Guinea

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Guinea

Although today Guinea struggles with persistent poverty, the country possesses agricultural and mineral riches and an equally rich history. In precolonial days the area now known as Guinea was home to several distinct ethnic groups—principally the Mandinka (or Malinke), Fulani, and Soso. The region was also the site one of Africa’s longest-lasting autonomous Islamic theocracies, known as Fouta Djallon. Under French Colonial rule, Guinea was one of the most productive of West African colonies. Its lucrative exports included rubber and bananas. However, French investors and merchants retained most of the wealth those exports produced.

Guinea achieved renown as the first of the French colonies to claim independence, and it served as an example to other African nations seeking autonomy. Guineans voted in 1958 to break ties with France. In the words of Guinea’s first president, Sékou Touré, Guinea chose “poverty in freedom to opulence in slavery.” In fact, poverty has haunted Guinea since independence. Hunger and disease are widespread, literacy levels are low, even by African standards, and the infant mortality rate is among the highest in the world.

Early History

Archaeologists have found evidence of human occupation in present-day Guinea dating back 30,000 years. Artifacts show that inhabitants of the central Guinean savanna were farming cereals such as millet and sorghum by 1000 B.C.E. The people of the southeastern forest region were cultivating yams, oil palms, and vegetables by 100 B.C.E. By around 200 B.C.E. the region’s inhabitants were smelting iron. Anthropologists believe that the earliest inhabitants of upper Guinea may have been the ancestors of modern Mande speakers.

Guinea

view larger image

Upper Guinea (the northeastern savanna region) formed part of the heartland of the great Mande empires of Ghana and Mali. The first of these, ancient Ghana, also extended into present-day Mali and Mauritania. Ghana achieved its power by controlling trade—in particular, by exacting duties in gold for the transport of salt from northern mines—and it dominated the western savanna from the eighth to the eleventh century. Ghana was supplanted by the Mali empire, which arose around 1200 C.E.. under the leadership of the Mandinka king, Sundiata Keita. Mali also exploited the rise of long-distance trade, including gold and slaves transported across the Sahara for markets in the north of Africa. The upper Guinea city of Kankan became a center of Islamic scholarship under Mali’s rule.

Ancestors of the Baga, Nalu, and Kissi peoples once occupied most of present-day Guinea west and south of the Mande upper Guinea region. However, migrations of Mande-speaking peoples starting in the tenth century drove the ancestors of the Baga and Nalu toward the coast and the ancestors of the Kissi toward the forests of the southeast. Gradually, the Mande-speaking Soso people came to dominate the Fouta Djallon highlands of central Guinea, while the Kpelle and Loma moved into the forest region.

Internal divisions caused the slow collapse of the Mali empire beginning in the fourteenth century. Starting in the fifteenth century, a new migration brought Fulani herders to the Fouta Djallon highlands. Although the first Fulani migrants mostly followed traditional religious practices, subsequent waves included Islamic Fulani migrating from areas in present-day Senegal. Islamic Fulani founded Fouta Djallon, an Islamic theocratic state, in the early eighteenth century. Fouta Djallon was a strictly hierarchical society with a ruling class (led by two families from which the alimamies, or leaders, were chosen), artisans, and slaves (mostly consisting of non-Muslim Fulani and non-Fulani inhabitants). To escape this forced servitude, the Soso people who had lived in the region began moving to coastal lower Guinea, where they dominated and gradually absorbed the existing Baga and Nalu populations.

The Soso and other coastal peoples established trade relations with the Portuguese, who first arrived on the coast during the fifteenth century. European powers were attracted to the region’s strategic location for trade to the Niger River Valley. By the eighteenth century the French and English came to dominate the coastal trade. The Europeans traded guns, alcohol, and other products for ivory, gold, and slaves (although the Transatlantic Slave Trade remained relatively small-scale in Guinea). By the early nineteenth century, they had begun to explore the hinterland. The first English expedition inland was in 1816; the French soon followed, with explorations in 1818 and 1827.

Meanwhile, the Fulani maintained a powerful theocratic state in the Fouta Djallon. Their culture of Islamic revival helped spark the rise of the Tukolor empire in the 1840s. Its leader, Umar Tal, a Fulani-speaking Islamic scholar, ruled over a kingdom that included parts of upper Guinea and the area comprised of present-day Senegal and Mali.

Colonization

In the early nineteenth century the French established a trading settlement on the northwest coast as an outpost of their colony in Senegal. In 1849 they declared the coastal region a protectorate, administered from Senegal. They concluded treaties of mutual protection with indigenous leaders and began erecting an administrative structure that eventually included the entire area now known as Guinea. France established three military posts in the region by 1866. At first, the French promoted the cultivation of peanuts, but the humid coastal climate proved unsuitable for this cash crop. During the 1880s the French shifted their focus to the extraction of rubber. On the site of an old Soso fishing village known as Conakry, the French founded a town in 1880. In 1891 Conakry became the capital of the newly founded colony of French Guinea.

