Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
It began on 21 September with the workers in the private sector. The secretary general of the CGT, which grouped most of the workers, was Sékou Touré, who had lost his civil service job because of his union work. He had only elementary schooling, was barely thirty, veteran of the GEC of Conakry and the Bamako RDA congress. He cultivated his talents as an orator by speaking daily in different neighbourhoods of Conakry, giving the news and watchwords, maintaining determination and discipline among the strikers. The themes of his speeches in the daily town meetings were designed to break down ethnic differences, to point out how little tribe counted among workers. People from near-by villayes brought food to the families of the strikers. The strike lasted a record-breaking sixty-six days and ended only on 25 November 1.
In Guinea the impact of the strike was profound. The number of organized union members, only 4,600 at the beginning of 1953 rose to 20,000 in 1954 and 44,000 in 1955 2. The union leaders of Guinea acquired fame and credit for the decree taken by French offlcials on 27 November, increasing the AOF minimum hourly wage by 20 per cent 3. In Dakar, for example, the workers gave a standing ovation to Sékou Touré as representing the heroes of the workers' movement of Guinea' 4. So solid was Touré's support among West African workers that the French CGT feared losing control and changed the statutes to provide for not one but three secretaries of the West African AOF-CGT coordinating committee. At the 1954 CGT-AOF meeting in Abidjan, Sékou Touré was elected one of the three (the others were Diallo Seydou of Mali and Bassirou Guèye of Senegal).
Within Guinea, the strike had most important political consequences, since the trade unionists also led the PDG. After the sixty-six-day strike, they had territorial fame, a recognized leader in Sékou Touré and the party entered a new phase. On the coast, the market women were selling whole loaves of bread as pain Sékou Touré, while cut-up slices, symbolizing the break-up of regional politics, were sold as pain Amarah Soumah. Within less than two years the PDG leaders displaced in elected office the leaders of the ethnic and regional associations; within four years they had destroyed also the commandement indigène, particularly the chefs de canton.
1. See Afrique Informations, 15 December-1 January 1954; and Sékou Touré's editorial in the federal CGT-AOF newspaper Le Travailleur africain, c. July I955. President Touré in his 'Rapport Moral …' of January 1958, L'Action politique du PDG . . ., tome i, op. cit., p. 19, speaks of the 73-day strike.
2. See Appendix X.
3. Afrique Noire, 24-30 November 1953.
4. Citation recorded at trade union meetings in January and February 1956.
