Thanx Buharry for sharing. I had this report laying in my library for 5 months now and I never could bring myself to read it for its length. However, with my newfound audio transcription (inspired by you) I was able to read this copy quickly. It brings a pre-independence perspective to Seku Toure' and perhaps some of what shaped his early leadership. But for his latter extremes, he was inspirational. The report is chock full of actionable information I might add. Thanx again for sharing. I got a question for you: Can you only send us reams of information or can you share shorter but equally virulent notes with us? You're too good men.
Haruna.
> Date: Tue, 30 Dec 2008 01:15:55 +0100
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: fwd: Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa)
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
> Top Down or Bottom Up? Nationalist Mobilization Reconsidered, with
> Special Reference to Guinea (French West Africa)
> ELIZABETH SCHMIDT
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> In September 1958, the people of Guinea voted for immediate
> independence from France, overwhelmingly rejecting a constitution that
> would have granted the territory junior partnership in a French-
> dominated community. Throughout the vast French empire, Guinea, with a
> population of only 2.5 million people, was the only territory to vote
> "No" to the proposition offered by Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle.1
> The referendum's outcome was a major victory for the Guinean branch of
> the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), a political party with
> affiliates in the fourteen territories of French West Africa, French
> Equatorial Africa, and the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon.
> While every other RDA branch had fallen into line behind de Gaulle, the
> Guinean RDA, under the leadership of a charismatic young trade unionist
> named Sékou Touré, had spearheaded the drive for complete and immediate
> independence. 1
> The decision to oppose the constitution was made two weeks before
> the ref- erendum, at a territorial conference attended by some 680
> party militants from RDA subsections, neighborhood committees, and
> village committees from across Guinea.2 Although Sékou Touré
> articulated the party's position, he did not determine it. The final
> decision was made by the delegates attending the conference, who voted
> solidly against de Gaulle's proposition. Sékou Touré's endorsement of
> the "No" vote was, in fact, the result of massive pressure from the
> grassroots.3 2
> While the RDA position was elaborated and its victory lauded in
> La Liberté, the party newspaper read by Western-educated elites,4
> nonliterate women celebrated their triumph in songs they had created
> for the occasion. Guinean scholar Idiatou Camara recorded one such song
> during interviews conducted in 1976?1977:
>
>
>
> Guinea says "No"
> De Gaulle says "Yes"
> One must vote "No"
> Comrade Sékou Touré, one must choose the "No"
> Yes, one must choose the "No," Sékou Touré
> In any case, we have voted "No."5 3
> One month before the referendum, Prime Minister de Gaulle had
> traveled to Guinea in a futile attempt to sway the vote. At the
> airport, he was welcomed by Sékou Touré, president of Guinea's recently
> established local government, who was attired in the flowing white
> uniform of the RDA. Hundreds of party militants, dressed in handmade
> uniforms of cheap white percale, lined the road for fifteen kilometers,
> from the airport to the city center. As the motorcade approached, they
> cried, "Syli! Syli!" ["Elephant! Elephant!"]?the symbol of the RDA, and
> by extension of Sékou Touré personally. Partisans waved homemade
> posters emblazoned with elephants and plastered them on buildings
> throughout the capital. As the women danced, accompanied by traditional
> tam-tams, balafons, and coras, the crowd sang, "The elephant has
> entered the city!"6 In his memoirs, de Gaulle recalled: "from the
> airport to the center of the town the crowd [was] evenly distributed in
> well-drilled battalions along both sides of the road ... The women were
> lined up in front in their hundreds, each group wearing dresses of the
> same cut and color, and all, as the procession passed by, jumping,
> dancing and singing to order."7 Later that day, Sékou Touré officially
> received the French prime minister and addressed the Territorial
> Assembly, providing colonial authorities with an advance copy of his
> roneotyped speech.8 4
> This confluence of popular and elite nationalism was
> characteristic of the Guinean RDA, a broad-based ethnic, class, and
> gender alliance that incorporated Muslims, Christians, and
> practitioners of indigenous religions. The movement embraced Guinean
> speakers of Maninka, Susu, Pulaar, Kissi, Kpelle, and Loma, as well as
> those who spoke languages indigenous to other French African
> territories. As the RDA struggled to build an independent nation from
> this heterogeneous base, its message, conveyed by both masses and
> elites, was simultaneously anticolonial and nationalist. 5
>
>
> Although Guinea was alone in its embrace of independence in 1958,
> it was not unique. In the post?World War II era, nationalist movements
> burgeoned across the African and Asian continents, resisting
> imperialism of diverse origins. Other African territories followed
> Guinea's lead, and by 1960, most French "possessions" had regained
> their sovereignty. The Guinean RDA was thus one among scores of African
> and Asian movements that waged successful struggles for national
> independence in the postwar period. So, why study the Guinean
> nationalist movement, and why study it now? Decades after the fact, the
> Guinean case warrants scholarly consideration for the important lessons
> it can teach us about anticolonial nationalism in the non-Western world?
