Sékou Touré: an African revolutionary leader
On March 26, 1984, Guinean President Ahmed Sékou Touré died in a hospital in Cleveland, United States. Forty years later, the debate surrounding his memory still tears apart the families of the victims of his regime and the heirs of his ideas on Pan-Africanism and African dignity. The complexity of this major and controversial character in African history cannot be easily grasped. Beyond this double memory, what can be a shared story about Sékou Touré?
Ahmed Sékou Touré, President of Guinea, during a press conference on September 20, 1982, at the Marigny Hotel after his five-day official visit to France. © AFP / Michel Clément
By: Laurent Correau Follow
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These are unexpected texts and, therefore, forgotten by history. Poems, buried in the shock of memories surrounding Ahmed Sékou Touré. However, these “militant poems” provide fascinating clues about the person of the first president of
Guinea
. As the meeting of the National Council of the Revolution, on May 12, 1969, draws to a close, he reads a text which combines a declaration of love to the people of Guinea and a new acceptance of the redemptive mission which would have been entrusted to him. , Sily (“the elephant”, his nickname): “
Let YOUR ACTION be amplified People of Guinea, / My People
! / I can neither hesitate nor retreat
! / The criminal plots of your enemies / And their satanic plans have strengthened / And galvanized in Sily a single will
; / The resolute desire to subdue / Those who deem you humiliation and contempt / And who
for their vileness deserve to be taken / Before hanging, just ransom / Assassins who are traitors to the Nation. / But you shaped me a soul / In the radiance of your flame. / I can neither hesitate nor retreat.
". Figure of revolutionary Africa and head of a repressive system: are the two faces of Ahmed Sékou Touré really irreconcilable?
The debate, in any case, is polarized to the extreme. Those who take part seem irreconcilable. The legend of Ahmed Sékou Touré, as told by his supporters, has its roots in a glorious ancestry, that of the great resistance to colonization Samory Touré. It was really born on August 25, 1958, in the words of a
speech given to General de Gaulle
. The French leader then toured Africa to promote his French Community project. In Conakry, he found a protesting Sékou Touré, who demanded an improved Community... And uttered words that would go down in history: “
We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery.
» A month later, Guinean voters massively indicated their refusal during the referendum of September 28 and, in official Guinean history, Sékou Touré then became “the man who said No to de Gaulle”.
This founding story responds to another, darker story. That of a “tyrant” Ahmed Sékou Touré, reigning following independence over a “chained Guinea”. This is what the victims of the party-state and the opposition who tried to exist in exile tell. The one echoed by the open letter from a “condemned to death in absentia” published in 1972 in
Le Livre noir by Sékou Touré
[1]: “
Your exactions and the terror which you have made a way of being of your State have transformed your regime into an institution against reason, the entire country into a prison.
»
Visionary or tyrant?
For forty years, these two perfect and smooth images have been engaged in a veritable melee of memory. Blows have started to be exchanged again since certain political actors want to use the political legacy of Ahmed Sékou Touré to ignite contemporary imaginations. The decision of the Guinean transitional authorities to name Conakry airport after Sékou Touré has awakened old wounds. But where is the reality of the historical character? The complexity of Ahmed Sékou Touré cannot be easily grasped [2].
Its relationship with colonial France was in constant transformation. As the researcher Abdoulaye Diallo [3] recalls: “
Sekou Touré actually unceremoniously opposed the colonists and the French administration for the defense of the interests of the “natives” in the pay of the colonial economy and for the peoples Africans. This strong opposition against colonization guided his trade union activism and his first steps in the Guinean and “Aofian” political arena until the 1950s.
» But on the other hand “
from
1954, Sékou Touré publicly held a speech mixed with compromise in which the word “collaboration” returned, thus inaugurating a new era in the colonial political history of French Guinea
”. He only supported independence from France, according to various works, two weeks before the referendum of September 28, pushed by certain groups within his party, the PDG (Democratic Party of Guinea).
It is a fact that Ahmed Sékou Touré made a powerful voice heard, in the 1960s, on independence, the fight against imperialism and the criticism of neocolonialism. It encourages groups demanding the independence of the Portuguese colonies, supports the fight of the UPC (Union of the Populations of Cameroon), hosts one of the first representations of the GPRA (Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic) in sub-Saharan Africa. It is naturally part of a form of alliance of the great revolutionary figures of Africa. He denounces the assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and honors his memory. He stood in solidarity with Ghanaian President
Kwame Nkrumah
when he was overthrown by a coup in 1966 and made him co-president of Guinea. In another of his "militant poems", written for the funeral of Guinea-Bissau independence leader
Amilcar Cabral
, he celebrates "all the martyrs of colonialism": "
The Lumumba and N'Krumah / Mondlane and Cabral / Have been and will be all Time / Permanent and reliable references / Martyrs with imperishable causes.
»
Ahmed Sékou Touré also implemented a policy of cultural independence which is reflected in particular by attachment to African languages and
support for local orchestras
.
