Background
He was born to a family of Muslim farmers at Faranah, Guinea (then a French colony), on Jan. 9, 1922.
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Sékou Touré
Edit ProfileEducation
Sékou Touré was first educated at the local Koranic school and pursued further studies at the regional school of Kissidougou, south Guinea. In 1938, he was expelled from school in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, for leading a hunger strike. He continued educating himself through correspondence courses while taking on various jobs.
Career
Touré took a job as a clerk in Guinea's colonial administration, but, frustrated at the slow pace of advancement for Africans, he soon became active in the labor movement. By 1945 he was chief of the Guinean branch of France's largest labor federation. In 1952 he assumed as well the leadership of the Guinean Democratic Party. With these two bases of support. Touré created a political organization that began to dominate Guinean politics in the mid-1950's.
In 1958 the French offered their colonies a form of internal self-government in close association with France. Touré led the forces in Guinea pressing for immediate independence. When the French proposals were voted down in a referendum, the French angrily withdrew from the country.
Touré became president of the now-independent republic in October 1958. Guinea was the only African colony to reject the association scheme, but its rejection in Guinea made it unworkable elsewhere and speeded up the advance to independence throughout French Africa. French hostility divided Guinea from Western countries and from other French-speaking African nations. TouréToure at first had to rely mainly on aid from Communist nations. Yet even relations with the Soviet Union were far from smooth, and at times Guinea's diplomatic isolation was almost complete.
Internal affairs, too, were conducted mainly by improvisation. In the 1970's for example, Yet Touré did create a real sense of pride in Africa. Faced, however, with a growing gap between the backwardness of Guinea and the "socialist revolutionary state" he had promised, Touré became obsessed by domestic and foreign plotters - whom he blamed for Guinea's food shortages and deepening poverty. He increasingly based his rule on authoritarian measures. In the mid-1970's Touré adopted a more conciliatory foreign policy, including better relations with France and, after 1979, with the conservative Ivory Coast.
Achievements
Politics
Being the President, Touré launched a "cultural revolution" on the Chinese model. Yet (unlike the Chinese) he rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict and treated underdevelopment and neocolonialism as the main targets of attack. Moreover, his government failed to work out or implement a coherent strategy for long-range social and economic development and instead sought to convince the public, both at home and abroad, that a truly "African" social and political system was being created in Guinea.
His rule quickly showed the characteristics of a dictatorship with arrests of government opponents and executions. He also drove many dissents into exile.
Connections
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Born
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Died
March 26, 1984 (aged 62) -
Nationality
Guinean -
Religion
Islam