New York. Routledge. 1990
Probably more than any other African country, the former French dependency of Guinea owes its present form to the influence of one man. Four years after his death, and in spite of a military coup which overthrew those of his supporters who sought to perpetuate his ideals, Sékou Touré's shadow still hangs over the country. For many, this means that a nation has come into being and will triumph over the obstacles put in its way by enemies both at home and abroad. For other, it is a threat to every effort to utilize freely the natural resources with which Guinea is generously endowed in order to create a prosperous society.
From the beginning of his career — initially as a trade-union leader — Sékou Touré 's principal objective was to restore the dignity of the African people which, he believed, had been gravely distorted by the influence of Europe. His aim was not restricted to his own ethnic group, the Malinke, or even to the French dependency of Guinea. It embraced the whole of French West Africa, and he was convinced that the African people must unite to present their case effectively to their French overlords if they were ever to achieve that aim. He himself cooperated closely with the RDA, founded by Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast, to translate the pious rhetoric of the French loi-cadre of 1946 into genuine African participation in the control of West African affairs. To that end, too, he became the driving force behind the formation of the CGTA in 1956 which, in the following January, joined with a number of other unions to form the UGTAN.
That Sékou Touré became associated with the attempt to create a national identity for Guinea alone was due to a quirk of fortune, and he did not accept that task wholeheartedly until compelled to do so by force of circumstances. Two years after the second loi-cadre of 1956 abolished the West African Federation, General de Gaulle decided to create a new French community which individual dependencies would be invited to join. Sékou Touré was in favor of joining the new community, but only of it could be done in three stages.
Under this plan, the initiative would come from both sides, and the African peoples would not simply be required to accept terms laid down by France. By forming a West African federation before joining the community, the Africans would have a better opportunity of dealing on equal terms with France. When these preconditions were rejected, Sékou Touré turned down de Gaulle's offer, though not with the intention of isolating Guinea from the other West African territories. That that was in fact the outcome was largely due to a clash of personalities, Sékou Touré's pride could not accept a future in which Guinea remained subservient to France — which he believed would be the case if his country joined the proposed community on de Gaulle's terms. Given that response, the equally proud French president immediately severed all links with France's former dependency. It was a petulant reaction, unworthy of the leader of a great nation.
Sékou Touré had made a brave if naive gesture on behalf of the African peoples, and Guinea was confronted with grave problems. For what were primarily economic reasons, the other West African dependencies deiced that they could not support him. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Guinea became both independent and isolated from its neighbors. It was a disturbing setback, although for a time Sékou Touré did not believe it to be irreversible. But de Gaulle's implacable hostility to any rapprochement, and the coolness of other western powers, forced him to recognize that Guinea must work out its own destiny. Thus, fortuitously, was Sékou Touré faced with the task of creating a nation from what was widely acknowledged to be one of the least united countries arbitrarily created by the imperial powers. Here, if anywhere, would be put to the test the viability of a country which had never been planned to stand alone. It was a challenge which he took up courageously, but with neither the expertise nor the generous external help needed to make his undertaking a success.
Geographically, ethnically, historically, and politically, the peoples of Guinea differed widely. During nearly 89 years of conquest, collaboration, and domination, the French had tried to impose at least a uniform system of administration. Their aim had been to promote the interests of a handful of French traders and settlers who were seeking, somewhat peripherally, to exploit the country's resources. But they had shown little interest in, and had made no attempt to understand, the differing cultural traditions of the peoples they incorporated in their Guinean dependency. The successive policies of assimilation and association, so seriously bruised in the metropolis, made little impact upon the practice of French administrators in Guinea, save where expediency and the lack of European manpower made it necessary to make use of them. Those same administrators did all in their power to destroy traditional institutions, but the lack of European supervisors, and the hostility aroused by the oppressive methods of French officials and their African collaborators, served ultimately to strengthen the people's attachment to their traditional loyalties.
The pastoral Fulani, for example, had created an Islamic empire on the plateau of Futa Jallon on the foundations of an existing hierarchical society in the early eighteenth century. In many instances, the religious leaders of the empire had deemed it wise to co-operate with the French in the early days of French expansion in Guinea. But co-operation turned to hostility and hatred when the French changed their approach and tried to wipe out every vestige of traditional authority.
The Malinke of the north-eastern savannah — traditionally the region's foremost traders and farmers — had been more recently united under the leadership of the able military adventurer, Samory, but their pride in the new empire and their loyalty to its leader were strong and they deeply resented their conquest by the French in 1898. Their hostility became more marked when their imperial achievements were rejected by their new rulers and French administration was arbitrarily introduced.
The less united peoples of the forests and mountains of the south-east, some of whom had successfully resisted the attacks of Samory, also mounted a stout opposition to the French. But they, like stronger neighbors, were crushed into truculent submission, though sometimes they were able to seek sanctuary over the largely notional, but in this instance extremely useful, boundary with Liberia.
