Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
Crowds acclaimed Sékou Touré as 'the real chief', 'the real deputy' 1. The PDG took care to demonstrate its preponderance. Sang the women:
You are a new chief
You are chosen as chief
The people is with you
You are a new chief
Lift up your head
Look at the sea of faces
That answers when you call.
The reasons varied why Governor Parisot and his associates of the 'tough' school of French officials, took so active a part in the Guinea elections. Some saw the PDG as subversive because of its potential nationalism, and others because of its supposed Communist sympathies. The latter group argued that the PDG had never accepted the interterritorial RDA decision to disaffiliate from the French Communists in Parliament, and pointed out that no Guinean was among the RDA parlementarians who took the decision. The interterritorial RDA, therefore, stepped in to demonstrate solidarity with the PDG, prevent a repetition of the Ivory Coast incidents, and to undercut in Paris the influence of the French officials in Guinea who opposed the PDG. These tasks fell upon the political director, Ouezzin Coulibaly, then a senator from Ivory Coast. He spent most of the year after the by-elections touring with Sékou Touré and helping to organize the PDG, and occasionally joining in where the PDG came to blows with chiefs and their clients. He used his status and immunity as a parlementaire to press local French officials to pay attention to the law. He prepared the way within the PDG also, for a shift
from the tactics and vocabulary of total opposition to those of partial communication with French officials. Then in July 1955 the interterritorial RDA Co-ordinating Committee met for the first time since the RDA parlementaires broke with the French
Communists, and deliberately chose Conakry as the place.
This meeting was the occasion Sékou Touré chose to begin breaking the West African trade unions from the French CGT and out of the Communist-dominated international, the World Federation of Trade Unions. A secret session of the Co-ordinating Committee began the pattern leading to the autonomy of all West African union, youth and party organizations from their French affiliates. The move revealed the frankly nationalist objectives of the Guinea RDA leaders, determined to build
1. L'Essor, Bamako, 15-16 July 1954.
