Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
The local government reforms, designed to consolidate party control over local administration, also increased the need for cadres. The reforms released yet further revolutionary forces in the countryside, and reinforced the pressures for early independence. People flocked to Conakry. 1 The PDG leaders knew the party was closer to the people than was the administration, and elaborated the doctrine of party supremacy over the government, with its corollary that party loyalty and ideology were supreme over the technical and seniority standards in the civil service. Yet the French governor still maintained French standards in key sectors of the civil service, while the shortage of African personnel sharply limited the pace of Africanization. The Loi-Cadre framework forced the PDG leaders to pay attention to French criteria for promotion; they knew they could strengthen administration or the party, but not both, for there were not cadres enough. In order to be able to introduce their own criteria for promotion, they had to overcome the limits on their powers. That meant independence.
The division of the educated men between PDG and BAG intensified the conflict between civil service and party criteria for promotion. The shift from BAG and PDG cadres meant a shift from more to less educated, from older to younger. This was a heritage of French pressure against the PDG in 1947 when Guineans with secondary schooling knew they risked their jobs unless they kept out of politics or backed a regional association. Hence the founders of the PDG were primary school products mostly and held low civil service jobs. By 1954 they were joined by the new products of the elementary and upper primary schools who also found little scope in the existing system. Most Ponty men were BAG, and there were only a handful of exceptions:
Saifoulaye was the first president of the National Assembly of Guinea, Abdoulaye built the CGT in Mali, was its first minister of labour, and after he voted against the 1958 constitution went to Guinea to become its first minister-resident in Ghana; Magassouba Moriba, an African doctor from Kankan who became the first director of Guinea's sûreté nationale.
1. By 1960 the population was estimated at 112,491 Toure, La Lutte du PDG …, tome vi, op. cit., p. 87.
