Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
Mamba Sano created a similar group, the Comité d'Entente Guinnénne, which included Amarah Soumah and Bangoura Karim, son of the chief of Coyah, from lower Guinea, Framoi Berete from upper Guinea and some Fulani chiefs.
The RDA section of Guinea was born against this background of regional associations in which higher African civil servants and official chiefs uneasily co-operated in choosing candidates for successive elections. As in the other territories, educated Africans in Guinea were concerned at the rejection in referendum of the April 1946 Constitution, and discussed the need for unity. Another party nucleus was born out of the Groupe d'Eudes Communistes (GEC) in Conakry, and took on the name Parti Progressiste de Guinée (PPG). It was 'the only political party in Guinea which in framework and programme was conceived so as to group together Africans and Europeans of good will;' 1 and it urged unity in the form of a rassemblement. The AGV, however, true to its socialist origins, spoke of a bloc. In the first Constitutante Yacine Diallo joined the Socialist group, and voted in favor of the April Constitution. Briefly in 1946 the PPG and the AGV worked together for the re-election of Yacine Diallo, while within each respectively French Communist and Socialist advisors tried to win influence. Like the other parlementaires who had become associated with the SFIO, Yacine Diallo signed the call issued by the African deputies for a rassemblement, which became the RDA at Bamako in October 1946. But Diallo decided not to attend the Bamako congress, after the Socialist overseas minister Marius Moutet withdrew his approval. Some Guineans went to Bamako nevertheless: the GEC contingent in the PPG which included a few Frenchmen and a handful of young Africans, mostly in their twenties, having only primary school education, holding low ranks in the civil service, and some eleven representatives of ethnic groups. 1
Back from Bamako, the Guinea delegates worked together organizing the 1946 elections to the first Legislature of the French National Assembly, but kept to methods, propaganda themes, and structures based on tribe or region. The PPG did not of itself turn into the RDA section of Guinea, but dissolved. Not until May 1947 was the Guinea section formally created —the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG). The statutes were adopted at the first congress in June. Its comité directeur, where each ethnic group was represented, was then a coordinating committee. Sékou Touré, for example, represented the Union Mandingue. Later he spoke of:
The contradictions which existed in the methods and doctrines of the ethnic groups also existed inside the RDA movement of Guinea, and almost took away its true purpose. This was to unite, in democratic organs and in units geographically defined, men and women of all races' of all religions, around a common programme for a common action 2 The fragile and (we must admit it) uniquely electoral bases of our new section did not resist the centrifugal activities of its own leaders, and the elections which followed …ended the myth of political unity theoretically symbolised by the existence of an RDA section…. Thus the Guinean section of the RDA broke apart, and only a small minority of democrats, who had resolutely placed their confidence in the future of the movement and defended its flag to prevent its total disappearance, could speak in its name and for its programme. 3
While French officials made clear their disapproval of the RDA, only a tiny minority of educated Africans remained loyal to it and regionalism remained the chief obstacle to its growth.
1. Touré. 'Rapport moral …, 123-26 janvier 1958, L'Action politique du PDG
2. Sentence in heavy type in the original.
3. Touré, tome 1, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
