(In this book, Ahmed Sekou Toure expresses the ideology of...)
In this book, Ahmed Sekou Toure expresses the ideology of the Guinea Revolution. Beginning with an historical analysis of the condictions in pre-Independence Guinea, he goes on to examine the " groundwork of the revolution" and to define the principles, orientation and methods of the Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG). Among the subjects covered are socialist economic planning, education, the position of women, justice, pan-African and foreign policies, political and administrative structures, and revolutionary culture. The Guinea experience is of great relevance to all peoples engaged with replacing the structure of exploitation with those of socialism, and, in this Panaf edition of Sekou Toure's important work, the author provides a valuable account of the philosophy and progress of the Guinea Revolution in the Pan-African context.
Ahmed Sékou Touré was a Guinean political leader; head of the PDG, he was elected as the first President of Guinea, serving from 1958 to his death in 1984. Touré was one of the primary Guinean nationalists involved in gaining independence of the country from France.
Background
Sékou Touré was born on January 9, 1922 into a Mandinka family in Faranah, French Guinea, while it was a colony of France. He was an aristocratic member of the Mandinka ethnic group. His great-grandfather was Samory Touré, a noted Muslim Mandinka king who founded the Wassoulou Empire (1861-1890) in the territory of Guinea and Mali, defeating numerous small African states with his large, professionally organized and equipped army. He resisted French colonial rule until his capture in 1891. He died while held in exile in Gabon
Education
Touré's family were Muslim, and he was initially educated at the Koranic School in Faranah, before transferring to a school in Kissidougou. In 1936 he moved on to a French technical college, the Ecole Georges Poiret, in Conakry, but was expelled after less than a year for initiating a food strike.
Over the next few years Sékou Touré passed through a series of menial jobs, whilst attempting to complete his education through correspondence courses. His lack of formal education was an issue throughout his life, and his lack of qualifications left him suspicious of anyone who had attended tertiary education.
In 1940 Ahmed Sékou Touré obtained a post as clerk for the Compagnie du Niger Français while also working to complete an examination course which would allow him to join the Post and Telecommunications Department (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) of colony's French administration. In 1941 he joined the post office and started to take an interest in labor movements -- encouraging his fellow workers to hold a successful two-month long strike (the first in French West Africa). In 1945 Sékou Touré formed French Guinea's first trade union, the Post and Telecommunications Workers' Union, becoming its general-secretary the following year. He affiliated the postal workers' union to the French labor federation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT, General Confederation of Labor) -- which was in turn affiliated to the French Communist party -- and also set up French Guniea's first trade union center: the Federation of Workers' Unions of Guinea.
In 1946 Sékou Touré attended a CGT congress in Paris, before moving to the Treasury Department -- where he became the general-secretary of the Treasury Workers' Union. In October that year he attended a West African congress in Bamako, Mali, where he became one of the founding members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA, African Democratic Rally) along with Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d'Ivoire. The RDA was a Pan-Africanist party which looked towards independence for French colonies in West Africa. He founded the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG, Democratic Party of Guinea), the local affiliate of the RDA in Guinea.
Ahmed Sékou Touré was dismissed from the treasury department for his political activities, and in 1947 was briefly sent to prison by the French colonial administration -- he decided to devote his time to developing workers' movements in Guinea and to campaign for independence. In 1948 he became the secretary-general of the CGT for French West Africa, and in 1952 Sékou Touré became secretary-general of the PDG.
In 1953 Sékou Touré called a general strike which lasted for two months, the government capitulated -- he campaigned during the strike for unity between ethnic groups (opposing the 'tribalism' which the French authorities were promulgating) and was explicitly anti-colonial in his approach.
Sékou Touré was elected to the territorial assembly in 1953 but failed to win the election for the seat in the Assemblée Constituante, the French National Assembly, after conspicuous vote-tampering by the French administration in Guinea. Two years later he became mayor of Conakry, Guinea's capital. With such a high political profile, Sékou Touré was finally elected as the Guinean delegate to the French National Assembly in 1956.
