History - Independent Guinea
In May 1958 General de Gaulle returned to power in France and undertook an African tour to propose to the colonies the status of the Community in the new constitution. In Conakry in a famous speech, Sekou Toure refused this offer and proposes to say "no" to the community if the option of independence within it is not open. "We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery," he said. On 25 August, by a very large majority, Guineans answered no, and independence was proclaimed on October 2, 1958, Sékou Touré became head of government, a constitution was adopted on November 10, 1958.
The 1970 aggression, in which a Portuguese commando, accompanied by some armed opponents, came to deliver compatriots imprisoned in Guinea, marked a turning point in the regime. The latter becomes more authoritarian and repressive. It marked the beginning of the "Conakry trials", which had many victims, even within the family of the President. The symbol of this repression remains the Camp Boiro where several thousand people were imprisoned, tortured and murdered. Among them many former ministers or close friends of Sékou Touré. The repression also affected the provinces and the Kindia prison, if it did not give rise to a literature as abundant as that on camp Boiro (see bibliography and especially JP Alata "Prisons of Africa") remained infamous.
By early 1975, after more than sixteen years in office as the republic's first and only head-of-state, President Touré remained the undeniable center of all political, social, and economic authority. As head of government and leader of the country's sole political party, his voice remained persistent in exhorting the people to strive for national development, an effort he had chosen to label the "Guinean revolution."
The theories, goals, and methods of the PDG, which had not tolerated any political opposition, touched every sphere of public and personal life. They were projected directly into the community by the party committees in the towns and villages and indirectly by the government and numerous parapolitical mass organizations in which party members occupied all the key positions. President Touré, in his dual position of authority, impressed his philosophies and personality on the whole structure. As products of a particular experience of colonial rule, he and his colleagues revelled in what they have done and hope to do the selective utilization of European and African elements for national purpose.
A number of outside observers likened the discipline of the PDG — and the conception of its relationship to the government and all other Guinean institutions — to those of the communist parties in various other countries of the world. President Touré, however, described the rule of the PDG as a popular dictatorship based on the will of the whole people and contrasted it with the class dictatorship of the communist states. In rejecting the Marxist concept of class struggle during the first decade of independence as inapplicable to Guinea, he asserted that he and the PDG were not interested in theoretical doctrines but rather in practical needs. By the early 1970s, however, his opposition to the principle of class struggle had lessened as he warned the people that a fifth column (agents of foreign interests) in Guinea represented a serious threat to the country's revolutionary goals.
Since independence the party-state sought to minimize the political and social implications of ethnic differences by exhorting the people to strive for national unity as Guineans rather than as competitive members of particular ethnic groups. In a contest that had been principally one between the local communities and the central government, national leaders made decided inroads in their assault on the traditional social system. Increasingly, traditional functions were taken over by elements of the governing regime, generally lifting the individual out of a world in which family and kinship ties formerly defined his place in society and placing him in one where new group loyalties assumed a position of primacy and where such values as education, skills, and national solidarity were repeatedly asserted.
The national leadership, which had the power to reward its friends and punish its enemies, succeeded in involving almost everyone in one way or another. Such pressures had been particularly successful among the young. Nonetheless, by the mid-1970s there were indications that obvious differences in language, custom, and religion continued to exist to some degree in everyday affairs, despite party efforts to dispel them. This appeared to be particularly true of the uneducated masses of subsistence cultivators whose isolation defied widespread ethnic interaction.
Although the PDG extolled national unity as the answer to Guinea's problems, the traditional assurance arising from membership in the family and larger kin group remained the subsistence cultivators' major guarantee against economic disaster. Moreover, traditional ethnic alliances with peoples in neighboring countries — ties that for centuries had ignored territorial boundaries — complicated the efforts to achieve national unity.
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