The Republic ot Guinea (formerly French Guinea, one of the constituent states of the Federation of French West Africa lies at the tip of the “bulge of Africa,” on the Atlantic coast four hundred and fifty miles south-east of Dakar. It extends from 9° N. to 12.5° N. in latitude, and from 17° W. to 12° W. in longitude. One of several states located on the two thousand mile stretch of the Guinea Coast, it is bounded on the south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the northwest by Portuguese Guinea, on the north by Senegal and Mali, on the East by the Ivory Coast, and on the southwest by Liberia and Sierra Leone. The country has an area of about 97,000 square miles, roughly the size of the State of Oregon. Like most of the West African states, Guinea has no natural frontiers. Her size and shape have been determined by the colonial rivalry of European powers, which drew lines of partition with scant regard for the land and its inhabitants.
Geographers divide Guinea into four topographical and climatic regions:
Lower Guinea (Guinée Maritime) is an alluvial plain extending along the Atlantic coast, frequently gashed by the deltas of deep, meandering rivers. This aspect of the coast south of Dakar led the French to call it “les Rivières du Sud,” a name which it retained until the nineteenth century. Inland, Lower Guinea has the rain forest vegetation typical of the tropics. Temperatures and humidity are highest here and rainrall heavy — about 168 inches a year.
Middle Guinea (Moyenne-Guinée), comprising over half the total area of the country is also known as the Fouta-Djallon (or Fouta). It consists for the most part of a chain of lofty hills with altitudes ranging from 1,500 to 5,000 feet. Nearly every valley here has its river, and in the Fouta some of the great rivers of West Africa have their sources — the Niger, the Gambia, and the Bafing, chief tributary of the Senegal. Rainfall is much less here and temperatures quite irregular.
Upper Guinea (Haute-Guinée) is savannah. country, some 1,000 feet in elevation. Numerous streams wind through the plain to empty into the Niger, which here becomes a very sizeable river. Rainfall is much less in this region than in the Fouta-Djallon, and several months (usually December to March) may go by with only a scant half-inch. In this, the region farthest from the ocean, one senses the relative proximity of the sahara off to the northeast.
The Forest Region (Guinée Forestière) lies immediately north of Liberia. A typical West African tropical rain forest, this region is characterized by high temperatures and heavy rainfall, though these average somewhat less than on the coast.
The four topographical zones may also be considered ethnographic zones, for in each zone one tribe is predominant over a host of lesser peoples. In Lower Guinea, the Soussou constitute the largest group, numbering almost three hundred thousand. Excellent farmers, they have also shown great aptitude for trade, and are reputed among the most intelligent ethnic groups in Africa 1. The Soussou originated in the Soudan and drifted across Guinea to the coastal area where they settled. Their language, related to that of the Malinke of Upper Guinea, has gradually spread among neighboring peoples. Other tribes which reside in Lower Guinea include the primitive and aggressive Coniagui, the Mayo, the Nalou, the Baga, and the Landouman. The latter groups number only a few thousand each. All are Moslem.
The mountains of the Fouta-Djallon are the home of the Foulah 2, the largest tribal group in Guinea (almost one million). Fairly recent arrivals in Guinea (18th century), the Foulah are primarily a pastoral people 3, little attracted to agriculture. Around 1750, the primitive Negro inhabitants of the Fouta-Djallon were expelled northward and southward by the Foulah, who then settled with their herds in this much-favored region.
Nearly all the Foulah are literate to some extent, writing their difficult, nuance-filled language with Arabic characters learned from their marabout missionaries, who spread Islam through this whole section of Africa.
Upper Guinea is the home of the Malinke, a Mande-speaking group ethnically related to the Mandingo peoples of Mali and Upper Volta 4. Numbering some six hundred thousand, the Malinke are noted as a hard-working people willing to try a hand at anything from agriculture to retail trading and soldiering. They practice the Moslem faith.
The Malinke are of particular interest at the present time, for the young men of this tribe have largely secured control of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (P.D.G.), and, through it, have come to rule the country. Their most noted member is Sékou Touré, President of the Republic of Guinea.
Peoples much less advanced than the Soussou, Foulah and Malinke inhabit the Forest Zone. There is no one dominant tribe here, but the 110,000 Kissiens comprise the largest single group. The Guerzé, 80,000 in number, are thought to be indigenous. The Toma, numbering some 36,000, are also important, as are the Manon, separated by the frontier from the bulk of their nation that lives in Liberia. The Forest peoples, in contrast to most other Guineans, are still largely animists. Islam has failed to register any significant advance among them. This fact is often ascribed to the Moslem prohibition of wine, for the forest peoples produce great quantities of palm wine and are famed for their bibulousness.
