Ahmed Sekou Touré
Generations of Africans will continue to laud
Guinea-Conakry’s first president Ahmed Sekou Toure for his defiant rejection of
the flagrantly neo-colonial arrangement that was behind Francafrique. Rejecting President Charles de Gaulle’s paternalistic
offer to France’s former colonies, Toure’s cry that Guinea would prefer freedom
in poverty to "riches in slavery" still resonates. But during Toure’s
26-year period in power, “freedom”, as well as substantive economic development
in Guinea remained an illusion. This all the more pitiful given the privations
and widespread repression his nation had to endure. While Toure continues to
receive the adulation of many for his commitment to Pan-Africanism, his support
for liberation movements, as well as his attempts at decolonising the education
system and freeing his people from the pervasive mental subjugation to French
culture experienced by Francophone Africa, his legacy is clouded by the method
of his rule which came to be underwritten by managerial incompetence, the
fostering of a cult of personality and a brutal mission aimed at maintaining
power for power’s sake.
A former trade
union leader, Ahmed Sekou Toure, who claimed lineage from the legendary
Mandinka warrior Samori Toure, challenged French rule in 1953 by leading a
successful strike against the colonial authorities in French West Africa. His
organising abilities allied to his oratorical skills provided the basis for his
entry into politics and he was twice elected as a representative to the French
National Assembly. He was barred from taking his seat on both occasions, but
after winning a resounding majority to become mayor of Conakry in 1955, he was
allowed to take a place in the assembly.
Toure guided
the decision of the Guinean people to reject the option of Guinea being co-opted
into the federation community led by France, choosing instead the path of
independence which was achieved on October 2nd, 1958. The French reacted by
withdrawing civil servants and professionals, as well as by dismantling
transportable equipment.
Toure sought to
overcome this act of sabotage by seeking help from a wide circle of nations.
These included members of the communist bloc and Western countries. An
injection of $10 million from Kwame Nkrumah-led Ghana also helped.
Along with
Nkrumah, Modibo Keita of Mali, Gamal Nasser of Egypt, and King Mohammed V of
Morocco, Toure formed the Casablanca Bloc, that group of African nations which
sought a faster pace of political and economic integration among newly
independent African states than those who comprised the Monrovia Bloc.
Apart from
this, Toure participated in an attempt at fostering regional economic
cooperation, and along with Nkrumah and Keita of Mali, sought to create a socialist
bloc in West Africa, which at one time appeared to
include Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria.
Alongside Ben
Bella and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Toure gave a home to African liberation
movements. He provided valuable assistance primarily to the African Party for
the Independence of Guiné and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), the guerrilla movement led by
Amilcar Cabral which successfully overthrew Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau.
But this extended to offering facilities to figures of the anti-Portuguese struggle
in Angola such as Holden Roberto, leader of the National Liberation Front of
Angola (FNLA) and Lucio Lara and Iko Carreira of the Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
He also
provided a home in exile for his old ally
Nkrumah.
Like Nkrumah,
Toure’s skills as an orator were matched by his abilities as a writer. He was
adept at articulating the condition of Africa and the problems it faced in
forging a place in the post-colonial world. His paper titled “Africa’s Future
and the World” which appeared in the October 1962 edition of Foreign Affairs, published by the
Council on Foreign Relations provides is a good example of his flair for words
and his cogency in putting across his points in regard to Africa’s
underdevelopment, the discriminatory effect of the pricing of raw materials and
the adoption by African states of “neutralism”.
However, the
early idealism and progressive aspirations of Toure would become submerged in a
system of rule that came to be characterised by mismanagement and cruel repression.
The roots of this malaise are easy to fathom but are hard to justify.
Toure was
constantly burdened by the question of national and personal security. He saw
his allies overthrown by successful military coups: Nkrumah in 1966, Keita in 1968 and Ben Bella in 1965. The early attempts by the French government aimed at sabotaging his
economy included a covert action designed to flood the Guinean economy with
fake currency after Toure had created a central bank and new currency.
Operation Persil, which was planned by Jacques Foccart and implemented by the
SDECE, the French foreign intelligence service, ultimately failed.
