The character of Tiemoko surprises me in these two chapters. Based on his characterization earlier in the novel, I expected him to be a hot-headed thug, a brute. And Ousmane carefully describes Tiemoko as being physically large and intimidating, with a "bull neck seeming more massive than usual." (79) Tiemoko simmers with rage at the strikebreaker Diara, and Ad'jidbid'ji still regards him with an unexplained hostility.
But Tiemoko is more than a two-dimensional ball of anger and physical power. In these two chapters, we see him borrow the novel La Condition Humaine from Bakayoko. This novel depicts the failed socialist insurrection in Shanghai in the 1920s, which creates a hint of foreshadowing that Tiemoko is hoping for mor than just increased pay and pensions, but eventually the liberation of Senegal from French colonial rule.
The transition from a less organized system of justice to a formal legal system is a key step in the development of civilization, according to Rousseau: "The obedience to a law we proscribe to ourselves is liberty." (The Social Contract, 196). Here we see Tiemoko try to impose more formal justice on Diara through his reading of a French novel about a Chinese rebellion. This complicates Rousseau's idea of the noble savage: Tiemoko is using the tools of other cultures to try to gain leverage in the eyes of the Senegalese against the French.
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