One of the curious but natural results of the independence of African countries is the interest with which both native and European scholars are studying the history of Africa before the arrival of white explorers. In the former French colonies no time was lost in abolishing the anomalous situation in which Black African pupils memorized French texts about French history such as the much-quoted “nos ancêtres les Gaulois…” (“our ancestors, the Gauls…”). Because written records are largely lacking and because oral traditions must be accepted with caution, one must at present begin his study of West African history with such well-established facts as the formation of the Empire of Ghana. Later on, it is to be hoped, archaeologists and ethnologists will increase our knowledge of the pre-history and ancient history of this vast region.
The Sahara Desert, which seems such a formidable barrier, interestingly enough proved to be the avenue of
communication between North Africa and the Negro country of the whole Guinea Coast. (See map, page 8) The Negroes sent expeditions deep into the desert to buy salt from the Berbers, who controlled the salt mines (Taghaza, Taodeni, and Taotek). From such beginnings a highly organized trans-Saharan trade developed, in which Berbers, Arabs, and Jews of North Africa participated. Attracted by this commerce, or pursuing a desperate search for new grazing territory, or perhaps fleeing Roman persecution, migrants from North Africa settled in large numbers around Aukar in the western Soudan during the fourth century A.D. 5 Here they found a Negro population whom they apparently had no difficulty in subduing. They established a kingdom, Ghana, which lasted until the end of the eighth century.
At this time a dynasty arose from the Negro subjects, the Soninke, who vigorously expanded the kingdom into an “empire” which by the eleventh century reached
some six hundred miles to the east and south, embracing Timbuctu and the Upper Niger. Ghana was the name not only of the empire but of its capital city, which is placed by scholars some two hundred miles north of Bamako, capital today of the Republic of Mali. (It will be seen that the Empire of Ghana only brushed the northern extremity of the present-day republic of that name.) In the southwest the empire extended some four hundred miles, taking in all of Upper Guinea, and on the west it came within perhaps two hundred miles of the coast. What the northern limits of the empire may have been is a mystery still unknown to scholars 6.
From perhaps 770 to 1240, when the capital city was destroyed, Ghana enjoyed great prosperity based on a vigorous trade and a strong government. Most of the commerce was with Soudanese peoples living along the southern fringes of the desert, outside the empire's control. Ghana became the entrepôt for Moroccan merchandise, which the Soudanese paid for in gold. The precious metal tended to flow to Morocco, which furnished important quantities of it to medieval Europe.
In Kangaba (on the Niger only a few miles beyond the present Guinean frontier) there arose in the eleventh century a little kingdom of Islamized Negroes. An energetic and ambitious prince, Sundiata, concentrated his resources on building up a large standing army. Sundiata systematically eliminated all possible rivals within a radius of several hundred miles, and finally, ca. 1240, transformed his petty kingdom of Kangaba into the Empire of Mali. Mali was also the name given his capital, built farther down the Niger from Kangaba. The word means “here the king dwells,” and “Mandingo” or “Malinke” means “people subject to Mali.” Both terms are applied to the tribe which, as pointed out above, forms the bulk of the population of Upper Guinea.
Sundiata's empire included the region of Upper Guinea, but his successors expanded further, taking in all of the Fouta-Djallon (Middle Guinea) and part of the Forest Zone as well. The prosperity and far-flung commerce of the Empire of Mali rivalled that of the old Empire of Ghana, and throughout four centuries it dominated West Africa below the desert. The Emperors of Mali made the pious pilgrimage to Mecca, often with Solomonic magnificence. Later sovereigns, however, were unable to hold this great state together, and subject tribes on the outer fringes wrested their independence from them. Some tribes even combined to attack the dying empire, so that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the emperors received word that Portuguese vessels were exploring the coast, they resorted to the desperate, and unsuccessful, expedient of applying to these infidel newcomers for military aid.
The first major explorations of the African coast were carried out by the Portuguese, in the fifteenth century. These explorations were soon rivalled by those of the French and the English. Hoping to develop a profitable trade, the Europeans established agents at various points along the coast, sometimes building forts to ensure their protection during the absence of the fleets.
Commerce was limited to a few items, none of which as yet had any great appeal for Europe. Once the Portuguese had rounded Africa and reached India, their interest in Africa dwindled until, with the opening up of the New World, Portugal acquired a great market for slaves whom she could export from her outposts on the African coast.