The Sousou had been the first to come under French rule, not because of any failure to oppose their conquerors, but because, on the coast — where the Sousou were located — the French were operating from bases easily supplied by their navy and their trading ships, and their power was consequently irresistible.
Until the end of the Second World War, opposition to French administration, though subdued, remained strong. Generally, it was uncoordinated, operating on a local basis which, in the southeast, might with some justification be described as tribal. Elsewhere, local loyalties of wider nature — based upon more recent political alignments and underlined by common ethnic and linguistic tradition — could well be thought of as national patriotism. Yet even these larger polities, more ancient and more circumscribed loyalties still played an important role in the everyday life of the people.
The promise of a brighter future for Africans in the French dependencies, which was given during the Brazzaville conference of 1944 under pressure from America, resulted in two new types of political development among the people of Guinea. In 1946 [1956] the loi-cadre gave the franchise to all adults, together with the right to elect deputies to the assembly in Paris and to a representative assembly in Guinea. This led tome people to conclude that, if they co-operated with the French, a new era of prosperity would develop. The members of this group were drawn mainly from the relatively small, but now increasing, number of those who had received a measure of European-style education, and also from the much larger number of Fulani pastoralists and Malinke traders who hoped for the restoration of their former freedom to exploit opportunities for their own economic benefit. By contrast, the leaders of the potentially less prosperous peoples of the forest region, and those who had felt themselves to be exploited as poorly-paid labourers on French-owned plantations or in the towns, decided that their only hope lay in ridding the country of French rule, though not necessarily in dissolving all links with France. In response to these conflicting ideas, two types of political organization developed: one primarily of an ethnic character — at least among the Fulani; the other seeking initially to promote within Guinea the broader political objectives of the RDA.
Not suprisingly, the French administrators were better disposed towards the first of these two groups, represented most strikingly by the Fulani dominated Bloc Africain de Guinée (BAG). The second, from which sprang the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), benefited from the leadership of Sékou Touré, who was appointed secretary-general in 1952. Sékou Touré had boundless energy, admirable powers of organization, and a deeply-rooted faith in himself and in the African people. Though the BAG was successful in the elections to the Guinean assembly in 1954, the pendulum thereafter began to swing in favour of the PDG. Support for the party grew rapidly, mainly as a result of tireless travelling and campaigning by Sékou Touré, who planted party organizers in every village with the task of building up cells of supporters and of propagating party ideology. Spurning the divisive forces of ethnicity, Sékou Touré himself stood for election as mayor of the Sousou-dominated town of Conakry, while four other members of his party were successful in local elections outside their own ethnic areas. In the same year, Sékou Touré and another member of the PDG were elected as deputies to sit in the French assembly, after a fierce struggle with the BAG. In 1957 those initial successes were followed by the overwhelming victory of the PDG in the elections to the national {?} territorial assembly — of which, under the new loi-cadre of 1956, Sékou Touré became vice president (?) [erratum actually he became vice president of the territorial government ]. Under the new constitution, the president was still a Frenchman.
The popular appeal of the PDG lay primarily in its insistence upon the dignity of the African people, to which scant attention was paid by the French in spite of their assertion to the contrary. To ensure recognition of that dignity, the PDG maintained, called for a united endeavour by all Africans. Sectional interests, whether racial or economic, must be rejected. As a first step in that direction, the new PDG government abolished the office of chief which, it declared, was not an African title but one that had been introduced by the French, who had used it mainly as an instrument for the subjugation of the African people. In fact, at the lowest levels, the title had usually been bestowed upon traditional leaders, though it is true that they then became a part of the French administrative system. The new measure, therefore, not only struck a blow at alien domination but was also intended to eliminate what the PDG regarded as the divisive influence of local loyalties. The chiefs were to be replaced by the party organization which, it was claimed, would make known the wishes of all the people to the higher echelon of the party. In practice it acted mainly as the channel through which the party made known its ideology to the people, the ideology having been formulated in the first place by Sékou Touré himself. In 1958 all party committees of an ethnic character were also forbidden, and a single youth movement, the Jeunesse de la Révolution Démocratique Africaine (JRDA), was created to embody all locally based youth associations.
These changes were not received with universal enthusiasm, and the national elections held in March 1958 were accompanied by local acts of violence stimulated by ethnic loyalties. Nevertheless, hostility to French rule was so widely felt that Sékou Touré was able to orchestrate it skillfully to overcome local differences and win an overwhelming vote in favour of rejecting de Gaulles's offer of membership of the French community. By that time party membership had risen to 800,000 and after independence every adult automatically became party member by payment of a subscription as part of his state tax.
