Reddit mentions of Crossing the Mangrove

It looks a ton of this stuff has been translated into English.

Ousmane Sembene's God's Bits of Wood is the story of a railroad workers strike told from the workers' perspective, and the community tensions that are exposed during the strike. Almost all of his movies are also up on Amazon, and they're all worth checking out. He's not known as the father of African cinema for nothing.

Aminata Sow Fall's The Beggar's Strike is about a city trying to clean up its homeless/beggar population, who retaliate by going on strike, which causes chaos since giving alms to the needy is a requirement in Islam (and the city's elite were fulfilling their divinely mandated charity by giving to the striking beggars).

Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Sand Child is less about leftist class politics and more a meditation on gender identity and gender roles in Arabic society. It's the story of a father who after having seven straight daughters decides to raise his eighth daughter as a son.

Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is a book-length poem that's a mediation on blackness and colonialism and arguably the defining work of the Negritude movement.

Neither Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent or Maryse Conde's [Crossing the Mangrove] (https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Mangrove-Maryse-Conde/dp/0385476337/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1501603791&sr=1-3&keywords=maryse+conde) are particularly focused on leftist class politics but they're still fascinating for their explorations of Creole identity. They're both murder mysteries; the Chamoiseau novel is basically a police procedural and the Conde one is a mystery that's slowly unspooled through the eyes of various villagers.