The slave trade reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, by which time the British and the French were providing stiff competition.
The British busied themselves with exploring Gambia, Sierra Leone, and the lower coast of the West African bulge. The French, operating from their base in Senegal, explored the shoreline to the south of Gambia. (See map, page 13) Like the Portuguese before them, the French were attracted by the many rivers and streams which cut the coast of Guinea and suggested for this stretch the name “Les Rivières du Sud.”
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw great activity in West Africa commerce, slaving, naval warfare, and the destruction of coastal warehouses or factories by rival European powers. During the Seven Years' War Britain captured all of France's outposts on the Upper Guinea Coast, but during the War of American Independence France regained them. Both powers remained frenzied rivals in the rich slave trade. Although some three thousand slaves were taken each year from the Windward Coast between the Gambia River and Sherbro Island (the coast of modern Portuguese Guinea and the present-day Republics of Guinea and Sierra Leone), the Europeans usually bartered for their human merchandise much farther down the coast than Guinea. Indeed, a long strip of the Lower Guinea Coast became known as the Slave Coast.
During the Napoleonic era France was cut off from her West African coastal holdings by Britain's mastery of the seas, but in 1817 she was able to reoccupy posts on the Senegal and the Gambia. When an experiment in plantation cotton culture failed in 1826, the French concluded that the safest and most profitable course was to follow the example of the British: They would concentrate on trade establishments along the Guinea Coast wherever a navigable estuary and friendly native chiefs should make these possible 7.
The early nineteenth century saw many attempts, especially by the British, to control, reduce, and suppress the slave trade. Yet in this same century it reached enormous proportions, in great part due to the voracious demands of the Brazilian market, which was directly accessible straight across the Atlantic.
As early as 1835-1840, at least 100,000 slaves a year were shipped from West Africa. Although the commerce was by now illegal and there was a risk of capture by European cruisers patrolling the Guinea Coast, a slaver had to save only one of two cargoes to make a profit of 140 percent 8. During this time, the Rivers of the South (Guinea) was a favorite haven for the slavers. They dickered with the chiefs on or near the coast, buying great caravans of slaves taken as prisoners in the wars that were convulsing the interior.
Captives were trekked across the Fouta-Djallon down to the vegetation-shrouded estuaries to await the furtive visits of slave ships. The coast of Guinea, because of its many rivers and estuaries, was ideally designed for this overt but illegal traffic. The King of Koba (on the coast of Guinea between the rivers Konkoure and Pongo) went so far as to retain two French pilots to meet slavers and guide them through the winding channels of the deltas, first wrapping the masts with mango branches and palm fronds to hide them from the gaze of any cruiser that might be lying 9 offshore and studying the leafy coast with a spyglass.
The British and the French vied with one another in making deals with petty chiefs or “kings” to guarantee a monopoly of the trade within a certain zone or to secure other advantages which usually proved to be ephemeral. The Europeans hatched many intrigues supported one local chief against another, and these sometimes resulted in raids or “wars” involving considerable destruction of property and much loss of life 10.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the French sought constantly to consolidate their position in the Rivers of the South. To this end they concluded a series of treaties with native “kings” and other local rulers by which the African signatories agreed to put themselves and their people under a French protectorate. In return, the chiefs received an annual stipend from the French State 11.
Thinking that the best way to ensure freedom of commerce along the Guinea Coest was to secure the immediate hinterland also, both France and England sought to acquire control over the strategic highlands of the Fouta-Djallon. A Foulah people, Moslem in faith, had settled here, organizing a feudal state which every two years alternated quasi-religious rulers chosen from the two strongest families.
In 1881 a French envoy signed a treaty of protection with the Almamy, or sovereign 12.
A second treaty was signed on February 6, 1897 stipulating that a French Resident should live in the Fouta under the direction of the French Governor of Guinea 13. In 1906 the Fouta was partitioned between the two contending families, whose heads were reduced from the high status of Almamys 13 to the level of provincial chiefs 14.
In 1911 a French military column made a punitive tour of the Fouta, burning huts, seizing herds, and effectively “pacifying” the region. No other Almamys were appointed thereafter, and the Fouta-Djallon highlands passed definitively under French control. The English remained checkmated within Sierra Leone.
From 1882 onwards, after the English recognized French rights over the Rivers of the South, Guinea gradually assumed its present form. Until then, French administrative control had been exercised from Senegal, always the center of French activity on the Guinea Coast. Organized originally as a dependency of Senegal, the Rivers of the South acquired administrative autonomy on December 17, 1891, under the name “French Guinea and Dependencies” 15.
