Ahmed Sékou Touré

President of Guinea (1958-1984)

• Born: January 9, 1922
• Birthplace: Faranah, Guinea
• Died: March 26, 1984
• Place of death: Cleveland, Ohio

A lifelong revolutionary nationalist, Touré led Guinea in 1958 to independence from French colonial rule by securing, in all of Francophone Africa, the only no vote against affiliation with the French Community. As Guinea’s president he implemented radical sociopolitical transformations. A leading revolutionary African ideologue, Touré left the imprint of his socialist vision on all aspects of Guinean life.

Early Life

Ahmed Sékou Touré (ah-mehd seh-koo tur-ay) was born in the village of Faranah, situated on the bank of the Niger River, deep in the interior of Guinea. One of seven children born to Alpha and Aminata Touré, Malinke peasant farmers, Touré claimed to be the grandson of Samori Touré, the legendary Muslim state builder who waged a protracted resistance against French conquest until his capture in 1898. Reared a Muslim, the dominant religion in Guinea, Touré attended the École Coranique (Qur՚ānic school) and a French primary school in Kankan. In 1936, he was enrolled in the Georges Poiret Technical College in Conakry but was expelled at age fifteen for participation in a student food strike. Thereafter, Touré continued his education through correspondence courses and independent study. He became fluent in French and Soussou in addition to his native Malinke and a spellbinding orator in all three languages.

In 1940, Touré obtained a clerk’s position with the Compagnie du Niger, a Unilever subsidiary, where he quickly became involved in labor union activities. The following year, after passing the qualifying exam for work with the Post, Telegraph and Telecommunications (PTT) service, he entered the colonial civil service as a postal clerk. While working in this capacity, he made his first remarkable impression as a constructive agitator by organizing the postal workers into a union. His talent and efficient work earned for him the admiration of his countrymen and the vigilance of the colonial authorities. At that time he formed connections with the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), a communist-dominated French labor organization.

By 1945 Touré was elected general-secretary of the postal workers’ union, the Syndicat du Personnel des PTT. A quick succession of upward moves in the trade union movement in both Guinea and French West Africa was to follow, establishing him between 1947 and 1956 as a leading West African trade unionist. In 1946 he became involved with intracolonial politics through the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). By 1948, Touré was elected general-secretary of the Territorial Union of the CGT, and two years later he was named general-secretary of the coordinating committee of the CGT for French West Africa and Togoland. Touré’s close relationship with the CGT was a significant influence on the development of his skill as a mass organizer and political tactician and assisted in no small way in his mastery of Marxist-Leninist thought and practice.

Life’s Work

Revolutionary political and socioeconomic change is the central theme of Touré’s life. From his earliest years as a labor union organizer, through the decades he labored for independence and as president of Guinea and leader of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), he sought to effect fundamental change in his country and create a model for other African nations to follow.

The first two decades of his work life centered on labor issues and the struggle for political independence. Although clearly a radical in the 1940’s, he fought within the French colonial system to advance the causes of social justice and Guinean independence. During World War II, African nationalism developed rapidly, and in 1944, at Brazzaville (French Congo), General Charles de Gaulle, president of the French Committee of National Liberation, recognized that France’s postwar relationship with French Africa must be revised. The Brazzaville recommendations, accepted by the Fourth French Republic formed in 1946, scrapped the French Empire and substituted the French Union, which allowed the African “overseas territories” administrative freedom, the right to form political parties, the creation of local assemblies composed of both Africans and Europeans, and the formation of regional assemblies for French West (AOF) and French Equatorial Africa (AEF).

In Guinea three parties arose, including the PDG in 1947; by 1952 Touré had become secretary-general, and the party had become dominant. That same year he became secretary-general of the RDA and helped organize in September, 1953, the CGT-initiated, territory-wide strike that secured a significant increase in the minimum wage for workers in the AOF. Later that year Touré won a seat in the Territorial Assembly as the councilor for Beyla, Guinea. In 1955 he was elected mayor of Conakry, and in 1956, to a seat in the French National Assembly.

