Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
There was, however, a different social and economic base. Guinea's economic development did not take the form of small farms, and the introduction of the cash economy did not mean as in Ivory Coast the formation of a rurally based African middle class. Guinea's wealth was in mining and potentially in industry. Though economic growth was rapid, most of the profits not invested in machinery went out of the country. The Guineans associated with the modern economy were for the most part labourers organized in the trade union movement; like the planters in the Syndicat who launched the PDCI-RDA of Ivory Coast the workers of Guinea proceeded to back their economic fight with a political one. The PDG-CGT leaders wanted Guineans to have a larger share of the wealth, and believed they could achieve this only by ending the colonial relationship. To them, in the first post-war decade, party and trade union were one. And though they achieved their first public successes as trade union leaders, they insisted
the trade union movement …must integrate itself as the nationalist revolutionary and not the reformist force within the context of other progressive political forces. Its role at every instant is political 1.
The trade union experience of many PDG leaders affected their ideas as well as their style of living, speaking, writing, and acting. Since they held jobs low in the administrative hierarchy, they lived of necessity close to the people. Many had but irregular incomes; their housing was bad, few had cars, their clothes were simple. They relied on their colleagues or relations when in need, and made virtues of the labels pinned on them by their adversaries —"illiterates", "vagrants", and "badly dressed" 2. The union background meant they prized more highly loyalty, discipline, and collective solidarity, than technical proficiency or job performance. Their union background assured their familiarity with the techniques of mass action and protest, with boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations. The PDG newspaper La Liberté did not err on the side of understatement. This, for example, was how they went about defending the interest of veterans who wanted higher pensions.
Every time a minister visits he pins medals of the Legion d'Honneur or the Etoile du Benin on the chests of old and loyal servants of France—to be certain no one seeks to raise their miserable pension. No Medal Feeds A Man 3.
They said of their adversaries 'let us pray for the damned souls who would sell mother and father for a title or an invitation' 4. The French political vocabulary of the PDG leaders bore marked traces of the union experience. The PDG-CGT leaders became revolutionaries; they rejected the privileges the colonial system gave to the Europeans and to the small nucleus of Ponty-trained African élus. They recognized that not only the lower educational qualifications of Africans than of Europeans, but the entire colonial system kept Europeans in the top jobs and prevented Africans from outranking Europeans. The trade union experiences also made the CGT-PDG leaders modernizers, who rejected the traditionalist view that tribe or inherited status made men different. Finally, trade union work in Guinea and attendance at French and international trade union congresses deepened the inclination of the PDG-CGT leaders to seek the goal of equality.
After the strike the PDG burst to popularity as an expression of revolutionary protest in the villages. This kept the PDG-CGT leaders from accepting the Marxist formula that the workers were the vanguard of the revolution. Sékou Touré came to elaborate the thesis that 'the first great industry of Africa is agriculture, 5 and to be increasingly reluctant to ask villagers for sacrifices so that the workers in the towns might have high wages. At first the PDG-CGT leaders, using Marxist categories drawn from CGT and GEC pamphlets, spoke largely in terms of 'the exploitation of capitalism and colonialism'. As the base of party support spread to the rural areas, they added 'chiefs and feudalism' to the list, and began to use words designed to harmonize with Muslim tradition.
1. Diallo, Seydou. La Liberté, 11 December 1956.
2. Ibid., 25 January 1955.
3. Ibid., 2 November 1954.
4. Ibid., 10 May 1955.
5. La Liberté, 27 March 1956, reprinting his maiden speech to the French National Assembly.