A French lieutenant-governor, who had taken up residence at Conakry in 1890, ruled a few small enclaves along the coast (including some in the Ivory Coast), and exercised suzerainty over the innumerable protectorates established by treaty with local chiefs and over the important region of the Fouta-Djallon.
Deep in the interior, beyond the highlands of the Fouta-Djallon, lies the country of Ouassoulou, which comprises parts of Upper Guinea and the Forest Zone and extends across the modern frontier with the Ivory Coast.
In this remote region, under the generalship of a native ruler — the Almamy Samory Touré 16 — there was strong resistance to further French penetration.
Samory was worried over the threat of expansion into the interior, either by the French from Conakry or the Fouta, or by the English from Sierra Leone. Since the English seemed the more formidable at the time, Samory allied himself with the French. But after disposing of some minor enemies, the French turned on Samory and attacked the Manding territory over which he ruled.
From 1891-1898 French troops ravaged the land, burned villages and crops, and sent thousands of captives to a dubious fate in the Soudan. On more than one occasion Samory gave evidence of very superior generalship, but his resources could not compare with those which France lavished on this conquest.
Finally, betrayed by one of his own people, Samory was captured and exiled to Gabon, where he died two years later. His death made it possible for the French to round out the conquest of the region to the south (the Forest Zone). The Manon, Toma, Kissi, Coniagui, and other smaller groups resisted the French advance, but they were no match for artillery-equipped troops.
[Errata. — Read A Tribute to Victor Du Bois. — Tierno S. Bah]
In 1895, the same year which saw the creation of the General Government of French West Africa 17, the cercle of Faranah bordering Sierra Leone was transferred from the Soudan to Guinea. With the establishment of a protectorate over the Fouta, the annexation of Timbo in 1896, the conquest of Samory's lands and the Forest Zone to the south, and a strip of the Soudan in 1899, the colony of French Guinea took on its definitive shape. The British ceded the Islands of Los, off Conakry, in 1904. Frontier adjustments were made with Portuguese Guinea in 1886, with Sierra Leone in 1889, and with Liberia in 1911, to establish Guinea's present borders.
Just as the forts of preceding centuries were intended to protect the factories (warehouses) of the European merchants, no less was the political structure erected by the French in 1890 designed to favor the commercial exploitation of the colony. Decades of experience with the outposts along dozens of rivera had revealed that Conakry enjoyed considerable advantages. It was natural, therefore, that in 1890, the year before the Rivers of the South were to receive administrative autonomy from Senegal, Conakry was created a port. It became the capital of the colony of French Guinea the following year. Within the next decade, business houses in Dubréka, Boké, and Boffa suspended their operations in those cities and moved to Conakry 18.
The countries of Europe which had achieved success as colonial powers were the more highly industrialized nations of Western Europe. In their search for raw materials to occupy their industries, and in the concomitant search for ever greater markets for the products of those industries, these nations sought to establish political control over large portions of the underdeveloped world and to force them into an unbalanced economic collaboration.
It was for the colonial peoples to produce raw materials, even under forced labor if that should be necessary. It was for them, too, to consume a goodly share of the merchandise into which those materials had been converted.
On both transactions the European mother country intended to make as high a profit as possible, and little thought was lost on what effects this one-sided economic exploitation might have on the colonial subjects.
As has been said, France by no means restricted her interests to the Rivers of the South (French Guinea)
but was active in many places along the vast stretch of
the Upper and Lower Guinea Coasts. After a number of
these areas had been placed under the supervision of
governors, responsible directly to the Ministry of the Colonies in Paris, it soon came to be realized that such a highly centralized administration was impractical. To achieve a greater degree of local coordination and some uniformity in the execution of the metropolitan government's instructions, experiments were made, beginning in 1895, in combining several of the territories into one group 19.
The Governor of Senegal was made Governor-General of an ensemble, comprising Guinea, the Ivory Coast, the Soudan (all an the Upper Guinea Coast), and Dahomey (on the Lower Guinea Coast). But, as the Governor-General had scant powers 20 and no budget, the arrangement was far from satisfactory.
At last, in 1903, the governor-generalship was separated from the governorship of Senegal, and in the following year the Federation of French West Africa was erected, receiving its own budget in 1905 21. The Governor-General, emphasizing his dissociation from Senegalese affairs, left Saint Louis du Senegal to take up residence in Dakar.
