Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
The son of the chef de canton at Dabola, Diawadou was then in his early thirties, Ponty-trained, and a government clerk. But the Fulani chiefs considered Diawadou a radical and a threat, and without them the AGV intellectuals could not produce the Fulani votes. After some heated debates, the intellectuals gave in to the chiefs and designated as candidate in the Constituante elections a man in his fifties, Yacine Diallo, a graduate of Ponty and a teacher. He was a favourite of the traditionalists, perhaps in part because he was older and of low traditional origins. In that first election 'the AGV …included all the sons of the Fouta, shoulder to shoulder behind their deputy Yacine Diallo; chiefs and intellectuals worked sincerely in the interests of the country' 1.
Diallo won the election, but by a very narrow margin and because the representatives of the three other regions of Guinea were divided. There were the predominantly Malinke peoples of upper Guinea, about a fifth of the total population, 2 centering around Kankan. Their main representative was Lamine Ibrahima Kaba, a Muslim scholar and educator in his fifties. From the forest region bordering on Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Liberia, the favourite son was Mamba Sano, of assimilated Malinke origins, a Ponty graduate and teacher. He came from the historic market town of Kissidougou, one of the bases the French used in the 1890s to launch their forces against the nineteenth century warrior Samory Toure 3. The upper Guinea and forest regions co-operated on these two candidates.
In lower Guinea, as in most of the West African sea coast, lived people with the longest history of European contact; when the reforms came they felt specially qualified to take the initiative politically. But as elsewhere, their numbers did not match their aspirations for office. One coastal candidate was Amarah Soumah, graduate of the upper primary school in Conakry, a clerk and son of a chief of the Baga fishermen and farmers who owned the land on which Conakry was founded in 1889 4. So popular was he among his kinsmen that in the market of Conakry the women found rice sold better when called after him. The second coastal candidate was Fodé Mamoudou Touré, who had, exceptionally, trained as a lawyer in Paris. He was a Soussou from Forecariah who had been president, in Bamako, of the town association Foyer du Soudan.
1. AGV Bureau directeur, Report of third congress at Mamou, January 1953, Conakry, mimeographed, p. 8.
2. For background see Niane, Djibril Tamsir. 'Mise en place des populations de la Haute-Guinée', Recherches Africaines. Institut National de Recherche et de Documentation, Conakry, April-June 1960.
3. Delafosse in Hanotaux and Martineau, op. cit., p. 209.
4. Dollfus, O. 'Conakry en 1951-52. Etude humaine et économique, Etudes Guinéennes, IFAN, Conakry, no. 10-11, 1952, p. 6.