> lessons with enduring relevance. What we learn from the Guinean case
> will help to push nationalist historiography in new directions. 6
>
> The study of African and Asian nationalism is not new. In recent
> years, however, there have been significant shifts in scholarly
> approach. The wave of anticolonial nationalism that swept Africa and
> Asia after World War II sparked new interest in what previously had
> been considered a uniquely European phenomenon. Many of the first
> studies approached nationalism from the perspective of intellectual
> history. Exploring the interaction of indigenous and Western ideas,
> early scholars of Asian nationalism generally focused on religious and
> secular intellectuals and political elites.9 Although the history of
> ideas remains a forceful current in the field,10 recent studies have
> paid greater attention to popular mobilization and the importance of
> peasant and worker movements. While many of these works note that
> nationalist leaders focused on local grievances and manipulated
> indigenous symbols and traditions to appeal to mass audiences, most
> perpetuate the top-down perspective of their predecessors.11 According
> to this view, the masses were but recipients of the nationalist
> message. They were mobilized by the elites; they were not a mobilizing
> force. 7
>
> While a number of recent studies make reference to the generation
> of mass appeal, only a handful scrutinize the actual mechanisms of
> popular mobilization. Gail Minault and Sandria Freitag examine the ways
> in which Indian Muslim leaders used religious and cultural symbols and
> events to unite a heterogeneous Muslim population, mobilizing the
> literate classes through the vernacular press, leaflets, pamphlets, and
> poetry, and the nonliterate masses through speeches, slogans, songs,
> religious processions, and demonstrations.12 Peter van der Veer has
> made similar claims for mobilization among Indian Hindus as well as
> Muslims, while James Gelvin has investigated these issues in Syria, and
> Nels Johnson and Ted Swedenburg in Palestine.13 Some of the most
> insightful work in this area has focused not on anticolonial
> nationalism, but on internal cultural resurgence in multiethnic,
> postcolonial nation-states. Pamela Price, for instance, argues in her
> investigation of Tamil nationalism in India that the Federation for the
> Progress of Dravidians "developed a new cosmology, a vision of a new
> society and polity, which was deeply immersed in Tamil images and
> themes." Its appeal resonated more strongly among the Tamil population
> "than the more secular, pan-Indian message of Nehru or the ascetic
> image of Gandhi."14 8
>
> While the majority of recent studies continue to treat
> nationalist mobilization as a one-way street, there are striking
> exceptions to this trend. Israel Gershoni points out that most works
> that focus on the dissemination of nationalist ideas from elites to
> women and "subaltern socioeconomic strata such as the lower middle
> classes, the working classes, and various levels of the peasantry" tell
> us very little about the receptivity of these groups to nationalist
> ideas. We remain ignorant of "the modes in which women, the poor, and
> the illiterate?constituting the overwhelming majority of the societies
> in question?reacted to the radicalized upper middle stratum's struggle
> against the Westernized `ancien régime.'" Gershoni argues that future
> studies "must encompass the strains of nationalism from below
> percolating upward as a supplement to the research on [educated urban
> elite]-driven nationalism trickling downward."15 9
>
> The nationalist historiography of Africa, like that of Asia, has
> changed dramatically in recent years. Since the early 1950s, scholars
> of Africa have investigated nationalist movements and nation-building
> endeavors that were both heir to the European revolutionary and liberal
> traditions of 1789 and 1848 and the product of indigenous grassroots
> movements.16 The earliest studies emphasized the leadership role of
> Western-educated elites who organized political movements grounded in
> Western concepts of democracy and national self-determination. To be
> successful, these movements had to be able to generate mass support,
> which they did by mobilizing around preexisting grievances and
> promising to resolve them through the attainment of national
> independence.17 While acknowledging the critical nature of mass
> involvement, pioneers in this field, like their counterparts in Asia,
> generally focused on the political leadership.18 10
>
> In the late 1960s, as social history gained prominence in the
> discipline, scholars of African nationalism began to shift their focus
> to "the role of ordinary ... Africans." John Lonsdale, an eminent
> member of this group, argued that "scholarly preoccupation with élites
> will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism."19 He
> claimed that "the pressures of the peasantry at the periphery were at
> least as important in breaking down the colonial governments' morale as
> the demands of the élite at the centre."20 In the post?World War II
> era, increased government intrusion into the lives of ordinary Africans
> "resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated
> rather than instigated by the educated élite." According to Lonsdale,
> it was the grassroots that "provided much of [the nationalist
> movement's] dynamism and direction."21 11
>
> It was left for later generations to show how "ordinary Africans"
> accomplished this spectacular feat. In her pathbreaking work on
> nationalism in colonial Tanzania, Susan Geiger focused on the role of
> nonliterate women. She argued that these women did not "learn
> nationalism" from the Western-educated male elites who dominated party
> politics. Instead, women without formal education brought to the party
> "an ethos of nationalism already present as trans-ethnic, trans-tribal
> social and cultural identity. This ethos was expressed collectively in
> their dance and other organizations, and reflected in their families of
> origin as well as in marriages that frequently crossed ethnic
> divisions."22 Such women were "a major force in constructing,
> embodying, and performing Tanzanian nationalism."23 Thus, Tanzanian
> women were a driving force behind a movement in which African and
> European ideas interacted to form a new synthesis, one that was
> uniquely suited to the African context. Geiger's work on Tanzanian
> women inspires similar questions about the role of other grassroots
> actors. What part did military veterans, urban workers, and rural
> agriculturalists play in shaping nationalist movements from the bottom
> up? 12
>
> The importance of mass mobilization to the Guinean nationalist
> endeavor has been noted by several scholars. However, few have examined
> the popular aspects of the movement in detail. Ruth Schachter
> Morgenthau, Jean Suret-Canale, Claude Rivière, Victor Du Bois, and L.