Though anti-French feeling was dominant in 1958, Sékou Touré was faced with a difficult task in maintaining the same high level of unity after independence, more particularly when France peremptorily severed all its links with its former dependency. If he were to be successful in spite of the divisions which had existed almost to the day of independence, he had to demonstrate that the interests of every section of the population would be fully promoted. But instead of looking first at the economy — upon which the satisfaction of those interests depended — he tried to achieve his objective by instilling into the population the doctrine of party supremacy. In the meantime, lie hoped that any immediate economic strain might be dealt with by looking to Europe's eastern-bloc countries for assistance. It was a forlorn hope but, in the absence of qualified Guineans to carry out the task, he had at least the good sense to use French experts to draft a three-year economic plan to take effect from 1960.
Not everyone was convinced by PDG propaganda, and Sékou Touré's ideology proved unacceptable to some sections of the population. Opposition took the form of an attempt in 1960 to overthrow the government and to reestablish links with France. Those involved were the people who had contrived to make a satisfactory living under French rule and who were afraid that their economic prospects would be endangered by the radical egalitarianism professed by the ruling party. They were assisted by French soldiers from Senegal and the Ivory Coast, but the attempt was defeated — largely because Sékou Touré still retained the loyalty of an appreciable majority of the Guinean people. These latter the president was able to rally enthusiastically with the call to resist all threats to the country's independence from traitors within and from foreign neo-imperialists.
He was less able to deal with the flight of refugees seeking sanctuary in Senegal, in the Ivory Coast, or in France, which followed upon the failure of the coup. The exodus became a flood as the years went by, and from the beginning the refugees were mainly drawn from those sections of the population possessing the qualifications, initiatives or experience which might have made a vital contribution to the country's future. This was made particularly clear by the outcome of what came to be described as the « teachers' plot » of December 1961. This second attempted coup was attributed by the government to the machinations of some of the country's more left-wing teachers, prompted by Soviet diplomats. Whether or not the charge was just, the steps taken against both elements greatly increased the outward flow of educated Guineans and alienated the Eastern Bloc countries upon which the government had hoped to rely for assistance. Perhaps worst of all, it reduced the possibility that any informed internal criticism of Sékou Touré's ideology might ever be heard. To emphasize still further the internal solidarity upon which he insisted, Sékou Touré wrote in 1962:
There is no room in the Republic of Guinea for the Malinke race, the Sousou race, the Foulah race, the Landouma or Kissi … Thus, every youth of Guinea, every adult of Guinea asked about his race will reply that he is African.
African not Guinean, it should be noted, and it is interesting that, even at this early stage, he was beginning to suspect that excessive local self-interest was acting as a source of discontent and disunity.
In fact, it was economic rather than ethnic problems which had so quickly intruded upon the euphoria engendered by apparent solidarity. The French economic planners employed by Sékou Touré had wisely concentrated upon schemes for rural development, because of the fertility of the soil and the variety of climatic conditions which Guinea enjoyed. But because of the tardy introduction of education under French rule, and because many of those who had benefited from it had gone into exile, the country lacked the trained personnel to implement the plans proposed. Aid from the Soviet Union — upon which Sékou Touré had hoped to rely as an interim measure — proved inadequate and often inappropriate. Emergency efforts to improve the situation only made things worse. Incompetent interference by the government in the activities of the farmers, and an attempt to impose a form of collectivism which was unacceptable to the farming community, aroused strong opposition. Once again it was some of the Fulani pastoralists who led the flight over the border into Senegal. An attempt to control prices in turn led to the sale of black-market produce across the frontier. Sadly, and not wholly accurately, Sékou Touré deplored the persistence of regionalism and racialism. He would have been wiser to look more closely at the economic rather than at the ethnic preoccupations of the disgruntled sections of the population.
If there was discontent among the rural population, the people of the towns were no happier. Neglected by the government, traders and prospective small-scale industrialists had pursued their own ends as they saw fit. But in 1964 Sékou Touré rounded on them, denouncing them as exploiters of the masses. In the following year, a « traders' plot » was said to have been uncovered, and Sékou Touré accused the commercial classes of intriguing with France to promote their own interests at the expense of the people of Guinea. Henceforward, he said, no trader or industrialist might hold office within the party. Once again he had rejected men of ability in favour of those who accepted his ideology without question. And once again many of those he had attacked fled the country.
Until 1967 Sékou Touré never clearly formulated his political philosophy, and even after that date his policies were inclined to be idiosyncratic. In that year, however, he claimed to have adopted a policy of scientific socialism, distinct from the African socialism extolled by a number of African leaders which he himself dismissed as romantic idealism. He did not, in fact, pursue a consistently Marxist-Leninist line, but his public support for that doctrine aroused suspicion and hostility among important sections of the population and increased the enmity of the, by then, considerable contingent of influential Guinean exiles in other African countries and in Europe. Nor did it win support among the disapproving leaders of the western powers. On the other hand, it helped considerably to bind together more strongly those who supported Sékou Touré and who were not only impressed by PDG propaganda but had also been disturbed by the overthrow of President Nkrumah of Ghana in 1966 — an act they attributed to collusion between traitors and external capitalist interests.