For Toure,
added to the threat from France was that of Portugal whose colonial interests
were threatened by his support for anti-Portuguese insurgencies in west and
southern Africa. “Operation Green Sea”, an
amphibious assault on Conakry by Portuguese naval forces in November 1970,
sought to capture Cabral, free Portuguese PoWs and create circumstance
conducive for an armed insurrection.
Toure survived,
but his actions in response to the invasion began to show a pattern of
governance which began to be blurred by paranoiac purges of individuals, many
of them almost certainly blameless of the accusation of collaboration with
external forces or of having ambitions to overthrow him. This was the case with
the apprehensions and executions of many serving and former government ministers
and civil servants with whom Toure had either fallen out or otherwise did not
trust.
Prior to
“Operation Green Sea” in March 1969, Toure’s security machine had convinced
itself of a plot of the army based on an overheard conversation between two
paratroopers. It resulted in the arrests of Colonel Kaman Diaby, the Deputy
Chief of Army Staff, and Fodeba Keita, the Secretary of State for Defence who
were accused of being part of a French-backed
plot to overthrow Toure’s government.
Toure later
told a meeting that Diaby's home had been full of arms and ammunition and that
when he was seized, he had been about to flee the country. He also claimed that
the house contained a marshal's uniform and a "Proclamation of the Second
Republic".
Both men were
shot to death on May 27th, 1969, after having to dig their own graves.
The charges are
widely believed to have been false and both Diaby and his superior, Colonel Keita
Noumandian, Chief of General Staff who was arrested in 1970 and executed in
1971, have been formally rehabilitated by the National Recovery and Development
Committee (CNRD).
Guineans had
little reason to believe in the veracity of the “confessions” of supposed fifth
columnists arrested by Toure’s security network in the aftermath of “Operation
Green Sea.” Each confession contained common elements regardless of whether the
prisoner had been supposedly recruited by the American, French or West German
secret services. They were always recruited into spy networks, were paid
astronomical stipends, and ended up naming and denouncing their “collaborators.”
Corroboration
that these were stage-managed, fictitious enterprises were confirmed by letters
which managed to be smuggled out of the detention centres at which the victims
were held.
The contrivance
of many of the arrests carried out by Toure’s security men, the theatre of the
consequent show trials conducted by revolutionary tribunals and the macabre
ways in which victims were tortured and put to death were present in the manner
in which Toure dealt with his most famous victim, the diplomat Diallo Telli.
Telli was a
long-term Secretary General of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) who
prior to that had served as Guinea's ambassador to the United Nations. He was
murdered at the notorious Camp Boiro in Conakry in 1977. The cause of death was
the 'Black Diet': starvation through the withdrawal of food and water.
An ethnic
Fulani, Telli was a victim of a second wave of anti-Fulani purges mounted by
Toure.
By this time,
the modus operandi for engineering these liquidations had been well
established. In her paper titled "Guinea's Political Prisoners: Colonial
Models, Postcolonial Innovation" which was published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (October
2012, Vol. 54, No. 4, pp. 890-913), Mairi S. MacDonald drew on the
recollections of Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, a prominent victim who had been
Minister of State for Youth and Tourism:
First Toure himself would suggest an arrest.
Before moving against an individual, the regime's seers would perform a set of
occult rituals to paralyse the target and “kill" his or her will.
Leaving nothing to chance, the regime would
pursue a more prosaic form of paralysis. Even as one member of an extended
family was being arrested, another would be promoted to sap the group's
cohesion and its ability to act.
Once arrested the prisoner would be held in
solitary confinement without food or water for several days—the diete
noire—then invited to sign a confession. If the prisoner did not sign, he or
she would be sent to the cabinet technique and subjected to a variety of
tortures, including the application of electrical current to the body. Torture
sessions would be interspersed with further opportunities to confess.
The confession itself took the form of a
statement prepared for each in and presented to him or her by the commission of
inquiry, usually in the person of Ismael Toure. The prisoner was often
pressured to elaborate on the prepared confession by denouncing a specified
number of additional people. Once the prisoner agreed to sign, he or she would
be recorded reading the confession. The recording would then be broadcast on
the Voice of the Revolution (Radio Conakry), and the cycle would begin again
with the newly named victims.
There is
something to be said of the argument that underdeveloped nations such as Guinea
and other African states can only achieve a rapid and assured transformation of
their societies into industrialised, self-sufficient entities by the
regimentation of their people under strong leadership which facilitates a
centrally planned course of economic development.