French colonization, however, met heavy opposition. The Fulani of the Fouta Djallon continued to resist French control. Meanwhile, the Mandinka-dominated region produced one of Guinea’s historic heroes: Samory Touré. Touré built an empire covering much of present-day eastern Guinea, southern Mali, and northern Côte d’Ivoire during the 1880s. He fought colonization by the French for nearly twenty years until his defeat in 1898. Although the French defeated Fouta Djallon in 1896 and captured Touré in 1899 in a series of bloody campaigns, isolated resistance movements continued for another twenty years.

Under colonial rule, French commandants headed the colony’s administrative districts. Each of these, in turn, oversaw several smaller districts, ruled by indigenous African leaders. The colonial government selected these “chiefs,” often from a different ethnic group than the people of their districts, on the basis of their loyalty to the colonial government. As a result, local puppet-chiefs reinforced French rule in Guinea.

Colonial rule also transformed Guinea economically. French laws made former communally held land available for purchase, and France’s colonial “head tax” on all Guineans increasingly forced people to supplement traditional subsistence farming with participation in the cash economy. The head tax compelled many Guineans to cultivate cash crops, especially rubber in the coastal and forest zones and peanuts in upper Guinea. During the 1920s, after a collapse in the demand for Guinean rubber, French officials introduced coffee cultivation to the forested highlands. During the 1930s, French investors established banana and pineapple plantations in the country, and the head tax compelled many Guineans to seek menial jobs on these plantations. Meanwhile, educated Guineans found employment in the lower levels of the civil service. For the French, Guinea became a fairly lucrative holding, as its economy shifted from traditional occupations like subsistence farming and craft-production to large-scale farming of peanuts and tropical fruits for export.

Independence Movement

The French colonial system, increasingly under attack by both French Socialists and the educated elite of Africa, began to loosen after World War II (1939–1945). In 1945 new colonial laws permitted the formation of political parties and trade unions. The growth of unionism in Guinea received added impetus from European communist and socialist parties as well as religious organizations. The Guinean labor movement formed part of a larger Pan-African movement, promoted through regional meetings sponsored by the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT).

Fighting a system in which European workers earned three to four times more than indigenous Guineans on the same jobs, the country’s communications workers were the first to organize. Sékou Touré, who would become independent Guinea’s first president, got his start as the secretary general of the postal workers’ union in 1945. The rise in unions such as Touré’s occurred alongside similar growth in political parties. In 1946 Touré was instrumental in the formation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). He also helped found its Guinean branch, the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG). Labor unions functioned not only as effective mobilizers across ethnic group lines; they also served as a training ground for the country’s future political leaders.

Strikes in 1950 and 1953 helped mobilize the entire population against the inequities of colonial rule. Even nonunionized workers, according to Touré’s account, contributed food aid to striking workers. As Rivière points out, such shared struggles contributed to a growing sense of nationalism among indigenous Guineans. Although they had retained more control over local issues than some other colonized people, Guineans increasingly sought more political autonomy along with more economic fairness. The man at the center of both movements was Touré.

Elected to the national assembly in both 1951 and 1954, Touré was barred from his seat until 1956, when he won office as Conakry’s mayor. By then, the Mandinka from upper Guinea had gained a reputation as both a powerful speaker and a shrewd politician. By 1957 he was both vice president of the executive council of Guinea (the national governing body) and the founder of the Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire (UGTAN), a new labor union for Africans under French colonial rule. Immensely popular among the poor and dispossessed of Guinea, Touré effectively quashed rival political parties and by 1958 was the acknowledged leader of Guinean anticolonialism.

France’s war with Algeria spurred a further liberalization of its colonial policy. French President Charles de Gaulle proposed that the colonies be allowed to choose, by referendum, whether to adopt internal self-rule as part of a Franco-African confederation or to claim complete independence. Led in large part by Touré’s inspiring rhetoric—although the PDG conducted no campaign on the matter—Guinea, alone among the French colonies, chose full independence. The vote conducted on September 28 1958, was 1,134,324 to 56,981.

Touré’s Reign and Beyond

Instantly decried as part of a worldwide communist movement, Guinea’s vote for independence sparked a harsh French reaction. De Gaulle recalled French administrators, technical workers, and the French machinery that was crucial to Guinea’s modern infrastructure. In addition, France cut off all financial aid to its former colony and left Guinea’s economy in danger of total collapse.

Touré assumed office as Guinea’s first president shortly after the Republic of Guinea gained independence on October 2 1958. Drawing from his experience both in building coalitions as a union leader and in neutralizing political opponents, Touré effectively co-opted rival parties into the PDG. His efforts at attracting foreign aid, according to historians, were masterful: Touré emphasized the “positive neutralism” of Guinea in relation to Cold War allegiances and portrayed Guinea as being punished for personally challenging de Gaulle. Despite the influence of such political theorists as Karl Marx and Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Touré’s anticolonialist approach was also strategic and pragmatic. Although he reached out to both eastern and western powers, Touré’s anticapitalist stance tended to attract the most aid from the Eastern bloc nations such as the Soviet Union, which helped develop Guinea’s potential for the mining of bauxite (the raw material for aluminum production).