With events in Ghana very much in the forefront of their minds, the fear of external threat from exiles and foreign forces hostile to the government was a matter of daily concern to the Guinean people who remained in the country. Internal forces, too, presented problems. In 1969 it was claimed that there had been an unsuccessful coup attempt by dissident elements in the army. This was a matter of double significance. Potentially the army, as in other African states, was the most powerful agency within the country. Hitherto, however, it had pursued its professional role, showing no interest in politics. But while membership of the government and of the senior offices within the party had, by no deliberate design, fallen to members of the different ethnic groups roughly in proportion to the size of those groups within the population as a whole, the officer corps of the army contained a disproportionately large number of Sousou, with the Malinke in second place, and the others poorly represented. By his heavy-handed intrusion into farming methods, Sékou Touré had already caused discontent among the Fulani — from which group a high proportion of the disaffected intellectuals had also been drawn — and he had disturbed the Malinke by his condemnation of traders and industrialists. Now he set about alienating leading figures among another ethnic group — the Sousou. Rather than appeasing the disgruntled officers by trying to discover the grounds for their discontent, Sékou Touré decided that a new force was needed to counterbalance that of the professional army. He therefore created a militia from within the party's youth movement which, he felt confident, would be ideologically committed to the government.
In spite of these measures, and the president's suspicions which had prompted them, opposition to the government was still, essentially, neither tribal nor ethnic in origin. But Sékou Touré's behaviour caused traditional loyalties to become more significant as the government's critics were forced to conclude that the president was wholly insensitive to regional interests and to deeply ingrained social customs. To add to the discontent, a second three-year economic plan, which had been intended to take effect from 1964, was proving to be a failure. Anxious to avoid any reliance upon external assistance, with its potential for interference, Sékou Touré had left the formulation of the plan to party members. They, however, had lacked the expertise to carry out the task and had taken little account of the realities of the situation in Guinea. The result was not even a list of objectives but only of aspirations. Yet the attempt to control the economy, ineffective though it was, still contrived to stir up discontent among those who resented its implications, and disappointment among the party's faithful because it failed to produce the results they had expected.
One factor which did initially help to unite the people of Guinea was Sékou Touré's education policy. Education, though gravely neglected by the French administrators until after the Second World War, was, for the president, one of the keys to successful nation building. Educational provision was widened at all levels in the first decade of his rule, and at all levels the aim was to tie education to the achievement of the party's objectives. In 1961 it was announced that scholarships enabling students to advance to higher levels of education would be awarded on the basis of loyalty to the party and to Guinea. Students in secondary schools were required to follow a compulsory course in political education which introduced them to the history and aims of the PDG. Students at the higher levels were prepared for service in the upper echelon of the party and the state and, more particularly — after the disturbances of the late 1960s — emphasis was placed on teaching about the threat of neo-colonialism and the need to fight to preserve the country's independence. Research by students of history in the polytechnics — later to become universities — was almost uniformly devoted to questions of local resistance to French conquest and administration and to the struggle for independence 2. As a result of this type of education the younger generation of Guineans not unnaturally became less critical of the government than were some of their elders. The ease with which the new graduates found positions of responsibility within the party and the state also meant that there were few disgruntled young intellectuals to reinforce the older intellectual critics of Sékou Touré's ideology.
Surprisingly, then, though the president might have believed that he was acting pragmatically to defuse an acknowledged threat, he introduced a parallel program which seemed to run counter to the aims already fixed by his educational system. Addressing the first graduates of Conakry Polytechnic in 1968 he acknowledged that tribal and ethnic groups were historical facts and that those groups were deeply conscious of their geographical and linguistic unity. This situation, he said, must be accepted and account must be taken of those differences when national policies were being formulated. Nevertheless, he still intended that the development of the different groups should take place within the national community, for, if the nation collapsed ethnic groups could not survive.' His recipe for promoting these apparently conflicting objectives sounded equally unconvincing. Developing his theme shortly afterwards, he announced his decision to encourage the teaching of eight of the country's traditional languages. Initially the idea sprang from the laudable desire to promote adult literacy, but it was soon extended to become an integral part of the country's educational system at primary level. The object was to ensure that indigenous languages were the normal means of communication for the first eight years of instruction, though French was to be taught from the third year onwards.