> Gray Cowan have commented on the popular foundations of the Guinean
> RDA, but their primary focus has been on colonial reforms, electoral
> politics, and male party leaders. Their works do not explore the
> mechanisms by which people were mobilized or the ways in which the rank
> and file influenced party methods and programs.24 Guinean historian
> Sidiki Kobélé Kéïta has written the most comprehensive, if largely
> uncritical, account of the Guinean nationalist movement. His two-volume
> study devotes considerable attention to elite electoral politics, and
> some to the movement's popular roots. However, the specific tactics of
> mass mobilization are not scrutinized. The central role of women is
> mentioned, but the dynamics of their participation are not explored in
> depth. 25 Although some other works remark upon the crucial nature of
> women's involvement, few offer an analysis of women's motivations,
> methods, and visions of a transformed society or discuss their role in
> shaping the nationalist movement and defining the terms of the debate.
> 26 A notable exception is Idiatou Camara's unpublished undergraduate
> thesis, which demonstrates the ways in which urban women helped to
> construct Guinea's nationalist movement and were critical to its
> success. Unfortunately, this unique work, preserved in Guinea's
> national archives, is available only in that country.27 13
>
> If the focus on popular mobilization is one trend in recent
> nationalist scholarship, criticism of the negative qualities of
> nationalism is another. In the 1950s and 1960s, nationalism in Africa
> and Asia was associated positively with anticolonialism and popular
> liberation.28 A generation later, however, following the disintegration
> of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, and internal
> struggles in a number of African and Asian countries, nationalism
> acquired a highly negative connotation. Ethnic chauvinism and
> ethnically motivated atrocities overwhelmed the positive
> characteristics associated with earlier nationalist movements.
> Increasingly, nationalism was deemed a negative force, promoting
> ethnic, linguistic, and religious homogeneity, brutally excluding?or
> eliminating?those considered outsiders.29 These illiberal,
> counterrevolutionary forces had much in common with the right-wing
> nationalisms of Europe in the "Age of Empire" (1880?1914), when, in the
> words of E. J. Hobsbawm, "ethnicity and language became the central ...
> or even the only criteria of potential nationhood." In the case of
> Europe, and later Africa and Asia, "a concept associated with
> liberalism and the left [mutated] into a chauvinist, imperialist and
> xenophobic movement of the right, or more precisely, the radical right."
> 30 In Guinea, the RDA was forced to confront these narrow, ethnically
> exclusive tendencies, both within its own ranks and in those of the
> ethnic associations promoted by the colonial government and its African
> supporters. 14
>
> Nationalism thus remains a hotly debated topic with undeniable
> relevance to the contemporary world. We revisit the case of Guinea, a
> small West African nation that won its independence from France in
> 1958, because its local lessons enhance our understanding of global
> trends. While earlier studies have reevaluated particular aspects of
> the African nationalist experience, none has attempted to integrate
> these parts into a fully reconceptualized whole. Building upon these
> works, this article elaborates a new framework in which to consider the
> nationalist movement of postwar Guinea. It raises theoretical and
> methodological issues that fundamentally alter the way in which we
> understand anticolonial nationalism in the non-Western world. 15
>
> An examination of the Guinean case leads to three theoretical
> conclusions. First, anticolonial nationalism, in many instances,
> embraces heterogeneous populations that are ethnically and religiously
> diverse. As such, it belongs to a progressive political tradition that
> one might call "inclusive nationalism."31 Second, while anticolonial
> nationalist movements have been led by educated elites, often inspired
> by European ideals, elites did not instigate the anticolonial protests.
