In Sembene Ousmane's Gods Bits of Wood and Mariama Ba's Scarlet Song one sees the use of characters as representatives of humanness, as well as the eventual display of the lack of it. For the purposes of this paper, humanness is defined as "that in which empathy is the basis for being human- . Gods Bits of Wood has a broad peripheral view of one great movement for humanity to change and for the Africans and Europeans to accept each other as whole societies. On the other hand, in Scarlet Song one perceives a more focused and personal version of the same attempt, in which the author has created two characters in a dramatic romance plot to depict the struggle between their worlds. Both in Ousmane's and Ba's pieces, the lack of tolerance in the characters from older generations repress and annihilate the younger generation's attempt for humanness.
Surrounding the subject of lack of humanity, Ousmane portrays how human we can be, as well as how inhuman. The story tells of the inhabitants in several areas in Senegal, most specifically of the African men and women on the Dakar-Niger railway in the late 1940's and of their struggle to free themselves from being mistreated by the colonizers. Here, one sees the cruelty within the white western ideals of power over the Africans, contrasting with the Muslim African black traditions of sexism, repression, control, polygamy, and ignorance. Meanwhile, this is all contradicted when Ousmane presents us with their powerful unity as a people who support, have compassion and protect their own kind. In Gods Bits of Wood, Ad'jibid'ji is the soul proof of a younger generation trying to display traces of humanness. When striving to learn French, the white man's language, she exudes curiosity, openness of mind and tolerance "all very humane qualities. At the same time, by doing this, she defies her ancestors and traditions, and in response, receives a scolding from her grandmother Niakoro, who says "Aloss, aloss I speak to you in Bambara, and you answer me in a language of savages!- (Ousmane 5).