It was a programme beset with problems. Particularly at the higher levels of education, the use of a range of languages created confusion. For the mass of the population, however, it merely served to emphasize the divisions which already existed within the community. To the casual observer such an apparent concession to regionalism amounted to a complete reversal of policy. Not surprisingly, after the muddle that ensued, a return to teaching in French was one of the earliest proposals of the military government which took office in 1984.4
In 1970 there was an attempted invasion by Guinean exiles acting in co-operation with the Portuguese — who were anxious to release some prisoners of the Guinea-Bissau liberation movement who were being held in Guinea. The effort needed to suppress the invasion demonstrated all too clearly the strength of the exile opposition to Sékou Touré government. The invasion was not, however, the product of any tribal or ethnic movement, though it doubtless drew sustenance from communal feelings of dissatisfaction. It was primarily an attempt to rid the country of an ideology which those who took part in the invasion believed to be detrimental to their own interests if not to the whole people. Nevertheless, Sékou Touré reacted as if he believed that ethnic opposition lay at the root of the troubles. The violent purges which he carried out after the invasion had been repulsed were directly mainly against people of Fulani origin, including some of those who had seemed to be most consistently loyal to the regime and who were among the president's closest advisors.
It was this suspicion, even of his nearest colleagues, which caused Sékou Touré to rely increasingly upon younger men who had been educated since he came to power and who were uncritically devoted to the concept of a united Guinea. One by one, the older men were removed from office. First went those who had formerly led opposition groups but who had later joined the PDG — men like Ibrahima Barry III and Diawandou Barry, both Fulani. Then followed those who, although they had supported Sékou Touré's efforts to assert the dignity of the Guinean people, had never felt at ease within his ideological system. Again they were mainly Fulani. However, one of them, Saifoulaye Diallo, though relieved of office, was allowed to remain in honourable retirement, and his death in 1981 was marked by three days of national mourning. In place of these senior statesmen came Sékou Touré's younger men, eager to seek within the party hierarchy the only sort of remunerative and purposeful occupation open to educated people in a country where the economy had stagnated rapidly during the years since independence.
That money was available to pay the salaries of the rapidly expanding party bureaucracy was due entirely to the income from the country's bauxite mines. With a view to developing those resources, the richest of their kind in the world, the French had handed over the working of the first of the mines to an international consortium just before Guinea became unexpectedly independent. After lengthy negotiation, Sékou Touré succeeded in 1973 in recovering part of the ownership and two-thirds of the taxable profits for Guinea. Five years earlier he had made a similar arrangement with a mixed enterprise company to develop other bauxite deposits. By the mid-1970s, almost the whole country's foreign-currency earnings came from bauxite and allied products. All other forms of industrial enterprise, including transport, were under direct government control and had become virtually derelict because of the inexperience and incompetence of those responsible for operating them.
Another attempt to promote collectivization in the farming sector in the mid-1970s produced further opposition and again led to accusations that the opposition was the result of an ethnic plot. Not surprisingly, it had been the Fulani, with their traditionally hierarchical system of government and their deep personal attachment to their cattle, who had reacted most strongly against the unproductive egalitarianism and collectivism proclaimed by Sékou Touré's government. The plot, which was said to have had the support of France, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast, produced a violent response from the government.' The Fulani, it was claimed, were pursuing racist aims, and demands were made for the extradition of a number of Guineans in exile. They met with no success, but again Sékou Touré resorted to purges at home and seized the opportunity to rid himself of two leading figures who, for differing reasons, he feared might constitute a threat to the government. Telli Diallo had returned to Guinea after serving as secretary-general of the OAU and had been given a ministerial appointment. Sékou Touré quickly came to the conclusion that, for those who opposed his regime, Telli Diallo must appear as his natural successor. Though Diallo himself was embarassed to be cast in such a role, it was a situation which the president felt he could not ignore, and Diallo was dismissed. The other prominent person who was similarly involved was Alioune Dramé, who had served the government loyally for eighteen years but was now suspect because of the President's intense feeling against the Fulani. From this time, it became obvious that Sékou Touré was finding it increasingly necessary to fill the important offices of state — not just with members of his own ethnic group but more especially with people who were closely related to him and who might, for that reason, be committed to supporting him. Yet even his influential half-brother, Ismael Touré, was briefly dismissed from office because he was suspected of wanting to abandon the president's Marxist policy 6.