> Rather, they built their base among popular groups already engaged in
> struggle against the colonial state. They identified issues around
> which the masses were already mobilizing and incorporated them into the
> nationalist agenda. These agendas were successful largely because they
> were deeply rooted in mass concerns, rather than imposed from above or
> outside. Third, conceptualizing the nation was a two-way street. Masses
> as well as elites had an impact on the ideas, objectives, strategies,
> and methods of the nationalist leaders. While elites brought European
> ideas and models of nationalism to the table, the nonliterate majority
> brought others that were embedded in indigenous histories, practices,
> and beliefs.32 16
>
> Finally, an assessment of the Guinean case leads to an important
> observation about mobilizing methods. It shows us how people were
> mobilized?the mechanisms and processes by which mass mobilization
> occurred. While some indigenous cultural practices and images were co-
> opted by elites and presented to the populace, the people themselves
> brought others to the movement. Again, we see that the masses were not
> simply an "audience" for elite-inspired nationalism, nor the
> "transmitters" of a message formulated for them.33 The songs and
> slogans employed by nonliterate people to communicate the nationalist
> message were not composed by party leaders on their behalf. Rather,
> people without formal education created these devices to communicate
> among themselves, to transmit their own messages to the elites, and to
> interpret elite messages in terms meaningful to themselves. 17
>
> The postwar Guinean movement, spearheaded by the RDA, was not
> only vehemently anticolonial, but also nationalist and inclusive. It
> was the conscious struggle to bridge ethnic, class, and gender
> differences that made the Guinean movement so effective and placed it
> squarely in the progressive political tradition of the European
> revolutionary era (1789?1848).34 Much of the Guinean population shared
> a precolonial history. A large proportion shared a religion. All had
> mutually understood experiences and grievances resulting from French
> colonialism. Together, these formed a common basis that allowed a
> nation to be forged from a multilingual, ethnically heterogeneous
> population. 18
>
> While the movement's leadership was composed of Western-educated
> elites whose views of democracy and national self-determination were
> derived largely from European models, its strength lay in its solid
> support among peasants, workers, veterans, and women. The Guinean
> nationalist movement was successful because it built its base among
> these groups, which were already engaged in anticolonial protest. It
> was their grievances that drove the nationalist agenda and their
> energies that were harnessed in the struggle for national independence.
> 35 19
>
> If grassroots activists shaped Guinea's nationalist agenda, they
> also influenced its form. Indigenous cultural practices were adapted?by
> elites and nonelites alike?to transmit the new nationalist message.
> While print media contributed to the spread of nationalist ideas in
> nineteenth-century Europe, books and newspapers were less significant
> in Guinea, where mass education had yet to be realized. Mobilizing the
> largely nonliterate population required new methods of communication,
> notably songs, symbols, and uniforms. The majority of songs were
> composed by nonliterate women, who sang their nationalist message at
> public water taps, taxi stands, and marketplaces.36 Symbols and
> uniforms also had popular origins that spoke to mass sentiments and
> were integral to grassroots organizing efforts. 20
>
> If nationalist historiography has undergone a major transformation, so,
> too, has the meaning of "the nation." In 1882, the French philosopher
> Ernest Renan contested the nineteenth-century German romantic notion of
> the nation as a primordial, ethnically and culturally bound entity. The
> nation is not based upon race, ethnicity, language, or religion, he
> wrote, but rather on a shared past and a vision of a common future.37
> More than a century later, Miroslav Hroch built upon these ideas,
> arguing that the nation is not an "eternal category, but ... the
> product of a long and complicated process of historical development"
> that cannot be reduced to an ethnicity or language group. Rather, Hroch
> claims, the nation is "a large social group integrated not by one but
> by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships (economic,
> political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical, historical),
> and their subjective reflection in collective consciousness."38
> Similarly, Benedict Anderson describes the nation as "an imagined
> political community" that is sovereign and contained within defined
> territorial boundaries. The community is "imagined" because most of its
> members are strangers to one another, yet they consider themselves
> bound together in emotional solidarity as well as in a sovereign
> political entity.39 21
>
> According to these definitions of "the nation," broader and more
> nuanced than some that had previously prevailed, Guinea in the postwar
> period was unquestionably a nation-in-the-making. More than any other
> Guinean party, the RDA consciously and successfully shaped a national
> rather than an ethnic identity.40 Although characterized by its
> opponents as a party of Malinke and Susu with strong anti-Peul
> undercurrents, the Guinean RDA prided itself on its multiethnic
> membership and its particular appeal to the lower classes of all ethnic
> groups. The party's allure for Néné Diallo is a case in point. A low-
> status cloth-dyer, Diallo was among the first Peul women to join the
> RDA. "The RDA welcomed everyone," she claimed. "It treated everyone
> like family. It did not discriminate against the downtrodden or the
> poor." While many of her family members joined opposing parties such as
> the Bloc Africain de Guinée and Démocratie Socialiste de Guinée, both
> of which were led by Peul notables, Diallo was adamant in her support
> for the RDA. Likening members of her ethnic group to family, Diallo
> contended,
>
> It all depended upon who helped me. The other ones did nothing for me
> ... Diawadou [leader of the Bloc Africain de Guinée] is my kin. Barry
