Guinea's S?kou Tour?
SHATTEN, FRITZ
A Profile Guinea's Sekou Toure By Fritz Shatten An element of uncertainty always reigns whenever S?©kou Tour?© is discussed, whether inside or outside Africa. The public image of the man...
...Some people see Guinea's past four years as a running battle between Communism and anti-Communism...
...He entertained, and still does, an equally scant regard for atheistic materialism...
...Once these organizations and, through them, the Administration were committed to "democratic centralism" and the principle of criticism and self-criticism, Tour?© was at liberty to do what he liked with the country...
...His relations with the countries of the West are now largely devoid of emotionalism and resentment, and, though he bore de Gaulle a longstanding grudge for snubbing him in the autumn of 1958, the Franco-Algerian agreement at Evian prompted him to extol "the greatness of France and de Gaulle" more outspokenly than any other African leader...
...We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery...
...In brief we are not interested in philosophy...
...His grandfather, however, was undoubtedly the great Samory of whom ballads and legends in Guinea and Mali still relate that he was the last man to resist the whites in the 1880s...
...Tour?© has put it another way: "We should go under if we encapsulated ourselves in an abstract philosophy...
...Even if someone says that he does not believe in God or is a fetishist, he is a believer...
...He replaced it in more than 4,000 villages by his own brain child, the Parti D?©mocratique de Guin?©e (PDG), which became the best and most efficiently organized political party in the whole of tropical Africa-not least because of the organizing ability and talent for agitation of its leader and Secretary General, S?©kou Tour?© himself...
...Tour?© is and will always be an African, and thus a difficult subject for the conventional clich?©s of Western thought to master...
...During his early years as an unskilled worker and junior post office official he never abandoned hope, and when he was compelled to leave secondary school he devoted himself-with the fierce energy characteristic of the self-taught man-to the French sociologists, to Marx, Engels, Lenin and the writings of the Pan-African visionaries and prophets...
...The Samory's grandson was born to a life of poverty and lack of opportunity...
...France's months-long refusal to grant diplomatic recognition and the withdrawal of most French officials, doctors, teachers and technicians, together with tacit gestures of solidarity on the part of other Western powers, led directly to Guinea's involvement with the East...
...In his eyes, chefferie or rule by chiefs was a totally unsuitable instrument for the emancipation of his country...
...The public image of the man whose "No" to the Communaut?© Fran?§aise four years ago signaled the great secession of French African territories from the motherland is in a perpetual state of flux, which is why he is always so interesting...
...A certain number of us adopted the civilization of other countries, and the result has been the cultural dichotomy of Africa...
...We should go under even sooner if we insisted that Africa or Guinea recognizes the existence or non-existence of a God...
...The passionate enthusiasm with which he harps on this vision of a new African with his own scale of values is the true motive power behind Tour?©'s policy and the thing which brands him in many eyes as a radical and extremist...
...The PDG soon brought the Union G?©neral des Travailleurs d'Afrique Noire (UGTAN), the Conakry-based trade-union organization with PanAfrican ambitions, and Guinea's League of Young Pioneers, under its aegis...
...It did so because it disregarded the theme which most frequently recurs in Tour?©'s speeches: that of dignity...
...He has revised the original scope of the Three-Year Plan, abandoned collectivist experiments and once more thrown open Guinea's doors to international private enterprise...
...De Gaulle's gaze being focussed exclusively on the Community, he was convinced that Guinea would be forced to change its tune quickly enough if subjected to a certain degree of pressure...
...The African visionary appears to have become an African realist, though observers outside Africa will still find plenty of scope for conjecture, speculation and bewilderment...
...Even so, the Communists might have avoided it if they had studied Tour?© and his ideas, which seemed so similar to Communist ideas, with more care...
...He still speaks of it from time to time with the nostalgia and the blend of love and hatred felt by a son who has been banished from the bosom of his family...
...A few specially privileged "initiates" hint at a Messianic religious vocation corroborated by prophecies...
...Thus the result of the referendum hardly came as a surprise, especially since Tour?© left President de Gaulle in no doubt about the outcome in advance...
...Tour?©'s theme is Africa's future and unity, not the future and unity of any world proletariat or Socialist International...
...What makes it hard for Tour?© to govern is the painful conflict, so frequent in politics, between ideals and reality...
...Yet the Eastern bloc threw it away...
...Guinea became not the continent's model state but a testingground for conflicting ideas and ideologies, and their even more imperfect champions...
...We have a grave and pressing need: our dignity...
...Tour?© now seems to be aspiring to modesty, though it was never his strong suit...
...Its dignity was infringed, above all, when Communist envoys and observers came to see S?©kou Tour?© as a figure who could be "satellitized," turned to good use and subordinated to their own Communist ends...
...Available information is often vague, and much of it belongs to the realm of legend-as, for instance, that he is a scion of the celebrated Keita Dynasty and hails from the ancient warrior nobility...