Suspicion of everyone, save of his closest associates, had by now replaced Sékou Touré's boast of a united people. In 1977 his punitive measures against those he deemed to be his opponents led to a call to the United Nations from the International League for Human Rights for an enquiry into a « reign of terror and massive violation of human rights » in Guinea. But again, in November, another unsuccessful attempt to invade the country and to seize Conakry led to the arrest of many more presumed collaborators. Sékou Touré was not unaware of the unfavourable impression his actions were making upon external observers, and he was becoming increasingly conscious that he must moderate his former contempt for external criticism if Guinea was to get the outside aid which his regime needed for its survival, a fact which he was now coming to recognize if not publicly to acknowledge. At the time of independence the proud claim to « prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery » rallied without difficulty those whose experience had only been of poverty under French rule. It had not impressed those who had begun to enjoy a measure of prosperity before independence. Now the reality behind the slogan seemed distinctly less attractive to those of Sékou Touré's supporters who did not belong to the party hierarchy, and who looked out upon an apparently endless vista of poverty and increasingly limited freedom. Though foreign rule was a thing of the past, freedom under the new regime seemed less than complete, and Sékou Touré himself was beginning to realize that the inheritance of the political kingdom had not, of itself, led to the creation of a nation. What his people wanted, irrespective of tribal or ethnic origins, was stability and economic prosperity. The government's failure to produce results was the chief cause of internal discord. Unfortunately for Sékou Touré's hopes, the western powers had not relented, in spite of Guinea's new insistence upon its non-aligned role in world affairs, and no help was forthcoming.
It was against this background that, in the late 1970s, Sékou Touré began to woo France once again. In a paradoxical way he still trusted France more than any other country. Bowing to external pressure, he released 300 political prisoners in December 1977, and early in 1978 diplomatic links were restored with the Ivory Coast and Senegal. In December of that year, President Giscard d'Estaing of France paid a visit of reconciliation to Guinea, but it was some years before Sékou Touré was able to return the compliment. Guinea's relations with France continued to be ambiguous, even after Sékou Touré, in February 1979, ended the agreement granting the USSR airforce and naval-base facilities in Conakry. Commercial discussions took place with representatives of Ivory Coast trading interests, however, and from July 1st, 1979 small-scale private commerce was permitted within Guinea itself.
In spite of these modest improvements in Guinea's relations with the outside world, Sékou Touré still did not feel secure, and he railed against « corrupt cadres and disguised counter-revolutionaries » even within his own party 7. His fears were not without foundation. In May 1980 and again in February 1981 he escaped assassination attempts. On each occasion he responded by ordering numerous arrests and by purging the army and the PDG. A year later, in February 1982, he claimed to have foiled yet another plot against his regime and in May he was re-elected, as his party's only candidate, to a further seven-year term as president. In September he paid his long-delayed official visit to a France which, now that its pride had been satisfied by Sékou Touré's years of strain, was anxious to share in Guinea's rich mineral deposits. Nevertheless, the visit had its drawbacks. Sékou Touré was greeted by hostile demonstrations from Guinean refugees who condemned the record of his treatment of political opponents.
France was not the only non-African country to which Sékou Touré turned for assistance. Economic nationalism, for all its fine independent façade, had still failed to fill the vacuum created by the flight of French capital in 1958. The subsequent loss of its own men of experience had meant that Guinea's industries, its commerce, and even its output of export and food crops, had fallen far below the people's expectations and had even fallen short of their day-to-day requirements. During a visit to the USA in 1982, Sékou Touré attended a Guinea Investment Forum in New York at which he said:
We are eager to cooperate, because what we particularly lack today is capital. God has given us immense natural wealth, but we don't have the capital or the technology or the know-how to develop it.
Times, and attitudes, were clearly changing. Arab countries in the Middle East also offered help, and a nominal attempt was made to encourage private-sector activities in Guinea itself. But Sékou Touré was reluctant to abandon the idea of economic nationalism completely. He still could not rid himself of the belief that communal solidarity must triumph in the long run and, in any case, was the only sure bulwark against the exploitation of the weak by the strong. It was this conviction that led him to persist in trying to introduce collectivism into the farming sector. It was to prove a triumph of ideology over experience.
Sékou Touré's death after an operation carried out in the USA in April 1984 put his achievements to the test while challenging his fears of ethnic opposition to his government. Lansana Beavogui, Prime Minister since 1972, who was believed to have been a pliant supporter of Sékou Touré, temporarily took the reins of government into his hands. Three days after the president's funeral, however, there took place a military coup such as Sékou Touré had feared for some time. The objective of the coup, it was said, was to put an end to an alleged power struggle which had broken out among the associates of the former president and to rid the country of twenty-six years of repression, poverty, and corruption. This was a remarkable statement, because it challenged the vested interests of a whole generation of bureaucrats who, in spite of the growing disillusionment with the performance of the economy, still recognized that their own positions depended upon the survival of the old regime, and who were still prepared to lay the blame « or the shortcomings of the Sékou Touré era at the door of malign foreign powers. »
The first public announcement on behalf of the coup was made by Colonel Lansana Conté. He spoke, not in French but in Sousou, though the immediate assumption that this had ethnic implications was balanced by the fact that Conté's closest associate was Colonel Diarra Traore — a Malinke as Sékou Touré had been. Conté also announced that, although the leaders of the former government had been arrested, there would be no executions, but some might be called upon to answer administrative or economic charges. The PDG was dissolved and an eighteen-member Military Committee of National Redress (CMRN) was installed. Conté became president and Traore was appointed Prime Minister. The CMRN announced that its members would remain in office until racialism, regionalism, and sectarianism had been eliminated. This was a reference not to the exiles, whom Sékou Touré had frequently castigated for their ethnic loyalties, but rather to the former president's own increasing reliance upon his close relations to fill the high offices of state.