> III [leader of the Démocratie Socialiste de Guinée] is my kin ... Even
> if they were my mother, I would not support them ... Sékou worked for
> us. Allah and his Envoy are my witness. He told us he had no material
> things to offer, but he stood up for us and respected us. That is why
> we followed him ... Although Sékou did not give us anything, he cared
> for us.41 22
>
> To build an inclusive nation, the Guinean RDA, under the
> leadership of Western-educated elites, constructed a broad ethnic,
> class, and gender alliance that was heir to a long European, and
> particularly French, tradition. With its emphasis on individual rights
> and liberties and government by the governed, it was, in part, a
> product of the European Enlightenment. As a mass movement for "the self-
> determination of peoples," popular sovereignty, and citizenship, led by
> an aspiring intellectual elite against an oppressive, hierarchical
> state, it was also an outgrowth of the French Revolution and influenced
> by subsequent European nationalist movements.42 Rather than rejecting
> the modern nation-state as an alien institution imposed on African
> society by colonial rule, nationalist leaders charged that the state
> had failed because its work was incomplete. The colonial state was, in
> Partha Chatterjee's words, "restricting and even violating the true
> principles of modern government" by denying inalienable rights to
> colonized peoples.43 23
>
> The presence of European ideas in African political thought was a
> product of French colonialism?the unintended outcome of French
> assimilationist policies. When Guinea was colonized in 1891, the
> colonial administration, along with its missionary assistants, embarked
> upon a self-described "civilizing mission" with the goal of
> transforming an elite corps of Africans into "Black Frenchmen." This
> small group of assimilated Africans, or évolués, would serve as
> intermediaries between the government and the populace and work in
> European-owned enterprises. With a strong emphasis on "practical"
> education, especially in the poorly funded, lower-echelon rural
> schools, the African curriculum was designed to be devoid of subjects
> that might develop thought and hone analytical skills. However, some
> European ideas infiltrated the curriculum, as colonial educators
> denigrated African cultures, deplored African customs, and ignored
> African history?in favor of that which was French.44 24
>
> While many évolués embraced French civilization, some of the most
> assimilated challenged French cultural hegemony with their own. As
> schoolchildren, they had been prohibited from speaking their own
> languages and denied the opportunity to explore their own pasts. The
> most successful among them were rewarded with higher education abroad.
> On the eve of World War II, an elite group of African and Caribbean
> intellectuals in Paris rebelled against their growing sense of
> rootlessness and alienation. Under the leadership of Léopold Senghor of
> Senegal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique, they launched the Négritude
> movement. While Europeans championed Western civilization as the
> epitome of human achievement, practitiotioners of Négritude pointed to
> the West's legacy of brutality, exploitation, and alienation. In
> contrast, they posited African cultures, which, they claimed, promoted
> peace, harmony, and community.45 Through poetry, essays, novels, and
> plays, these cultural nationalists stressed a common African essence, a
> system of shared values and beliefs that laid the foundations for
> nationalist movements in the political realm.46 25
>
> Although few Guineans achieved the educational qualifications
> necessary to study in France, the ideas of Négritude reached elites in
> Guinea through Senghor's literary and scholarly journal, Présence
> Africaine. Published simultaneously in Dakar and Paris, the journal was
> circulated among Western-educated intellectuals in Guinea.47 While the
> ideas promoted by Senghor and his colleagues certainly influenced some
> Guinean nationalists,48 proponents of class analysis, including Sékou
> Touré and interterritorial RDA leader Gabriel d'Arboussier, rejected
> the racially based theories of Négritude, claiming that they obscured
> the socioeconomic roots of oppression and distracted the masses from
> the class struggle.49 26
>
> On the eve of World War II, Négritude was joined by other
> critiques of colonialism that had germinated on African soil. These,
> too, were influenced by European ideas. Just as African intellectuals
> in France challenged the premises of assimilation, French intellectuals
> in Africa defied the mandate to only partially educate their African
> charges. During the Popular Front government of 1936?1938, a growing
> number of French teachers pushed the boundaries of the African
> curriculum, extolling the republican principles of liberty, equality,
> and fraternity and championing the universal rights of man. Moving onto
> terrain considered dangerous by both previous and subsequent
> governments, they taught the history of the French Revolution along
> with practical skills and the elements of literacy.50 27
>
> The belief in the universal rights of man, as embodied in French
> civilization, was the cornerstone of French assimilationist policies.
> The 1789 "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen" promoted
> radical ideas that bolstered the Guinean nationalist cause. Those
> exposed to the text learned that "Men are born free and remain free and
> equal in rights." In striking contrast to their experience under French
> colonialism, they read that "The aim of all political association is
> the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man,"
> including "liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression."
> While their people were ruled by governmental decree, Guinean students
> learned that "Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen
> has a right to take part personally or through his representative in
> its formation."51 Thus, the rows of African schoolchildren who
> dutifully chanted, "Nos Ancêtres les Gaulois" imbibed revolutionary
> lessons as well.52 Embracing the notion of French universalism, African
> elites incorporated many of its tenets into their nationalist ideology.
