Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
This theme brought the PDG peripheral support even in the Fouta-Djallon, in the roundé annexes to the Fulani villages, among 'captives' whose ancestors were sold by tradesmen dependent upon Samory. Among them organizers said, If Samory Touré can make you slaves, Sékou Touré can make you free 1. From the roundé came the votes the PDG had in the Fouta even in 1951, and a good proportion of the votes the PDG had there in the 1956 election.
Memory of unity under Samory eased the task assumed by the RDA leaders to demonstrate to villagers, at least 70 per cent. of whom were Muslim 2, 'the total identity of the RDA's programme of emancipation … with the liberating principles of justice and hope in Islam'3. Samory had fought in the name of Islam, and many descendants of the marabouts associated with him still made religion their way of life. The Grand Chérif Fanta Mady, one of the most influential Muslim teacher in the western savannah, belonged to the Cherif family originally from northern Mali, and following the Kunta Quadriyah tradition in Kankan. The Grand Cherif family had an international following; among those who sought his advice was President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. During the last decades of his life Fanta Mady was a recluse and a mystic; his sway over his many followers was so great that he was reputed to have received on the average a million francs a day as tribute. This he redistributed to the poor. His father Karamoko Boubacar Sidiki Cherif had been the moral and spiritual guide of Almamy Samory, to whom he taught 'the Koran, theology, law' and Muslim philosophy' 4. The number of the Karamoko's disciples grew with each of Samory's military victories, since he was chaplain-in-chief of the troops. The woman who became Fanta Mady's mother was given in marriage to his father by Samory, and as a boy Fanta Mady studied with Moctar Touré, one of Samory's sons. Fanta Mady's religious ideas harmonized with aquiescence to French rule, but his family history explains why he regarded the rise of the PDG with benevolent neutrality.
When Fanta Mady died in 1955 the PDG mourned and Sékou Touré praised him ‘as the living example of a being who believes in God, who has faith in his function, and who treats as equal and brother every man, regardless of his colour or his origins’ 5.
1. Ibid.
2. Tam-Tam, March-May 1955, pp. 34-5.
3. La Liberté, 28 December 1954.
4. Lamine Kaba writing in La Liberté, 25 October 1955. Considerably more research is needed on this subject.
5. La Liberté, 13 September 1955. See also ibid., 27 September and 1 November 1955.