Messages of support for the new government poured in from exiles of all ethnic groups, and many former refugees immediately began to contemplate a return to Guinea. The western powers also looked with approval on the change of government, but, after years of detachment and even of suspicion, they were slow to convert their approbation into active assistance, although the new regime quickly made it clear that it was prepared to give unconditional support to private enterprise. A limited amount of aid was provided, but it was expected that the main help would come from the IMF — with all that might involve by way of strict economic controls.
The task of regenerating the country's economy was retarded by the new regime's immediate concern with establishing its legitimacy. There may have been unanimity among the coup leaders about the desirability of ridding the country of Sékou Touré's ideology, but there was a lack of unanimity about who should rule in his place. As early as December 1984, Conté announced that state corruption had forced him to take over the offices of Prime Minister and minister of defence in addition to the presidency. The former Prime Minister, Colonel Traore, was demoted to the ministry of education but remained in the cabinet. Nine other members left the government and five new members were added to it. Conté stated ominously that other members might be removed if they did not put the interests of the state above all others.
Traore's demotion may have resulted from his weakness in high office, but it was more probably a cunning test of his loyalty, for a strange occurrence took place in July 1985. President Conté left the country to attend a conference, but before his departure he took the precaution of disposing some of his troops in strategic positions to check any uprising. His prescience was rewarded when an attempted military coup, led by Colonel Traore, was successfully suppressed because of the precautions he had taken. The fate of Traore is not known, though it is rumoured that he was killed in fighting for control of the radio station. It is also widely believed that, during the struggle, troops supporting Conté stormed the prison at Kindia and shot some of the members and officials of Sékou Touré's government who were detained there. Credence was given to this latter claim in May 1987 when the government unexpectedly announced that secret trials had recently taken place at which members of Sékou Touré's government, as well as some of those involved in the attempted coup, had been found guilty of capital offences and had been executed. Others had been found guilty in their absence and still more had been sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour. Among those condemned to death were seven relatives of Sékou Touré, all of whom had held ministerial office! One general, two colonels, eleven majors and six captains of the Guinean army, whose names were not published, were sentenced to death in their absence 9.
Immediately after the coup there had also been a purge of the army directed particularly against the Malinke, and many of the officers who had fled the country were from that same ethnic group. Reprisals were subsequently taken against civilians of Malinke origin also, which may suggest that the government had serious doubts about the loyalty of that group. The Malinke were certainly under-represented in the cabinet, and it was also noted that Conté had been in no hurry to increase the number of Fulani members, although the Fulani had been particular sufferers under the regime of Sékou Touré.
For all his claims to be above internal divisions, it seemed that Conté was beginning to follow in the footsteps of Sékou Touré in relying increasingly upon a close circle of colleagues who belonged to his own ethnic group. The problem was that the influence of Sékou Touré's years in office could not easily be dispelled. It was not simply that the former government had led the country into total disarray. The new regime was handicapped by the fact that it lacked the means, and the people lacked the will, to change the situation. By 1987, representatives of a number of countries — meeting under the chairmanship of the World Bank — had accepted that Guinea must have assistance, and the Guinean government, for its part, had offered incentives to encourage private-sector activity. The main obstacle, however, was the absence of appropriate manpower to put this programme into effect. Whatever Conté's plans, their implementation depended upon the co-operation of such educated people as remained in the country. As in Sékou Touré's time, these were mainly young men who had filled the party bureaucracy in numbers far exceeding the requirements of the system, and they were still wholeheartedly committed to Sékou Touré's ideology. Conté's willingness to acknowledge Guinea's dependence upon outside aid was anathema to them — Sékou Touré having, by his rhetoric, carefully concealed his own partial acknowledgement of that position. Even more strongly resented was Conte's proposal to reduce the number of state employees from 90,000 to 60,000. Not even the promise of higher salaries for those who were retained could win acceptance for the plan. The suggestion that those who retired might profitably engage in the much-needed expansion of the country's agricultural sector met with little enthusiasm.