> African trade unionists and military veterans, who seized upon French
> claims of universalism to demand equal treatment, were a critical
> component of the Guinean nationalist movement.53 28
> If the Enlightenment and the French Revolution of 1789 laid the
> foundations for European nationalist endeavors, the continent-wide
> revolutions of 1848 resulted in the widespread building of modern
> nation-states based on liberal republican ideals. Struggling against
> the tyranny of monarchs ruling over large multiethnic empires,
> proponents of European nationalism supported their claims for national
> independence by asserting that "no people ought to be exploited and
> ruled by another." While concurring that certain fundamental features
> distinguished one people from another, they contended that those
> differences were not reducible to ethnic or linguistic traits.54
> According to Hobsbawm, "French nationality was French citizenship:
> ethnicity, history, the language or patois spoken at home, were
> irrelevant to the definition of `the nation.'"55 It was assumed that
> small ethnic groups would necessarily be joined into larger,
> economically and politically viable territorial states. It was this
> broad-based, multiethnic nationalism that took root in Guinea a century
> later. In Guinea, as in France, nationality was equated with
> citizenship, rather than ethnicity or language.56 29
>
> The foundations laid by the European Enlightenment and subsequent
> revolutions were built upon by French Communists. Because their
> opposition to imperialism resonated strongly with African
> intellectuals, members of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) had a
> tremendous influence on African elites educated during the 1930s and
> 1940s.57 Since the establishment of the Popular Front government in
> 1936, French Communists had worked in French West and Equatorial Africa
> as teachers, technicians, and military officers. They had taught at the
> prestigious federal school École Normale William Ponty in Senegal, and
> at the upper primary and vocational schools in Conakry and other major
> cities.58 They had helped to establish a number of Groupes d'études
> Communistes (GECs), where African intellectuals studied Marxist-
> Leninist theories and applied them to the political, economic, and
> social conditions of their own territories.59 Leadership and
> organizational training were also provided by the Communist-affiliated
> trade union movement, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT).60
> Numerous RDA stalwarts, including Sékou Touré, emerged from the GEC/CGT
> milieu, which deeply influenced their organizing skills, strategies,
> and ideology.61 They consciously modeled the RDA's structure and
> orientation on those of the PCF.62 It was to French Communists, as much
> as to nineteenth-century nationalists, that the RDA owed the notion of
> a broad-based nationalist alliance forged from a heterogeneous,
> sometimes divided, population. 30
>
> The construction of an inclusive nationalist alliance was the product
> of struggle. Guinea in the 1950s was anything but a homogeneous
> society. It was multilingual and multiethnic and included people of
> diverse religious backgrounds. Despite the nation-building efforts of
> party leaders, the battle to forge an ethnic, class, and gender
> alliance was fraught with tensions and marred by setbacks. Female
> emancipation, regional and ethnic inclusiveness, and the growing role
> of Western-educated elites were heavily contested at the grassroots.
> While RDA leaders remained deeply committed to inclusive nation-
> building, they struggled to convince the swelling grassroots membership
> on this point.63 While tensions sometimes percolated to the surface,
> there existed in Guinea what Karl Deutsch calls a "wide complementarity
> of social communication," which allowed Guineans to "communicate more
> effectively" among themselves than with others who might speak the same
> languages and belong to the same ethnic groups.64 31
>
> The "complementarity of social communication" in Guinea was
> predicated on the territory's shared history. Parts of Guinea had been
> incorporated into multiethnic political, economic, religious, and
> cultural systems long before European conquest. For centuries, Malinke
> trading networks and their associated Muslim communities had connected
> diverse parts of what would become modern Guinea. Jallonke (Susu,
> Limba, Landuma, Baga, Bassari) and Fulbe (Peul and Tukulor) residents
> of the Futa Jallon traded extensively with coastal peoples.65 In the
> eighteenth century, the Fulbe jihads brought the Futa Jallon under
> unified political and religious control.66 In the nineteenth century,
> the politico-religious empires of the Tukulor leader, El-Hadj Umar b.
> Said Tall, and the Malinke leader, Samori Touré, brought together vast
> expanses of territory that included much of modern Guinea and its
> neighbors.67 Many Guineans had, in Hobsbawm's words, "the consciousness
> of ... having belonged to a lasting political entity."68 This legacy of
> political, economic, religious, and cultural interaction linked
> Guineans to one another and to peoples in neighboring territories.69
> 32
>
> Precolonial African political leaders, particularly those who had
> resisted French conquest, were championed by the postwar nationalist
> movement?their subjugation and enslavement of African peoples
> minimized, if not erased from historical memory.70 Samori Touré was
> particularly revered for his seventeen-year conflict with the French,
> which had staved off colonial rule for nearly two decades.71 To
> Guineans during the nationalist period, Samori was promoted not as a
> Malinke leader, but as a common ancestor who belonged to all Guineans.