With the French government’s promulgation of the loi-cadre for Francophone Africa in 1956, parties with a mass base such as the PDG-RDA obtained an ideal opportunity for greater support at the polls. The loi-cadre provided universal suffrage and home rule, with France retaining control over foreign affairs, defense, monetary affairs, justice, and higher education. Touré was elected vice president of the first Government Council of Guinea , the equivalent of prime minister and a position he used to eliminate the tribal chieftaincies, which he considered corrupt.

When the Fourth Republic collapsed and de Gaulle came to Africa in search of support for his Fifth Republic with a referendum on the French Community (an updating of the French Union), Touré urged a vote of no, asserting that the draft constitution provided neither liberty nor equality with France. A no vote meant automatic independence and the forfeiture of French economic and technical assistance. Some 95 percent of the Guinean electorate complied; thus formal ties to France ended, and on October 2, 1958, the Republic of Guinea was proclaimed. Guinea was the only French African territory where a no vote was urged and overwhelmingly supported by the populace. Touré and the PDG had demonstrated that they enjoyed virtually undisputed support of the Guinean people, and the future of Guinea fell squarely on their shoulders.

Under the new constitution, Guinea became a democratic and secular republic. Popular rule was to prevail through election of representatives to the National Assembly and the president, who was to serve a seven-year term. Economic development, Touré’s prime objective, appeared brighter for Guinea than the other states of the AOF-AEF, for it was endowed with immense deposits of bauxite and iron ore, both already being exploited. For Touré the quandary was how to pursue development and fundamental social change while securing foreign investment and maintaining a foreign policy of positive neutralism. His strategies for realizing these goals were shaped by the dramatic rupture with France and Touré’s own past in the CGT and PDG.

Economic decolonization, Touré quickly asserted, would be pursued by a planned economy and a noncapitalist path to development. This resulted in the nationalization of the export trade sector in 1959 and of internal trade in 1960. State agencies were created to control all aspects of marketing, and the civil service was completely Africanized. In March, 1960, he also announced that Guinea had created its own currency, which gave the state control over banking and insurance. Touré then designed an economic Triennial Plan, which was adopted at the PDG Congress in April, 1960, and which stressed developing public and social services while expanding mineral exploitation. Cooperation with foreign capital, however, was supported, and the mixed economic sector, in bauxite mining especially, became the most important source of revenue and foreign exchange.

Touré’s political thinking, and hence the structure of the PDG, changed during the first decade of independence. Initially the party was conceived as a mass organization and thus voluntary associations were incorporated into it, such as the women’s organizations, youth associations, and trade unions. He defined the party as the unity of Guinean people and rejected the concept of class struggle. By 1964, Touré claimed the revolution was threatened by corruption, inefficiency, smuggling, waste, and low morale. The 1964 loi-cadre was passed to correct this. It created standards for party membership and stiff party discipline and extended the party’s reach into all factories, large businesses, the army, and the civil service, turning the PDG into a cadre party. Touré began to speak of class struggle and align himself ideologically more clearly with Marxism-Leninism. By the 1967 PDG Congress, he spoke of socialism as the official goal of the PDG and Guinea as divided into two opposing classes, the people (peasants and workers) and antipeople (their opponents).

Touré’s political development placed him squarely in not only the camp of African socialists but also the lead. Like Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and others who defined African socialism, he redefined class struggle. His institutionalization of mass support through the one-party system went further than elsewhere in Africa, culminating in his declaration of a one-party state in 1978. His opponents have stressed that the evolution of the PDG as the focal institution engendering one-man, one-party rule was achieved through the creation of a permanent “state of plots” and the arrest, imprisonment, or execution of all opponents. Touré exposed nine major plots against the government between 1960 and 1976, which in each case were followed by suppression of the dissenters or protesters (that is, traditional chiefs and unionists in 1960, teachers in 1961, traders in 1965, and civil servants in 1967, 1969, and 1971). The largest crackdown occurred in 1971 after a Portuguese-backed mercenary force attacked Conakry and thousands were arrested and dozens hanged, including several former government ministers.

