Ithaca. Cornell University Press. 1968. 260 p.
Anyone who would try to find a clue to the destiny of a country by studying the etymology of its name would be properly regarded as scientifically inept for undertaking a project that smacks of magic. Yet without claiming this to be more than an intellectual exercise, looking into the history of a word may disclose analogies with the history of a people. If nothing else, the word's striking oddities could cast light on what we have chosen to explore in this study: the present experience of a people, or at least the very recent past, for the present has already vanished into thin air, like Daphne at the moment when Apollo believed that he had captured her.
Just as Sudan derives from the Arabic word for blacks, so the name Guinée probably comes from the Berber aginau, or agnau, signifying a mute or a person whose language is incomprehensible; the designation has been applied particularly to the Blacks living south of the Sahara. Early in the first half of the twelfth century, the Arab Al Zukri spoke of the country of Kanawa (perhaps a corruption of Ghana, about which El Bekri wrote at length in the eleventh century), and Dulcert, circa A.D. 1340, identified it as the country of the blacks. In the fifteenth century, the Portuguese took over the name Guinea, and maps of that period applied it to all of the southern region lying between the mouths of the Senegal River and Gabon, where the kingdom of Manicongo had its beginning.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, certain colonizing powers each carved out its own Guinea along that coast. There were
These Guineas gave their name to a New Guinea in distant Oceania. The term « guinea » also applied to the piece of cotton cloth used as money by the English traders in their dealings with the West African coast natives. Subsequently, the term was applied to the gold coin that represented the value of a piece of cloth. After 1661, during the reign of Charles II of England, gold began to be imported from the Guinea region. The name « guinea » was
also applied to the English gold coin called a sovereign.
Today each of the meanings has certain overtones. Until after World War II, French Guinea continued to be as mute and anonymous as it had been under the French colonial empire. Since it has won independence many political scientists have admitted that they cannot understand the language employed by the government of Guinea, whose tactics and fitful or surly moods bewilder the logicians of politics. Many Americans and Europeans still find it difficult to place Guinea among the African nations. Those who know its geographical location might well envisage the country as colored bright red on the map, like the Soviet Union. Certainly, red is the right color for Guinea, but it is the tint of tbe blood of its slaves in the eighteenth century or that of the flames that twenty years ago consumed the scarecrow of colonialism on its soil.
Ahmed Sékou Touré, an admirer of Nkrumah and of the same stamp as he, aimed to link the destiny of the new Guinea with that of the new Ghana, after he had become the supreme leader of the former country following France's grant of a semi-independent status in 1957. A breach was made in the French colonial bastion of Black Africa on September 28, 1958, when Guinea voted in favor of independence, and in so doing showed the way to its former brothers. At first they were shocked, although Ghana the year before had set the example for the Anglophone African countries without, however, leaving the Commonwealth.
Thereafter, Guinea became the land of the Blacks, the champion of nascent African unity and also of the Africanization of the highest posts, after the French who had occupied them fled the country in disarray. From the whole Guinea Gulf area and beyond, Black revolutionaries came to help a mobilized people to build their nation. Of all the countries called Guinea, as well as other African territories, the new Republic of Guinea alone has distinguished itself by adopting a constitution bearing the imprint of the French republic which had been its - at times unfeeling - guardian.
Just as events have gradually restricted Guinea's scope for expansion, so the new state's first experiences have delimited the range of its political maneuvering. They have also clarified the extent of Guinea's real economic potential in relation to the welter of options generated by its people's impulses and aspirations. For its currency, Guinea in 1960 created the autonomous Guinean franc, which was replaced by the sily in 1972. Thereafter exports of Guinea's gold, which had been coveted by Arab rulers and, not long ago, by European powers, gave way to those of aluminum. Cotton goods, however, are still bartered for raw materials in an economy that remains predominantly agricultural and that is still feeling its way. Will the permanent mobilization of a people, of and by itself, suffice to ensure an economic take-off, or will it engender more lethargy and illusion than enthusiasm.
This book aims to provide the basic elements needed to answer that question by studying the history of a people, a party, and a leader, and by assessing Guinea's choice of political and economic policies as well as the transformations that have been altering Guinean society.
Chapters 2, 4, 5, and 6 appeared originally in Nos. 68, 95, 107, and 114 of Revue
Française d'Etudes Politiques Africaines and are reprinted by permission of Société Africaine
d'Edition, 32, rue de l'Echiquier, 75010 Paris; Tables 3, 4, and 5 are reprinted from La
Guinée Libre) February and March 1974, with the permission of Abou Soumah.
[ Home | Etat | Pays | Société | Bibliothèque | IGRD | Search | BlogGuinée ]
Contact :info@webguine.site
webGuinée, Camp Boiro Memorial, webAfriqa © 1997-2013 Afriq Access & Tierno S. Bah. All rights reserved.
Fulbright Scholar. Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. Internet Society Pioneer. Smithsonian Research Associate.