Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.
This handful of Ponty men suffered for their politics. Some lost their jobs, were transferred to outlying districts or to other territories, or served jail sentences.
Their experience with the elite of 1945 gave to the PDG leaders prior to independence a conviction that self-made men were more reliable to the nation than highly educated ones. Observing that 'when a country is betrayed by its elite it dies or it invents another', 1 they prized ideological conviction above diplomas, which they felt Africans obtained only at the cost of their own identity. They held the existence of links with the mass of the population to be far more important than the fact or level of education. One cannot, they observed, judge the quality of a State as a function of the individual qualities of the men who lead it 2.
University graduates were not involved in the competition for political power between BAG and PDG. 3 The first generation of university graduates was still studying in France or Dakar during the fighting phase of the PDG. Many students were near the age of PDG leaders. The students backed the PDG against the BAG, but after 1956 they found many grounds for criticism;
The uneasy relations with the more educated Guineans propelled the PDG leaders towards independence. So did uneasy relations with the workers. Briefly workers accepted that there was an identity of interests with the new African PDG government; their leader Sékou Touré became head of the government, and Bengaly Camara became minister of labour. Friction grew, however. The government though African was still the single largest employer of labour. There were some brief strikes in spring of 1958 4. The AOF union organization, UGTAN, called for immediate independence and an elected AOF African executive. Touré was formally the head of that movement, and knew that by ignoring that call he risked forfeiting his claim to lead the workers.
Pressure grew further early in 1958, when the new interterritorial Parti du Regroupement Africain (PRA) united all AOF parties except the RDA, 5 and adopted a radical platform.
1. N'Diaye, Edge. La Liberté 24 July 1956.
2. Touré. 'Rapport de doctrine…, September 1959, in Le Cinquième congrès national . . ., tome iv, op, cit., p, 48.
3. In the mid-fifties Me Paul Fabert was almost the only returned student; he led a one-man party, the Union Démocratique et Sociale Africaine, dedicated to building a West African federation of French and English speaking independent states. He became minister of justice after independence.
4. See Morgenthau's article in West Africa, 5 April 1958.
5. And the Mauretanians.
