perceived their lives as replaceable, as is illustrated by some other of Dejean's remarks to his superior, such as "The minute they have some money they go out and buy themselves another wife, and the children multiply like flies!" According to their convoluted thought process the machine will repair itself.

Thus far, the turbine of humanity's relationship to machines is an eerie sight when seen through the eye of the conquerer. Alternative solutions to this problem are on the rise throughout the book, as the initiator of the strike, Tiemoko, develops an awareness of the mechanical impetus of his oppressors. Gradually, by reading books from the toubabs, he programs his mind with the strategy of winning an argument itself over that of being right and presenting correct evidence. Yet, the most that can be said about him is that he values ideas as a tool of change on page 103. But in the process he is abandoning what makes him human by opposing Fa Keita's human approach to social relations during his uncle's trial and the injustice of the replicating patterns of similar culture when unique collectives are enslaved by industry on page 94.

People, even one's own, are believed to serve a function that is determined by those with the knowledge and power to execute what are seen as higher functions. After all, Sounkare's own description of the drive of the white men in the first paragraph above was that "you could never swear that a thing wouldn't happen, if those red-eared men wanted it to happen!" This doesn't come out of nowhere, but it is born out of the engine of philosophy that, as the same paragraph states "He (an african chief) swore that the rails would never cross his lands and make him lose the tribute he collected from travelers, but the red-eared men weren't interested in anything he swore or anything he lost. " Which itself reflects the less apparent legitimization in the book of enforcing the shutting-down of a social machine by shutting off water supplies to the towns along the railway and other such actions of the omnipotently withdrawn ones and their button pressing.