Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
The 1956 elections were relatively honest. The BAG vote, 131,678, only slightly less than it had been in 1954, was enough to elect Barry Diawadou. But the PDG was the victor. Two of its men became deputies —Sékou Touré and Diallo Saifoulaye. The number of those entitled to vote more than doubled to become almost a million and a little more than half voted. The PDG vote had grown from 14.3 per cent. in 1951, 34.6 per cent. in 1954, to 62 per cent. in 1956. Since then elections were by universal suffrage and the PDG majority grew steadily: it won control of all the municipalities in 1956; 56 out of 60 seats for the territorial assembly of March 1957. (Three from the Fulani area of Pita went to the socialists.) 1 Under the Loi-Cadre reforms, the assembly voted for the first elected African ministry and Sékou Touré became vice-president of the new council of government.
The PDG took control of the legal organs of the state after an interval of struggle that left a legacy. The struggle strengthened the party in Guinea rather than weakened it, as in Ivory Coast. Part of the explanation lies in the different intensity of the repression. In Ivory Coast officials tried to by-pass parliamentary immunity and most of the territorial leaders of the PDCI were among the estimated 3,000 prisoners. The pressure left the PDCI almost without territorial leaders, while at the local level the repression led to a rapid turnover both among official chiefs and local party leaders. In Guinea, however, fewer PDG leaders became 'martyrs' and most of these were local. Sékou Touré gave figures to the July 1955 meeting of the RDA interterritorial Co-ordinating Committee: in one year 250 arrested, 118 wounded, and 6 dead. 2 The members of the PDG bureau politique remained at liberty even though none had parliamentary immunity.
1. Figures from Direction des Affaires Politiques d'AOF, 1956, op. cit.; and Beaujeu-Garnier, Jacqueline. 'Essai de géographie électorale guinéenne, Les Cahiers d'Outre-mer, Bordeaux, October-December 1958.
2. La Liberté, 16 August 1955.