...Fritz Shatten, a new contributor, is an author and journalist specializing in West African affairs...
...But there is no dignity without freedom, for any subjection, any coercion dishonors the man who submits, deprives him of part of his humanity and arbitrarily turns him into an inferior being...
...Schemes for a planned and collectivized economy went so completely awry that the country's belief in its leaders infallibility suffered...
...The support which he has given to radical groups of rebels in the Ivory Coast, Cameroons and several other countries has alienated him from the ruling circles of large portions of the continent...
...Months before the referendum of September 28, 1958, a French official, in a confidential report to Paris, stated that Guinea was "a territory no longer controlled by the French Republic...
...This becomes all the more understandable when one recalls that the Eastern bloc came forward immediately with massive offers of assistance...
...It is Africa alone that dominates the thoughts and feelings of this man, who, with his athletic figure and forceful manner, seems anything but reflective and sentimental but is so to a marked degree...
...It is indisputable that, apart from Cuba, no other place in the world of the 'have-nots' has offered the Eastern bloc such an opening...
...The Algerian settlement, Tour?© made it clear, would shed its radiance on the future relations between Guinea and France...
...Guinea's dignity was infringed when the Communists, after a preliminary phase, substituted propaganda for performance and abandoned the country to starvation...
...They are always accompanied by a sort of inward cry of protest, always followed by demands for a return to "African dignity" and affirmations of the "African personality...
...I feel more at home in the company of French friends than of my elder brother, who has never been to school...
...Tour?© owed his introduction to politics to Frenchmen, Left-wing intellectuals and Communists who discovered his dynamic, active qualities and furthered his education by discussion and training...
...He has approached it in his own individual fashion, encountering more failure than success on the way...
...S?©kou Tour?© has made several similar remarks...
...Such charges were to be heard even before Guinea's independence, for Tour?© was the first African party leader to take up arms against the old tribal system, a struggle which, with the help of the erstwhile French High Commissioner, Jean Ramadier, he brought to a successful conclusion in 1957...
...His face, gait and gestures all betray the difficulties and disappointments that beset him, and he has aged at least 10 years in the past four...
...Whether or not these words are backed up by deeds, Guinea and S?©kou Tour?© seem determined, at the end of the first four years of independence, to avoid precipitate changes of course, shrill reactions and ill-considered actions...
...The results were catastrophic...
...Failure has also attended what Tour?© looked upon as his supreme task...
...The Casablanca Group has repeatedly demonstrated its inability to further pan-African aims...
...The union which he founded with Ghana and Mali and saw as the nucleus of a United States of Africa still exists only on paper...
...He has always regarded this dependence on France and the French as a tragic phenomenon and a step on the road towards alienation from the African milieu...
...There is talk of "a second Nasser," "an African Mao Tse-tung," of a reincarnation of the heroic figures that dominated the scene during Africa's warlike Middle Ages, when kingdoms rose and fell in the area that is now Guinea...
...Addressing the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London in 1959, he said: "Education brought us into contact with other cultures...
...Tour?© and his most intimate associates had nurtured it on numerous pro-Eastern statements, and it had been further facilitated by the casual way in which the Guinean leaders entrusted the training of Guinean cadres to Communists...
...Colonization meant a chance of advancement for a small African ?©lite, but at the cost of a deep gulf between us...
...Opposition groups have grown up inside and outside the PDG and the trade unions, groups which turn a deaf ear to Tour?©'s calls to order...
...Tour?© himself has done little to discourage such speculation, for he rarely speaks about himself...
...What probably depresses him more than anything is the thought that compromises have to be made, detours devised and targets postponed...
...Others maintain that Tour?©'s decisions during this period have been simultaneously determined by underlying currents of Francophilia and Francophobia...
...At the time, de Gaulle dismissed these proud words as a high-flown gesture, and France followed his example by refusing to take Guinea's declaration of independence seriously...
...He was one of the dispossessed, but he still preserved some of his ancestors' turbulent pride...
...Yet Tour?© had stressed on more than one occasion that the whole class-struggle ideology of Communism was repugnant to him: "No classes exist in Africa, let alone antagonistic classes...
...France became his spiritual home even before he first visited it after World War II to attend a course at a school run by the Conf?©d?©ration G?©n?©rale de Travail (the French tradeunion congress...
...May I quote a personal example...
...Instead, they took the similar interpretation of concepts such as colonialism and anticolonialism, imperialism and antiimperialism, peace and war, as evidence of complete ideological identity...
...This misunderstanding-not to overstate the case-was inevitable...
...No definitive biography yet exists, and -in contrast to Kwame Nkrumah -he has never written about his career nor given details which would permit one to draw any far-reaching conclusions about his mentality, mode of thought or basic ideas...
...Marxism-Leninism, he declared during an informative interview, affords an excellent method of interpreting economic and social conditions, but it also denies the existence of God: "Now you will not find a single man or woman in the African territories who does not believe in God...
Vol. 45 • October 1962 • No. 21