Several of his speeches confirm the place he gives to culture in the decolonization of minds. But this culture is also thought of as an ideological tool, subject to the will of the party-state. One of the Sekoutouréan paradoxes on this subject is probably that, while defending "authenticity", the Guinean government implemented, from 1961, a program of "demystification". As researcher Mike McGovern recounts, state agents then descend into villages, collect statuettes, masks, ritual objects, destroy them most of the time... and mistreat the ritual specialists [4].
The plots which marked Ahmed Sékou Touré's years in power, from independence until his death, perfectly illustrate the complexity of the character (and the difficulty for historians in investigating the history of Guinea). Resuming conspiratorial rhetoric that he already used before 1958, the CEO successively declared the country under threat from “crazy intellectuals”, teachers, traders, the “fifth column”, women, etc. [5] Sékou Touré himself spoke of a “permanent plot” which would target his country.
The President of the Republic of Guinea Ahmed Sékou Touré. © Donald Uhrbrock/GettyImages
If we have irrefutable elements on the existence of destabilization operations in 1959-1960 (the “Persil” operation of the French secret services) and in 1970 (the Portuguese “Mar Verde” operation), that does not is not the case for the so-called “teachers” plot of 1961 or the so-called “women” plot of 1977. The Guinean party-state very quickly used, in the context of these plots, the technique of “amalgamation” of verified elements to other purely imaginary ones. He seems to have used the denunciation of the conspiracy as a tool for regulating internal crises, while sometimes giving the impression of really believing himself to be under threat from abroad. Has the “supreme guide of the Revolution” locked himself behind a paranoid wall over the years? Some say so. The paroxysm of the outbreak of political violence was in any case reached during 1971, following the landing in Conakry of Portuguese troops and Guinean dissidents on November 22, 1970. The hunt for the “fifth column” led to numerous arrests of people who are forced to confess, to denounce their “accomplices” and the networks (“SS Nazis”, French services, CIA, etc.) to which they are supposed to have belonged. The whole, broadcast by the Voice of the Revolution and the
Horoya
newspaper , composes a baroque and macabre scenario, since it led to the torture of many people in the Guinea camps.
Sékou Touré also occupies a central place within the party-state, a place which does not tolerate dispute. One date is emblematic on this subject: December 1962. In Foulaya, in the Kindia prefecture, important activists of the Democratic Party of Guinea, including Jean Faragué Tounkara and Bangali Camara, contested Sékou Touré's decisions. “
Moreover,
” explains historian Mohamed Saliou Camara
, “Tounkara, Camara and their supporters were vehemently opposed to the concentration of powers by Touré, who was cumulatively head of state and head of the party. They proposed that Saifoulaye Diallo, who was then number two in the party, be elected secretary general.
» Tounkara and Camara were removed from the highest levels of the party, then arrested, described as counter-revolutionaries and sent to Boiro [6].
Part of the character's unity is probably played out in the revolutionary ideology that drives him. An uncompromising idealism, which wants to transform Guinean society and which imposes on it abstract combat categories free of nuance, such as the Revolution and the Counter-revolution, the “People” (with a capital) and their “enemies”. We are struck, in Ahmed Sékou Touré's texts, by the way he underlines the importance of the collective over individuals, by the overwhelming weight of "the Revolution" and its societal ambitions. “
The People as a social grouping is superior to each of the individuals who compose it
,” writes Sékou Touré in
Popular Power
, Volume XVI of his complete works… “
The Guinean State is organized in a rational and dynamic way, it that is to say in such a way as to safeguard the power of the People and to liquidate all the realities which are contrary to the interests of the People.
» There are undoubtedly, in the revolutionary literature attributed to the Guinean leader, threads which can help us think of his two faces together.
[1] DIAKITE Claude Abdou,
Guinea chained or The Black Book of Sékou Touré
, Paris, DAC, 1972, pp 217-245
[2] PAUTHIER Céline,
The controversial legacy of Sékou Touré, “hero” of independence
, Vingtième Siècle. History Review, vol. 118, no. 2, 2013, pp. 31-44.
[3] DIALLO Abdoulaye,
Sékou Touré and Guinean independence. Deconstruction of a myth and return to a story
, Outremers, volume 95, n°358-359, 1st semester 2008. pp. 267-288
[4] MCGOVERN Mike,
Unmasking the State. Making Guinea Modern
, The University of Chicago press, 2013, p. 171
[5] On some of these plots, see
Collective Memory. A plural history of political violence in Guinea
, the work produced by RFI, FIDH and academics.
[6] CAMARA Mohamed Saliou,
Political History of Guinea since World War Two
, Peter Lang, 2014, pp. 125-126
Our selection on the subject:
• To read :
→ Petit Barry, great witness to Guinea by Sékou Touré
→ Guinea: a history of political violence
→ “Collective memory”: a work on political violence in Guinea
• To listen :
→ Guinea • Sékou Touré, the president who said no
→ The pan-Africanist legacy of the first president Sékou Touré in Guinea
→ Sékou Touré, legendary political figure
→ Special Archives of Africa - Sékou Touré (1/4) - (2/4 ) - (3/4) -
→ October 2, 1958, independence of Guinea (26 episodes)
04:49
Ahmed Sékou Touré, President of Guinea, during a press conference on September 20, 1982, at the Marigny Hotel after his five-day official visit to France. AFP - MICHEL CLEMENT
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