Despite his harsh domestic policies, Touré was viewed in international politics as a moderate Islamic leader. In 1982 he led the delegation sent by the Islāmic Conference Organization to mediate in the Iran-Iraq War; he also was a member in the Organization for African Unity (OAU).
Later in his life, he proclaimed himself “All Faiths.”
Politics
Ahmed Sékou Touré political beliefs were strictly Socialism and Marxism.
In 1960, Touré declared his Parti démocratique de Guinée (PDG) to be the only legal party, though the country had effectively been a one-party state since independence. For the next 24 years, Touré effectively held all governing power in the nation. He was elected to a seven-year term as president in 1961; as leader of the PDG he was the only candidate. He was reelected unopposed in 1968, 1974 and 1982. Every five years, a single list of PDG candidates was returned to the National Assembly.
During his presidency, Touré's policies were strongly based on Marxism, with the nationalization of foreign companies and centralized economic plans. He won the Lenin Peace Prize as a result in 1961. Most of those actively opposed to his socialist regime were arrested and then jailed or exiled. His early actions to reject the French and then to appropriate wealth and farmland from traditional landlords angered many powerful forces, but the increasing failure of his government to provide either economic opportunities or democratic rights angered more.[3] While he is still revered in much of Africa[4] and in the Pan-African movement, many Guineans, and activists in Europe, have become critical of Touré's failure to institute meaningful democracy or free media.
Views
On October 2, 1958 Sekou Touré, proclaimed Guinea's independence from France and became its first president. One year later he gave a speech in Conakry, the capital in which he outlined the role of political leaders in reflecting and developing the culture of their nations. That speech appears below.
Since culture is not an entity or a phenomenon which is separate or separable from a people, the political leaders who have, in a free and democratic manner, acquired the confidence of that people with a view to directing it along the way it has chosen, are at the same time the expression of the aspirations of their people and the representatives or defenders of its cultural values.
The culture of a people is necessarily determined by its material and moral conditions. The man and his surroundings constitute a whole.
Every free and sovereign people finds itself placed in conditions more favourable to the expression of its cultural values than a colonized country, deprived of all freedom, whose cultué sustains the nefarious consequences of its state of subjection4 Whether it is a question of a free people or of a colonized people, the political leader who truly remains the authentic expression of his people is the one whose thought, sense of existence, social conduct and objects of action are in perfect harmony with the characteristics of his people.
Whether he tends, in a conservative spirit, to ensure the maintenance of an old economic, social and moral equilibrium, or in revolutionary manner, to replace the old conditions, by new conditions more favourable to the people, the political leader is by the very fact of his communion of ideas and action with his people, the representative of a culture. That culture may be reactionary or progressist according to the nature of the aims set for the action of the political movement to which the people have committed themselves.
Quotations:
"Without being Communists, we believe that the analytical qualities of Marxism and the organization of the people are methods especially well-suited for our country."
"People are not born with racial prejudices. For example, children have none. Racial questions are questions of education. Africans learned racism form the European. Is it any wonder that they now think in terms of race -- after all they've gone through under colonialism?"
"An African statesman is not a naked boy begging from rich capitalists."
"The private trader has a greater sense of responsibility than civil servants, who get paid at the end of each month and only once in a while think of the nation or their own responsibility."
"We should go down to the grassroots of our culture, not to remain there, not to be isolated there, but to draw strength and substance there from, and with whatever additional sources of strength and material we acquire, proceed to set up a new form of society raised to the level of human progress."
"We have told you bluntly, Mr President, what the demands of the people are ... We have one prime and essential need: our dignity. But there is no dignity without freedom ... We prefer freedom in poverty to opulence in slavery."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The President of Senegal, Abdou Diouf: ''History will remember him as a courageous and indomitable fighter and an intransigent defender of the dignity, independence and the freedom of Africa.''
Ahmed Sékou Touré: An African Tragedy
Marxist political analysis billing as a failure the policies and the legacy of Sekou Toure, first president of the Republic of Guinea.