The opposition to Conté was in no sense ethnic in composition. The men who filled the state bureaucracy still indulged in the panAfricanist rhetoric with which Sékou Touré had rallied the country in 1958. They remained an influential group because, for twenty-six years, they had borne the responsibility for organizing support for the party and for disseminating their leader's ideology. There were few who dared challenge their authority, particularly in the towns. Few, too, ventured to utter criticisms of Sékou Touré, even four years after his death. It was this continuing loyalty to the old order which had such a depressing effect upon the exiles who returned to Guinea with high hopes after Lansana Conté's coup. Many of them, having reviewed the scene, left again in despair. The insistence upon self-reliance, which the bureaucracy had imbibed under Sékou Touré's influence, and which they still embraced unquestioningly, seemed to the returning exiles a recipe for continuing economic ruin.
If President Lansana Conté is to have any prospect of surmounting this enormous obstacle, he will need the co-operation of the Fulani and Malinke, as well as of his own Sousou and the people of the forest region. Above all, he will need the help of the refugee elite — who alone have the experience to see the situation in Guinea in a wider context, and the flexibility to adapt Guinea's resources to meet its need. It would be disastrous if Conté were thought to be too suspicious of the Malinke and too wary of the Fulani to make use of their talents. Sékou Touré's fears of ethnic opposition had, it could be argued, been responsible for creating such opposition out of what were essentially disagreements over economic policies. The Fulani pastoralists had been led by his attack upon them to believe that collectivism was deliberately directed against them as an ethnic group. The Malinke, too, had felt themselves singled out for victimization by the exclusion of traders and industrialists from office in the PDG. Suspicion had bred suspicion and Sékou Touré had increasingly persecuted the Fulani leaders. By stages the conflict between the government and its opponents had taken on an increasingly ethnic character, though ultimately Sékou Touré had become isolated even from his own Malinke people.
So far as the Fulani were concerned, the fault did not lie wholly on the government's side. They, after all, had created a largely self-contained state which had survived for more than two centuries. Their relations with their neighbours, whether Malinke or Sousou, had been essentially those of a nation with foreign states. Their links with the Muslim peoples of Senegal were probably stronger than with the people with whom they had been associated in one administrative unit by the coincidence of imperial expansion in Africa. The Malinke, too, had not been wholly committed to Sékou Touré's objective of uniting the country. They still retained feelings of pride in the achievements of their former leader, Samory, and they, too, were disinclined to be associated unreservedly with the Fulani to the west, or with the forest people to the south. It was those feelings of local pride which had reinforced economic uncertainty and had led so many Guineans to flee the country rather than submit to the all-embracing party control which Sékou Touré had sought to impose. Conté's prospects of success depend heavily upon restoring their confidence in their country, and it is the survival of Sékou Touré's unifying ideology among the younger, better educated section of society which, ironically, presents the biggest obstacle to Conté's hopes of persuading the people to work together.
That ideology, while perpetuating the concept of a pan-African culture, paradoxically bred suspicion of everyone, even of Africans, but especially of Europeans. It also created a fierce pride in the ability of the Guinean people to rely upon their own resources which restricted, and still restricts, their ability to learn from others. The support of France, now wholehearted, has to be given with discretion lest it should arouse the hostility of the ideologically opposed middle-aged 'jeunesse' of the Sékou Touré era. The IMF had been particularly lenient in offering a standby loan in spite of Guinea's failure to fulfil the conditions laid down when aid was inaugurated. But there is increasing internal hostility to the restrictions upon which the IMF has insisted, and Conté is faced with the problem of convincing his people that short-term suffering and inconvenience will lead to long-term prosperity. The cuts he has imposed upon the civil service have produced a sharp outcry from the more vocal element in the population. At the same time, the government's offer of help to private enterprise in the agricultural sector has not resulted in the benefits for which people had hoped. The press and radio have uniformly supported the military regime, but this could have the effect of stifling dissent rather than of extending toleration.
Conté's call on October 1, 1988 to the « new Guineans » to respond to the challenge of the future in a responsible manner was accompanied by the admission that « generalized corruption, incessant embezzlement, laxity in implementing budget estimates and malfunctioning of our administrative systems » had, so far, paralysed all the recovery programmes that had been launched. All these shortcomings he attributed, in part at least, to the « Guinean mentality », 10 a claim which in itself was an indictment of Sékou Touré's legacy to his country. The self-reliance which, though initially forced upon Guinea by adverse circumstances, the former president had converted into a slogan to be proudly cherished, has produced in his supporters an uncritical arrogance which has justified any action, no matter how inefficient or corrupt, provided it was of their own doing. As a result, internal initiatives which might have benefited the country as a whole were rare. With most of the ablest people in exile, US aid alone had saved the country from food shortages. Even in the bauxite industry, the one reliable source of revenue, the Guinean people had played only a menial role. While boasting of its independence, the country had lived on foreign industry and aid. It is this legacy, now reinforced by ethnic suspicion, with which the government of Conté has to contend, while denied the help of the exiles whose return is effectively discouraged by the hostility and incomprehension of the leaders of Sékou-Touré's generation.
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