Baba,

This is a true scientific paper, well researched and publishable in an
international journal to add a feather on your laurel of achievements. An
excellent piece!

Thanks! Jados

2008/12/25 Baba Galleh Jallow <[log in to unmask]>

>  *Sekou Toure Revisited: A window into Guinea's current crisis*
>
>
>
> By Baba Galleh Jallow
>
>
>
> At the dawn of independence, many African leaders moved to establish
> single-party states. The justifications given for the establishment of
> single party regimes included the purported existence of potentially
> explosive ethnic cleavages, the fragility of the newly independent colonial
> creations, the need for unity and concerted national effort, and the
> proclaimed convictions, on the part of the new leaders, that western-style
> democracy and multi-party politics were not suitable for Africa. The
> introduction of single party regimes necessarily entailed the introduction
> of the politics of infallibility, which, in most cases, led to the now
> chronic specter of military intervention and intractable developmental
> problems in Africa. Today, over four decades later, the single-party
> experiment has long proven untenable and most of those countries whose
> leaders so enthusiastically participated in "the first dance of freedom"
> (July, 1987) are still reeling from the effects of the historical mistakes
> of their founding fathers in trying to impose unity on their peoples.
>
>
>
> African leaders of the independence era were particularly averse to notions
> of press freedom and opposition parties. Beset by all manner of challenges
> such as the provision of basic amenities like health care and education, the
> improvement of communication facilities, infrastructure and the building of
> more efficient bureaucracies than the ones they inherited from the
> colonialists, most leaders saw rival political parties and critical presses
> as needless distractions that must not be tolerated. Independent newspapers
> and smaller political parties that participated in the struggle for
> independence but could not clinch the leadership were accused of serving as
> instruments of neocolonial destabilization and sabotage. Extreme intolerance
> drove some newspapers out of business or into self-censorship, while some of
> the fledgling opposition movements went underground and became, in the eyes
> of their governments, illegitimate entities engaged in acts of sabotage and
> treason against the state.
>
>
>
> While the politics of authoritarianism and the curtailment of press
> freedoms in the African postcolony can be read bas continuations of
> processes of authoritarianism and censorship that were the hallmarks of the
> colonial state in Africa, it is clear that Africa's nationalist leaders of
> the independence era made a conscious choice to continue these processes. It
> is a cruel paradox of African history that nationalist leaders who fought
> against colonial authoritarianism and for their peoples' right to
> self-determination did little more than appropriate the apparatus and
> instruments of the oppressive colonial state and redeploy them against their
> own people upon gaining independence. Needless to say, the colonial and
> postcolonial politics of exclusion spelled doomed for Africa because it is
> impossible to generate viable socio-economic and political progress when a
> significant pool of the people's intellectual energies are suppressed or
> otherwise excluded from the national fund of ideas. All societies that have
> been able to register significant progress have done so by encouraging, or
> at least tolerating intellectual diversity, a free marketplace of ideas,
> from which those responsible for steering the affairs of state can pick and
> choose to propel the engine of national growth. Guinea's Sekou Toure would
> have none of that kind of diversity; hence the mess that Guinea, one of the
> potentially wealthiest nations in the world, finds itself in today.
>
>
>
> Sekou Toure was perhaps the most vehement exponent of the single-party
> system in Africa. Alone among the nationalist leaders of French West Africa,
> Toure voted No to De Gaulle's referendum of 1958 for a Franco-African
> Community in which French colonies would enjoy limited self-government,
> opting instead to go it alone. He proceeded to assume grandiose titles such
> as "Supreme Guide of the Revolution", "The Terror of International
> Imperialism, Colonialism and Neo-Colonialism", "The Doctor of Revolutionary
> Sciences" and "The Great Son of Africa" and plunged with remarkable gusto
> into the habit of condemning colonialism, neo-colonialism and those he
> considered agents and puppets of imperialism. Claiming that the leader was
> the ultimate symbol and representative of the culture of newly decolonized
> peoples, Toure declared at the Second Congress of Negro Writers in Rome,
> March 26, 1959, that "decolonization does not consist merely in liberating
> oneself from the presence of the colonizers: it must necessarily be
> completed by total liberation from the spirit of the colonized . . . from
> the evil consequences - moral, intellectual and cultural - of the colonial
> system" (Langley, 1979: 603). Ironically, he failed to see that the very
> nation-state system within which he worked was a creation of colonialism.