Over the Federation was placed a Governor-General responsible for administration of the Federation and for a budget designed to meet some services of concern to the Federation as a whole. Under him were the governors of the territories (colonies), each of whom administered his own territorial budget. In this task he was assisted by a conseil d 1adm1nistration, which he was obliged to consult on matters regarding direct taxation, disposal of government property, loans, and other administrative problems.
The conseils consisted, in most cases, of three Frenchmen and three Africans 22. For administrative purposes, each territory was divided into a number of cercles (regions), presided over by a commandant de cercle (regional administrator) 23, who was invariably a European. The commandant de cercle was assisted by a conseil de notables (council of notables) comprising chiefs and other traditional dignitaries nominated by the Governor the advice of district officers.
The conseil met regularly with the commandant de cercle to discuss matters pertaining to the affairs of the cercle. Below the cercle was the subdivision, also administered by a European, who carried the title of chief de subdivision. Below the subdivision were the canton and the village, ruled by traditional or customary chiefs. These chiefs had been very largely shorn of their traditional authority and were now reduced to the role of acting as agents of the colonial regime. Their principal functions were to collect taxes, provide forced labor for public works projects, and aid the district officers in minor administrative tasks. Such was the executive structure.
The line of communication ran from Paris to Dakar, thence to the territorial capitals (e.g., Conakry), and on out to the small towns on the coast with their regional administrators and to the interior and the bush with their district officers.
When the Federation of French West Africa was erected, capping the now firmly established colonial system, France — by the simple expedient of the Decree of October 24, 1904 — incorporated all of these West African lands into the patrimony of the French State.
With this unilateral act, she turned into mere “scraps of paper” the scores of protectorate treaties she had negotiated Nith the indigenous chiefs.
What motive lay behind France's policy of carefully selecting a few Africans to be developed into a well-educated elite? Partly, the belief that she could control her colonial subjects more easily by working through Africans of unquestionable loyalty to France.
There was also a genuine conviction — which at times seemed to grow into an obsession — that she had a civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) to perform among the African peoples whom she had subjugated.
On the assumption that it was possible, and desirable,
to make Frenchmen out of Africans, France offered
the small number of assimilated natives (évolués) a highly privileged position in African society. In fact this policy at times resulted in some dazzling successes, as exemplified by such men as Léopold Senghor of Senegal and Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Ivory Coast. True, experience ultimately proved that France could not rely even on these men to govern Africans exclusively for French interests. But they did exert every effort to persuade independent Africans to cooperate peaceably with France.
The number of évolués was never large, however.
The overwhelming majority of Africans, in Guinea as elsewhere in French Africa, neither learned the French language nor became assimilated into French culture and civilization. They were French in name but not in fact, and their life continued little changed from what it had been for centuries.
In the years between the two World Wars, nationalism had not yet taken hold in French West Africa. There did exist, however, a type of racism in the colonies, demonstrated on the one hand by the contemptuous attitude of the petits blancs (“little whites”) toward Africans, and on the other by an ethnocentrism among the Africans themselves. For the most part the latter were still far too conscious of and far too loyal to their tribal or regional affiliations to entertain a truly nationalistic concept.
When this African elite formulated requests for reform they thought only of achieving these within a framework of peaceful association with France. Their desiderata were mainly social and economic — elimination of forced labor, greater job opportunities, and equal pay for equal work. But as the years went by, and the reluctance of the French to make even the simplest and most inevitable concessions became evident, certain of the elite bege.n to think of turning to political reforms as a means of achieving reforms in social and economic matters.
When, just after World War II, nationalism became a major issue in many parts of Africa, the African elite in the French colonies recognized this concept as the vehicle that might carry them to success in their campaign for political reform. The conviction rapidly hardened that Africans would probably have to fight hard to realize their aspirations, for the French apparently would recognize them only under pressure. The fateful era of nationalism had begun.
Notes.
1. See Coutume Soussou (anonymous), Publications du comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française. Série A, Vol. 9 (Paris, 1939), pp. 67-87; also Aubert, M., “Laws and Customs of the Susus,” Sierra Leone Studies, Vol. 20 (Freetown, 1936), pp.68-71.