And in
protecting the nation from threats of foreign interference of the sort Toure
contended with, it would not be unreasonable for such a leadership to
substitute an open society for a closed one. This was the decision made in the
mid-1950s by the exiled Fidel Castro and Che Guevara who resolved to pursue the
latter if they ever achieved power in Cuba. Both men had observed the way the foreign
intelligence service of the United States had overthrown the governments of
Iran and Guatemala. The manipulation of the media for instance played a huge
part in setting up the deposing respectively of Mohamed Mossadegh and Jacobo
Arbenz.
However, in the
case of Toure’s Guinea, the brand of coercion and surveillance did not enhance
the development of the nation. They only created the conditions for poor
management of the nation’s human and material resources. This was reflected in
the failure of many important projects pertaining to industrial and rural
development in the 1960s and 1970s.
Writing in May
1984 soon after the death of Toure and the coming to power of a military
regime, Jonathan C. Randal of the Washington
Post in “Letter From Guinea” wrote:
What is striking is how little of Sekou Toure’s
reign remains. He created everything on paper, but little actually functioned.
While Toure’s
antipathy towards France was understandable, the decisions made in regard to educating the Guinean youth through a Mao-inspired Cultural Revolution which
sought a rapid Africanisation of the education system proved to be a disaster.
Radical education reform began soon after the French evacuation from the country after
independence was granted in 1958. In 1959, Decree Number 49 issued by the
Ministère de l'Education Nationale (National Ministry for Education) set out a
new ethnocentric policy of radical Africanization. However, the discarding of
the French pedagogical model was later acknowledged to have come at a great
cost: 20 years later, Guinea lagged behind every other Francophone African
nation.
As Randal
explained:
The only schoolbooks were volumes of Toure’s
theoretical writings and declarations-laced with the jargon of socialism and
pan-Africanism which students studied eight hours a week to the detriment of
French, once the country’s lingua franca, and other subjects. More than a
generation of students was churned out neither literate nor numerate,
unemployable in any but the lowest jobs and a potential pool of political
discontents. In any event only 32 percent of primary school-age children -and
16 percent of secondary school-age children-attended classes, far fewer than in
neighbouring Ivory-Coast, Liberia, or Sierra Leone. Those who did graduate were
rewarded with high-sounding titles. For example, more than 12,000 “agricultural
engineers” graduated from special polytechnic schools, all but 2,000 of them
hopelessly incompetent, according to education specialists.
Teachers also benefited from “degree
inflation,” with primary school teacher, promoted to secondary school teacher
and the latter given university posts, while grade schoolteachers were
recruited from among the new semi-literates from what is now known as the “lost
generations.”
Toure’s failure
to provide a solid foundation in educating the people undermined any pretence
that he was embarked on a great enterprise aimed at substantively transforming
his nation into a socialist triumph of modernity. From Toure, there was never
any serious attempt to set out and act upon a credible decades-long plan of
development that would mechanise agriculture and plant the seedlings of heavy
industry. His absorption with maintaining his power and institutionalising a
state of permanent conspiracy obliterated any ambition to embark on a Soviet
model of development which would have enabled his minerally rich nation to build
an industrial base.
As a result he
left no lasting achievement from which Guineans could benefit. The calamity
that he bequeathed to future Guineans in the form of several generations of
uneducated and undereducated, puts a lie to the claim of his most vociferous
adherents that he brought free education and free healthcare to the masses. As
previously mentioned, the number of Guineans who had a primary and secondary
school education were far less than those of neighbouring countries, and much
of this had to do with parents withdrawing their children not only because of
the extremely poor standards of the system, but because of the inordinate time
dedicated to tedious and unproductive indoctrination.
A system of
rule predicated on loyalty to Toure rather than on competence and the resultant
dysfunctional administrative capacities which accompanied the descent into ever
growing poverty led to a sizeable proportion of the population emigrating to
other countries. Ultimately, it meant that Guinea was unable to develop
economically, politically, and socially.
Thus, the
positive aspects of Sekou Toure in defying colonialism at home and within the
African continent cannot be allowed to overshadow his fundamental failings as a
leader and a nation-builder. For to do so is to abrogate the truism of learning
from the mistakes of the past.
© Adeyinka
Makinde (2022).
Adeyinka
Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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