>
>
>
> Totally convinced that he had the best ideas for the progress of the
> Guinean revolution, Toure attempted to create a single people with a single
> thought process and identical aspirations among a diverse population. He
> declared that the capacities of thinkers, artists, intellectuals or
> researchers "have no values unless they really concur with the life of the
> people, unless they are integrated in fundamental manner with the action,
> thought and aspirations of the populations" (Langley, 1979: 610). For Toure,
> intellectual decolonization required "a reintegration in the social
> background, a return to Africa by the daily practice of African life, so as
> to readapt oneself to its basic values, its proper activities, its special
> mentality" (ibid.).
>
>
>
> Toure's assumption that there was an "African life", "basic values",
> "proper activities", and "special mentality" constituted a meaningless
> generalization that could be understood only within the context of a
> dictator's desire to muzzle all forms of dissent and maintain the
> unquestioned supremacy of his party and its policies. In the name of
> authenticity and the call for authentic action, Toure systematically
> excluded and silenced all who would not subscribe to his ideas. He tried to
> impose an arbitrary commonality on a human society that was, like all human
> societies, intellectually and morally diverse and given to disagreement and
> dissent.
>
>
>
> While dismissing diversity as divisive, Toure waged a relentless war
> against the notion of individuality. For him, individuality was a corrupt
> western cultural artifact that had no place in the new politics of national
> purification and healing. Everything associated with western notions of
> independent thought divorced from collective aspirations as represented by
> his government was a disease to be purged from the Guinean body politic. In
> a speech to the congress of his party, the* Parti Democratique de Guinea*(PDG) on September 14, 1959, Toure vehemently argued that the problem of the
> individual was not a concern of Guinea at that moment. "If the problem of
> the individual is a central concern in other continents - in countries that
> are free and independent - the first and only true problem for the colonial
> peoples is that of the attainment of independence" (Sigmund, 1972: 226).
> Political unity, he insisted, can only be "maintained and developed to serve
> the national interest if it involves unity of action on the part of the
> whole population" (ibid.: 229). Individual wills must be sacrificed on the
> altar of the common will as defined by the PDG. "Our desires for progress
> will be fruitless if individual wills are not identical and do not aim at
> attaining the same objectives . . . At all times, the party must be
> extremely vigilant, intransigent and severe, in order to force the unitary
> and dynamic character of its policy into the awareness and action of every
> citizen . . ." (ibid.: 237). Apparently, Toure did not realize that trying
> to make individual wills identical is in itself a contradiction in terms. He
> seemed oblivious of the fact that a difference of individual wills does not
> necessarily translate into mutually exclusive desires or interests.
>
>
>
> For Toure, deviating from what *he* saw as* the* national struggle was
> unforgivable. If you must speak politics in Guinea, you must speak politics
> according to the PDG. For him, laws, decrees and similar legal instruments
> of governance had to play second fiddle to what, in his mind, constituted
> historic traditions, customs and the necessity for the maintenance of
> society. It is the party that is the supreme organ of state and every
> Guinean must submit his or her individual will and preferences to those of
> the party. "Everyone, as a matter of principle," he declared, "must serve
> the party, and no one must serve himself" (ibid.:233).
>
>
>
> To rebuff claims that his regime was a dictatorship, Toure argued that all
> governments were by nature dictatorships. Dictatorship, he claimed, "is the
> concentration of powers exercised by a man or group of men over the whole .
> . . If the dictatorship exercised by the governmental apparatus emanates
> directly from the whole of the people, this dictatorship is popular in
> nature and the state is a democratic state - democracy being the exercise of
> national sovereignty by the people" (ibid.: 234). It was in this sense that
> Sekou Toure espoused his anachronistic concept of "democratic dictatorship"
> whose three major principles he listed as follows: "(1) All leaders of the
> party are directly elected, democratically, by the party workers, who have
> complete freedom of conscience and expression within the party. (2) The
> concerns of the state of Guinea are the concerns of all the citizens of
> Guinea. The program of the party is discussed democratically. As long as a
> decision has not been taken, each one is free to say what he thinks or
> wishes. But when - after a long discussion in Congress or Assembly - the
> decisions have been taken by a unanimous vote or by a majority, the workers
> and the leaders are required to apply them faithfully. (3) There is no
> sharing of the responsibility of the leaders - only of the responsibility
> for a decision. Thus, discipline will not be undermined" (ibid.: 238)."