Within Guinea, Touré began to centralize authority under an increasingly dictatorial state. According to most historians, the combination of limited economic opportunity and growing political repression led as many as a million Guineans to seek refuge in neighboring states. As his long tenure continued—he would retain the presidency until his death in 1984—Touré faced a series of assassination attempts and coup plots. According to analysts, however, it is difficult to distinguish between the real threats to Touré’s power and those manufactured to justify the jailings and executions of his political rivals. By the late 1960s Touré began outlawing opposition parties and labor unions. He had prominent Fulani and Mandinka leaders jailed or executed without trial, on the suspicion that these large ethnic groups could mobilize effective opposition.

By the late 1970s, after years of mismanagement by state-run monopolies and dwindling foreign aid, Guinea’s economy had reached a standstill. The population began to demonstrate against Touré’s policies. Faced with riots in 1977, Touré prudently launched a series of changes. He traveled widely and approached Western lenders—governmental and private—for help in building a more capitalist economy, and he opened the government monopolies to competition. In addition, he tried to improve relations with Guinea’s West African neighbors.

In March 1984 Touré died of a heart attack in a Cleveland, Ohio, hospital. The Guinean government fell into turmoil. On April 3 1984, the Comité Militaire de Redressement National, a military junta headed by Colonel LANSANA CONTé, seized control. At first, Conté, who chose fellow soldier Diarra Traoré as his prime minister, seemed poised to reverse many of Touré’s excesses. He freed some ninety-seven political prisoners. At the same time, however, he suspended Guinea’s constitution.

As president, Conté changed the country’s name back to the Republic of Guinea. Since 1978, under Touré, the official name had been the People’s Revolutionary Republic of Guinea. Conté promised a gradual evolution toward a multiparty democracy, with free elections to be held sometime in the future. It wasn’t long, however, before opposition to Conté arose. His own prime minister, Traoré, allegedly attempted to overthrow Conté in 1985. Conté jailed and executed several of the alleged plotters. In 1987, perhaps fearing that Touré’s supporters would attempt another coup, Conté held secret trials in Conakry and had 60 people sentenced to death for “crimes against the state.” Since then, Conté’s administration has responded to ongoing protests by imposing limits on free expression, public meetings, and opposition parties. In December 1993 Guinea held the first multiparty elections in the country’s history. Conté won the presidency by a slim majority in what observers report was an election rife with fraud.

A violent revolt of at least 2,000 soldiers demanding higher pay in 1996 forced president Conté into hiding. Reports suggest that as many as fifty people died during two days of rioting in Conakry. In an attempt to restore confidence in his ability to improve the financial lot of Guineans, Conté appointed an economist, Sidya Touré, to the office of prime minister in 1996; he served until 1999 when he was replaced by Lamine Sidime.

Neither Conté nor his rivals have found an effective solution to the country’s grinding poverty. Guinea remains one of the poorest countries in the world. This poverty persists even though Guinea is the world’s second-largest producer of bauxite. The country also has important reserves of iron ore, diamonds, and gold. A structural adjustment plan imposed by foreign lenders in the late 1980s has brought little economic improvement. Though structural adjustment measures have boosted exports of minerals and cash crops, they have also ensured that foreign investors would reap most of the benefits. Associated austerity measures have limited the ability of Guinea’s government to invest export earnings in economic development that would benefit the country’s population. Instead, Guinea is required to devote much of its export revenue to pay interest on its debt to foreign lenders. The influx of refugees from neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia throughout the 1990s put a further strain on Guinea’s weak economy. In 2000 and 2001 fighting along the border with Sierra Leone and Liberia exacerbated the refugee crisis. More than 300,000 refugees from those nations flooded into Guinea causing further economic disruption and creating a humanitarian emergency.

In 1998 Conté won reelection to a five-year term amidst reports by the opposition that the election was rigged. Several opposition figures were arrested following the election, including Alpha Conde, leader of the Rally of the Guinean People (RPG). Opposition leaders rejected Conté’s invitation to join the government, claiming that Conté had not been legally reelected. Though his health has declined, Conté has taken steps to maintain his hold on power. In 2001, he successfully lobbied to end presidential term limits and to extend the term of office to seven years. In 2003 only one little-known candidate gained certification from Guinea’s Supreme Court to oppose Conté in the December election, virtually assuring the president of another term. Amid accusations of plans to rig the election, voters stayed away from the polls, giving Lansana Conté an easy win. In December 2008, however, Conté died, leading to yet another military coup. The transfer of power was halted and Captain Moussa Dadis Camara of the Guinean army assumed the presidency, at which point he quickly moved to suspend the country’s constitution.

See also Ancient African Civilizations; Cold War and Africa; Ghana, Early Kingdom of; Islam in Africa; and Structural Adjustment in Africa.

processed xml | source xml