> 72 33
>
> The Guinean RDA skillfully used the history of resistance to
> colonial conquest to rally people to the leadership of its secretary-
> general, Sékou Touré, a great-grandson of Samori Touré, and to inspire
> renewed resistance to colonial rule.73 Making a veiled reference to
> Samori's enslavement of conquered peoples, the RDA noted, "If Samory
> Touré can make you slaves, Sékou Touré can make you free."74 The party
> also promoted other historic resisters, consciously selecting
> representatives from Guinea's major regions and ethnic groups.75 Among
> the most prominent were rival Peul politico-religious leaders from the
> Futa Jallon, Almamy Bokar Biro Barry of Timbo and Chief Alfa Yaya
> Diallo of Labé; N'Zébéla Togba Pivi, a Loma war chief from the forest
> region; and Cerno Aliou, the Wali of Gumba, a Peul religious leader
> whose egalitarian Islamic movement attracted the lower classes and was
> crushed by the colonial administration.76 34
>
> If a common past was one unifying factor in Guinea, shared
> religion?at least by a substantial majority?was another. Nearly three-
> quarters of the Guinean population was Muslim, while a significant
> minority was Christian.77 Christian missionaries had attracted some
> converts among the Baga (subsequently incorporated into the Susu) in
> the coastal areas. They had had some success in the forest region,
> which, apart from Malinke trading communities, Islam had failed to
> penetrate. However, they had made little headway among devout Muslims
> in Upper Guinea and the Futa Jallon. Other Christians in Guinea
> included civil servants from diverse parts of the French empire, along
> with their descendants. Apart from Muslims and Christians, a minority
> of the population, particularly in the coastal and forest regions,
> continued to practice indigenous religions.78 35
>
> Despite the fact that the colonizers were largely Christian, the
> nationalist movement did not assume an anti-Christian fervor. Rather
> than lashing out at Christian infidels, RDA leaders, like others in
> Africa and Asia, stressed the positive attributes of Islam and their
> compatibility with the nationalist program.79 An article in the Guinean
> RDA newspaper, La Liberté, noted "the total identity of the RDA's
> programme of emancipation with the liberating principles of justice and
> hope in Islam."80 A regular attendee at Friday religious services,
> Sékou Touré frequented a different mosque each week, widely publicizing
> his relationship with Islam. During Friday prayers, worshipers were
> reminded of the commonalities between adherents of Islam and the RDA.
> Prayers such as the following drew parallels between the struggles of
> the two communities:
>
> God is great
> It is hard
> To bring unbelievers
> Into the brotherhood of believers
> But we need the die-hards
> To spur us on.
> Verses from the first chapter of the Qurn (the fatiha) were commonly
> recited at RDA meetings and for workers during highly politicized
> strikes. 81 Islamic practices?including Qurnic readings, the daily
> regimen of prayers, and religious festivals and holy days?provided the
> common symbols, rituals, and collective practices that, in Hobsbawm's
> words, gave "a palpable reality to otherwise imaginary community." 82
> 36
>
> If some of these practices were initiated by RDA leaders, others
> clearly emanated from the grassroots. In a manuscript based largely on
> interviews with female militants, Idiatou Camara notes that at baptisms
> and other gatherings, RDA women recited verses from the fatiha to
> "curse the traitors of the fatherland" and to bind loyalists to the
> party. Whenever a member of a rival party was converted to the RDA, he
> or she ate the "bread of fatiha," over which those assembled had
> intoned Qurnic verses "to express their firm conviction and faith in
> the RDA." 83 37
>
> The close association of Sékou Touré's work with Allah's Will was
> another politico-religious practice of local origin. Grassroots
> activists readily linked the names of Sékou Touré, Allah, and Mohammed.
> Recalling the day she was recruited into the RDA, Aissatou N'Diaye
> reminisced that she and Mafory Bangoura had been called to a meeting
> with Sékou Touré:
>
> Upon our arrival, he asked us to help him mobilize women ... He also
> said that he had nothing material, not money or gold, to offer in
> return. If the women would help him, they would do it for the love of
> Allah, his Envoy, and their cause ... He asked us to do this work in
> the name of Allah and his Prophet, Mohammed.84
> Similarly, police reports describe groups of RDA members crisscrossing
> the capital city, "singing praises to the Blessed of Allah, Sékou
> Touré."85 In one song, women beseeched Allah to bless Sékou Touré,
> "savior of the orphans and the Muslims."86 In another, party members
> proclaimed that both God and his Prophet favored the elephant?the
> emblem of both Sékou Touré and the RDA:
>
>
>
> God wants the elephant
> Muhammad the Prophet wants the elephant
> You went to Paris
> You returned from Paris
> Your face shows
> That even the people of Paris
> Want the elephant.87
> At the funeral of M'Balia Camara, the RDA's first woman martyr, party
> officials were followed by a procession of men, women, and children
> singing RDA songs and chanting verses of the Qurn mingled with the name
> of Sékou Touré. 88 38
>
> If Islam was a binding force, so too were pre-Islamic religious
> practices. Grassroots activists, rather than party leaders, first
> associated indigenous religious beliefs and symbols with the
> nationalist cause. 89 Numerous accounts link the RDA to Bassikolo, a
> spirit represented by a sacred tree in the Conakry neighborhood of
> Tumbo. Revered as the guardian of women and children, Bassikolo was
> believed to grant them wishes, to protect them from illness, and to
> ensure women's fertility. Just as some women read from the Qurn to
> convene RDA and trade union meetings, others began by asking for
> Bassikolo's assistance. They also sought his help during electoral
> campaigns, beseeching him to aid in the party's triumph. 90 After
> sweeping electoral victories in 1956, for instance, the RDA
> neighborhood committee in Tumbo organized a dance in Bassikolo's honor.