>
>
>
> Toure's pronouncements reveal a number of contradictions. While he
> condemned individual wills and freedoms, and would have the individual
> drowned in the sea of the general, and while he assumed a position of
> infallibility and acted as if he were infallible, Toure made remarks that
> ran counter to the grain of his usual demeanor.  For instance, in his 1959
> Rome speech, Toure declared that "the right of existence extends to
> presence, conception, expression and action. Any amputation of this
> fundamental right must be set down as a debit to mankind's account" (ibid:
> 615). Later, in his speech to the PDG, he admitted that "there is no action
> without mistakes. Only a party that carries on no activity can avoid
> mistakes" (Sigmund, p. 231). Yet, how could the PDG realize its mistakes if
> it made no allowance for independent thought or criticism? Or if it insisted
> that it knew what was best for the people? Even more ironic was Toure's
> declaration, in his exposition on the concept of democratic dictatorship,
> that "a first requirement for democracy is liberty . . . Without effective
> liberty, there is no possibility for men or societies to determine
> themselves freely . . ." (ibid: 235). How Toure could reconcile his concept
> of democratic dictatorship and the supremacy of the PDG with the type of
> liberty he espoused beats the imagination. Suffice it to say that in
> reality, no such liberty was possible in Guinea.
>
>
>
> Toure was eventually to go down the annals of history as one of the most
> ruthless dictators of modern Africa. As Martin Meredith (2005) puts it,
> having imposed a dictatorship and assumed a position of infallibility and
> omnipotence, Sekou Toure was condemned to live in a world of conspiracies,
> real and imagined. Paranoia born of despotism led him into a constant tirade
> against both real and imagined imperialism, neocolonialism and "fifth
> column" elements out to kill him or destroy Guinea. Indeed, his voice could
> daily be heard over Radio Conakry railing against perceived enemies of the
> revolution and shouting down imperialism and neocolonialism. Toure, Meredith
> recounts, "used plots as a pretext for liquidating his opponents, whether
> there was evidence against them or not . . . His regime became notorious for
> show trials, public executions, arbitrary imprisonment and the use of
> torture . . . More than fifty ministers were shot or hanged, or died in
> detention, or served prison sentences" (Meredith, 2005: 271).
>
>
>
> Among Toure's many victims was the distinguished Guinean scholar and
> diplomat, Diallo Telli, the first Secretary General of the Organization of
> African Unity. Meredith reports that "Telli was imprisoned, tortured and
> then subjected to *la diete noire*, a drawn-out form of execution which
> consisted of depriving a prisoner of food and water until he died" (ibid:
> 272). Toure's conspiracy theories started barely two years after
> independence. In 1960, an alleged conspiracy by French and Guinean nationals
> led to the death from torture of several people. In 1961, a teachers' demand
> for pay was described as a plot to sabotage the PDG government and led to
> the expulsion of the Soviet ambassador. In 1965, some traders were condemned
> to death for forming a party and nominating a candidate to oppose Toure. In
> 1970, Toure carried out a massive purge in the process of which about
> fifty-eight people were publicly hanged for allegedly conspiring with the
> Portuguese government to assassinate him. Medical doctors, soccer players,
> villagers and market women all suffered from the despotic policies of Sekou
> Toure.
>
>
>
> Contrary to widespread expectations that Toure would die of an assassin's
> bullet, Guinea's democratic dictator died in an American hospital undergoing
> heart surgery in 1984. The military scrambled for power with General Lansana
> Conteh coming out the victor. Until he reluctantly succumbed to the cold
> hand of death a few days ago, General Conteh hung tenaciously on to power
> while Guinea groaned under a weight of poverty and backwardness much worse
> than what prevailed at independence and during Toure's reign of terror.
>
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