2. Called Peulh by the French, but also known variously as Fellani, Fellata, Filani, Fulani, Fulbe, Ful and Pullo.
3. Gilbert Vieillard, Notes sur les coutumes des Peuls au
Fouta Djallon. Publications du Comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française. Série A, Vol. II (Paris, 1939), pp. 1-127; also by the same author, Notes sur les Peul du Fouta Djallon, Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Afrique Noire, Vol. 2, (Dakar, 1940), pp. 95-210; Durand, O., “Moeurs et institutions d'une famille peule du cercle de Pita,” Bulletin du Comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, Vol. 12 (Paris, 1929), pp. 1-85; Tauxier, L., Moeurs et histoire des Peuls [Fouta-Djallon et Masina] (Paris, 1937).
4. George Peter Murdock, Africa Its Peoples and Their Culture History, New York, 1959, pp. 64-77, refers to the Malinke as a member of what he terms the Mande nuclear group. Cf. H. Labouret, “Les Mandings et leur langue,” Bulletin du Comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, Vol. 17 (Paris, 1934).
5. J.D. Fage, An Introduction to the History of West Africa, Cambridge University Press, 1955, p. 18.
6. Fage, ibid., p. 20.
7. Fage, ibid., p. 142.
8. André Arcin, Histoire de la Guinée Française: Rivières du Sud-Fouta Dialo-Rivières du Sud du Soudan (Paris, 1911), p. 236. Arcin is the major historian of French Guinea.
9. Arcin, p. 299.
10. One of the most famous of these incidents was the severe repression of some of the Nalou people on the River Nunez in 1885. Called upon for support by two rival claimants to the Nalou chieftaincy, the French administrator of the cercle (district) of Boké decided in favor of one of them. He then had troops with artillery surround scores of villages suspected of supporting the rejected candidate, and destroyed them and their inhabitants with fire and shot. A final barbaric touch was to cut off the head of the defeated claimant and send it to his rival whom the French proceeded to install in the chieftaincy. See Jean Suret-Canale, “Guinea under the Colonial System,” Présence Africaine, special edition, Independent Guinea 3 (Paris, n.d.), pp. 24-25. Further details on this incident, which was typical of many others, are found in Etudes sur le Rio Nunez, Bulletin du Comité d'Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'Afrique Occidentale Française, (Paris, 1919), pp. 281-317. Cited by Suret-Canale, op.cit., p. 25.
11. Some of the more important of these early treaties were those with the chiefs of Cassini (March 25, 1857); the King of the Pengo (April 21, 1859); the Forecariah (January 17, 1878); the Béréiré (January 22 1 1878); the Samo (January 3, 1879); the Chiefs of Xabak (April 21, 1880); the Dubréka (June 20, l886); and the King of the Nalou (January 20, 1886). Complete texts of these treaties can be found in Arcin, op. cit., pp. 368-377.
12. E. Rouard de Card. Les traités de protectorat conclus par la France in Afrique (1870-1895), (Paris, 1897). Cited by Suret-Canale, op. cit., p. 27.
13. Complete text of this treaty provided in Arcin, pp. 633-34.
14. The Almamy (equivalent of the emir in Nigeria) means chief and was the title accorded the politico-religious ruler of the Foulah.
15. Suret-Canale, op. cit., p. 28.
16. Arcin, pp. 428-473.
17. Sékou Touré, first President of the Republic of Guinea, claims descent from Samory: Several good biographical sketches of the latter are available, among them those of Jean Suret-Canale, “L'Almamy Samory Touré,” Recherches Africaines. Etudes guinéennes (Nouvelle Série), Nos. 1-4, Janvier-Décembre, 1959, Institut National de Recherches et de Documentation, Ministère de l'Intérieur, Secrétariat d'Etat à l'Information. East Berlin, 1960, pp. 18-221; also see excellent accounts of Samory's exploits against the French in Maurice Delafosse, Afrique Occidentale Française, Tome IV of Histoire des colonies françaises et de l'expansion de la France dans le monde, edited by Gabriel Hanotaux and Alfred Martineau, (Paris, 1931), pp. 200-231.
18. Décret du 16 jutn 1895. Full text given in Arcin, op.cit., Annexe III, pp. 635-636.
19. Suret-Canale, op.cit., pp. 42-43.
20. L. Gray Cowan, Local Government in West Africa (New York, Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 35-36.
21. For the powers of the Governor-General, see Arcin, op. cit., Annexe IV, Décret règlant les pouvoirs du gouverneur général de l'A.O.F., p. 636.
22. Kenneth Robinson, “Political Development in French West Africa,” in Africa in the Modern World, edited by Calvin w. Stillman (University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 145.
23. Ibid., p. 148.
24. Called chef de region in French Equatorial Africa.
25. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, French Africa, (Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 25. Hereafter referred to as Thompson and Adloff.
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