That invasion related to Touré’s foreign policy, which emphasized African unity, support for national liberation struggles, anti-imperialism, and nonalignment. Touré extended support and refuge to the party waging a war for independence from Portuguese rule in neighboring Guinea-Bissau. Africa was the pivot of his foreign policy, but his international relations were characterized by militant rhetoric and flexible diplomacy. Thus, he sought good relations and aid from China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, receiving aid from all in the early years of independence. He nurtured strong relations with his ideological counterparts in Angola, Mozambique, Benin, Congo, and Algeria but failed to achieve good relations with his ideological opposites in the Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Senegal until the late 1970’s. His pan-African commitment was expressed two months after independence when Touré and Nkrumah, president of Ghana, signed a treaty of union the Ghana-Guinea Union as a nucleus for a union of West Africa. Mali joined two years later, uniting West Africa’s most radical states, but it was a paper union and was disbanded in 1963 when the Organization of African Unity (OAU) was created.

Significance

Throughout his life Touré sought genuine independence and social transformation for Guinea. He will be forever remembered for his success in achieving Guinean independence and rejecting French neocolonialism. Although the imprint of his revolutionary vision was left in every area of Guinean life, his efforts at transforming Guinea may not be eventually judged as so successful. Within weeks of his death, there was a military coup led by Colonel Lansana Conte and the Military Committee for National Redress, which embarked on a course of liberalization and dismantling of the state sector of the economy; yet altering Touré’s legacy will take a long time. When Touré died in a Cleveland hospital, flown there in the care of doctors sent by King Hassan of Morocco, much was made of his “opening to the West.” In reality, during the last decade of his life he brought Guinea out of diplomatic isolation, improved Guinean and West African regional cooperation, advanced interstate mediation through his work as a peacemaker, and enticed foreign investors to Guinea with attractive financial terms.

Programmatic consistency was not always his forte, but genuine independence and economic development remained his goals. Touré’s ideological shifts are spelled out in more than twenty books published between 1958 and 1977, works that clearly demonstrate his focus on radical social change, anti-imperialism, African unity, and national development. Even his many poems were politically charged paeans to the PDG, party militants, anticolonial resistance, and hard work in the service of national development. His greatest achievement was, no doubt, in forging through a protracted process of national sacrifice an independent African socialist path; African unity and development proved more elusive.

Bibliography

Camara, Mohamed Soliou. His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea Under Sékou Touré. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005. An examination of the single-party political system and mass communication during Touré’s regime. Camara argues that Touré’s government was not sustained by Touré’s charisma or repressive policies but by a common ideology and mass communication.

Geiss, Imanuel. The Pan-African Movement. London: Methuen, 1974. An important and accessible work for understanding the development of pan-Africanism within African nationalism. Thus, Touré is considered a representative of his generation in his pan-African concern.

Hanna, William J. Independent Black Africa: The Politics of Freedom. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1964. A helpful examination of independent African states in their early years, especially one-party systems such as that of Guinea.

Hargreaves, J. D. Decolonization in Africa. New York: Longman, 1988. A readily available work for nonspecialist readers to understand decolonization in Guinea and Africa in general.

Kaba, Lansine. “Guinean Politics: A Critical Historical Overview.” Journal of Modern African Studies 15, no. 1 (1977): 25-45. The political evolution of Guinea and Touré is traced since World War II. A critical analysis of Touré, this article demonstrates that he created a tyranny in which he was the sole interpreter of correct politics and culture.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “A New Era Dawns in Guinea.” Current History 84 (1985): 174-178. This article provides a succinct summary of the legacy of Touré in restructuring Guinea’s society and economy. It also discusses the initial policies of his successors.

Langley, J. Ayo. Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa, 1856-1970. London: Rex Collings, 1979. A documentary study of African nationalism, this work places in context the revolutionary ideas of Touré as well as detailing the antecedents.

Schmidt, Elizabeth. Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005. Schmidt examines the Guinean nationalist movement not by focusing on Touré and other leaders but by looking at the people who were involved. She maintains that Touré was able to obtain independence for Guinea by capitalizing on popular discontent with French rule and channeling this discontent into a nationalist movement.

Touré, Sekou. “Speech to the Congress.” Black Scholar 5, no. 10 (1974): 23-29. The president of Guinea’s speech to the Sixth Pan-African Congress in Tanzania in June, 1974. An ode to African civilization and resistance to colonialism, it is a good example of his rhetorical style and his deep belief in African unity.