Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
The benevolent neutrality of Fanta Mady brought with it valuable backing in Kankan and the surrounding areas. Yet it also involved the PDG in a centuries old local rivalry between the Tourés and the Kabas. Among the Kabas there were several outstanding Muslim scholars who asserted a claim for primacy in Muslim circles of Kankan as soon as the question of succession to Fanta Mady was posed. There were within the Kaba family several feuds which helped explain why one member of the family, al Hajj Ibrahima Lamine Kaba was not only a fervent disciple of Fanta Mady who was usually associated with the Toures, but also 'adopted' Sékou Touré as his son. Lamine Kaba was an elder, whose education had been mostly in Arabic and who had been during the war director of the Ecole Libre Franco-Arabe in Dakar. There he claimed to be carrying out the wishes of the Grand Chérif by organizing prayers in favour of the Resistance cause. When the war ended Kaba was in his fifties. He returned to Kankan and there incidents occurred, involving Tourés, Kabas, and the various rival Muslim notables, for which the French authorities exiled him to Mauretania. He returned to become president of the Kankan sous-section of the PDG. In the long run the PDG did not accept that Lamine Kaba use his party position to strengthen his claims within the Kaba family. But in the first phase of the PDG's struggle to win elections the leaders ignored the issue, as well as conflicts between Lamine Kaba and the modernizing educated PDG leaders in Kankan. For the PDG leaders deliberately sought an
early victory over the instruments of colonialist reaction in the religious milieux. In fact the RDA was presented as anti-religious, atheist, Communist, and the forces of Islam which exercised a profound influence in our country were mobilized by the Administration in a fight against us. Happily, the profound knowledge of democratic principles in this religion, and the abuses of the supposedly religious chiefs, allowed us to alter the balance of forces, and even to identify the RDA with all the concepts of progress, of democracy and liberty even when they are of a religious order. 1
To harmonize their revolutionary message, which they saw primarily in secular terms, with the precepts of Islam, the PDG leaders used several techniques, some of which they abandoned after 1957. Most party meetings included a recital of the Fatiha or opening sura of the Koran. The puritanism of Islam and of the revolution coincided in the refusal of Touré and many of his associates to take alcohol. On Friday, Sékou Touré attended religious services, at a different mosque. He made quite a production of this … chose an impeccably styled boubou and Muslim hat, and often found a supporter with a matching car to drive him.
1. Touré. L'Action politique du PDG …, tome I, op. cit., p. 18.
