Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
This region, dominated by Kankan and including Kouroussa and Siguiri, had a long tradition of political, cultural, and religious unity. lt was a base of the Mande ethnic family that spread in the western savannah and down into the forest, and included among others the Malinke, Bambara, and Dioula groups who lived in Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Mali. This was the tradition inherited by many leaders of the interterritorial RDA: Madeira Keita, the first secretary-general of the PDG and later administrative secretary-general of the Union Soudanaise, who came from Kita, a town in Mali on the road between Siguiri and Bamako; Sékou Touré, who was born in Faranah on the border between the Guinea forest and savannah. His father's family considered as an ancestor the warrior-trader Samory Toure who organized the Mande resistance to European penetration. Samory Toure delayed European occupation for several decades, before French forces captured and exiled him in 1898, when he was already an old man. There was no scarcity of direct descendants of Samory Toure who made a practice of taking wives everywhere in his extensive travels. The mantle of succession fell upon Sékou Touré at least in part because he consciously emphasized the historical parallel of resistance against alien rule. Contemporary memories of Samory's empire helped the PDG build the sense of unity with which to overcome the separatism of the regional and ethnic political groups.
Skillful use of 'Samorism' brought the PDG support from among the descendants of those who had been associated with him. Most of the traders considered Samory one of themselves; he was reputed to have spent the early years of his life trading between Beyla and Macenta; even after he acquired a kingdom much of his wealth was connected with gold, kola, and slaves, and he was at the end of the nineteenth century the single largest buyer and seller in the area. Also associated with Samory were Muslim reformers and teachers, for he made war in the name of Islam; there were those who had been the administrators of his empire, and his soldiers or 'sofa', 1 both captive and free, whose numbers grew with each military victory. Though the Samory connexion was on the whole an asset to the PDG, at times it was a liability. In the later phase of his life when his power waned and he was under heavy siege from the Europeans, Samory's victories decreased and his name became associated with acts of cruelty still remembered by the descendants of those Africans who suffered. Similarly descendants of those captured by Samory's wars remained resentful. 'You will not sell us into slavery ?' asked some of the older villagers of Sékou Touré during his first campaign in the forest. 'I am against all slavery,' was his reply. 2
1. Delafosse in Hanotaux and Martineau, op. cit., pp. 200 f.
2. Information based on interviews.
