ABSTRACT
The strike of African railway workers which began in October 1947 was an event of epic dimensions it involved 20,000 workers and their families, shut down most rail traffic throughout all of French West Africa, and lasted, in most regions, for five and a half months. The union's demands consistently had two dimensions to equalize benefits for all railwaymen in the cadres with no distinctions of origin or race, and secondly to integrate all auxiliaries into the cadres. The trade union movement, in West Africa and in France, did better by the railwaymen in a financial sense. Equality with French railway workers was a formal demand, yet the spirit of defiance and the anger against French colonial practices could not be so neatly bounded. It examines the extent to which the strike remained a railway strike or spilled over into a wider and longer term question of proletarian solidarity and anticolonial mobilization.