> Before a crowd of some two thousand people, speakers thanked the spirit
> for helping the party realize its electoral goals and requested his
> continued assistance in the future. 91 39
>
> According to Fatou Khimely, women who invoked Bassikolo
> customarily assumed male garb and social roles. To call forth the
> spirit for the new political endeavor, women also "wore trousers and
> cursed the enemies of the RDA."92 Women's assumption of male clothing
> and gender roles in times of crisis was rooted in precolonial cultural
> practices. In the forest region, for instance, women historically took
> collective action against men who abused their wives and failed to mend
> their ways. Dressed as male warriors and armed with sharp knives they
> called "penis cutters," women surrounded the offending parties' homes.
> While the women pounded on the buildings with clubs, no man dared to
> show his face.93 This precolonial gender practice, and its extension to
> the political realm under colonial rule, bears a striking resemblance
> to that of Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria, where, Judith Van Allen
> notes, "making war" or "sitting on a man" was women's "ultimate
> sanction."94 40
>
> If many Guineans shared a precolonial history and religious and
> cultural practices, all were bound by the common history of French
> colonialism. Even before Guinea's colonization, Renan recognized that
> "suffering in common unifies more than joy does." He noted that shared
> grievances are the critical constituent of national memories because
> "they impose duties, and require a common effort." In fact, he claimed,
> a nation is "a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of
> the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is
> prepared to make in the future."95 41
>
> Despite Renan's prescient words, French officials failed to
> recognize the uniunifying power of shared suffering under colonialism.
> To the government, "Guinea" was merely an "administrative unit," with
> no natural claim to nation-statehood.96 From the perspective of
> ethnicity, linguistics, and geography, its borders were arbitrary.
> Historically, the logic of its boundaries corresponded with nothing
> more than the extent of imperial conquest and "effective occupation,"
> legitimized by the General Act of the 1884?1885 Berlin Conference.97
> However, Hobsbawm writes, "The unity imposed by conquest and
> administration might ... produce a people that saw itself as a
> `nation.'"98 Such was the case in Guinea. 42
>
> The people of Guinea experienced French colonialism as Guineans?
> not as Malinkes, Susus, or Peuls. They were subjected to taxation,
> forced labor, military conscription, and the arbitrary "justice" of the
> indigénat as Africans, not as members of particular ethnic groups.99 As
> Guineans, they participated in the same political and economic systems,
> within geographic boundaries created by the colonial power. Despite
> their variety in language and ethnicity, they shared symbols, memories,
> and historical experiences that permitted them to communicate more
> effectively with other Guineans than with outsiders. Increasingly
> during the 1950s, this shared experience was reflected in their
> collective consciousness of themselves as Guineans.100 43
>
> The Guinean RDA was by no means the only postwar African movement
> to promote national over regional and ethnic identity and to root
> national identity in shared suffering under colonialism. However, it
> was among the first. Kevin Dunn's observations concerning the
> nationalist ideology of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba are apt for
> the Guinean RDA, which led Guinea to independence nearly two years
> before the Congo achieved its own. Influenced by the anticolonial,
> nationalist, and Pan-African ideas that prevailed at the All-African
> People's Conference convened by Sékou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, and others
> in December 1958, Lumumba emphasized national over ethnic and regional
> identity, accepting "the colonially constructed space of the Congo" as
> the basis of an independent nation-state.101 While his rivals
> "privileged smaller, fragmented spaces bound by ethnicity, language, or
> regional memories, Lumumba tied Congolese identity to the larger
> colonially demarcated space of the Congo." In an effort to create a
> unified identity for people of diverse ethnic origins from all parts of
> the territory, Lumumba "ground[ed] Congolese identity in the collective
> social memories of suffering at the hands of Belgian colonizers."102 In
> Guinea, the RDA had promoted a similar inclusive nationalist
> philosophy. 44
>
> If the shared history of the Guinean people was rooted in the
> precolonial past and strengthened by the common experience of
> colonialism, the identity of Guinea as a nation was still developing in
> the late colonial period. France, like other colonial powers,
> maintained control through policies of divide and rule. Existent social
> cleavages were reinforced, and new ones created, through colonial
> policies. Layers of African intermediaries?government-appointed chiefs,
> colonial soldiers, and police?became the focal point of popular anger,
> diverting attention from the Europeans at the reins of power. It was
> the task of Guinea's nationalist leaders to shift the focus and
> demonstrate common cause.103 45
>
> Although Guinea had the makings of a nation-state, the postwar
> anticolonial movement was not automatically a nationalist one. Rather,
> it was consciously molded as such. Nation-building was a long, arduous
> process that began during the anticolonial struggle and continued after
> political independence. According to John Breuilly, "the nation" was
> not only "a body of citizens claiming independence on the basis of
> universal human rights," it was also "a project, a unity to be
> fashioned out of the fight for independence and in the new era of
> freedom."104 It was the conscious struggle to bridge ethnic, class, and
> gender divisions?and the ultimate success of that endeavor?that made
> the nationalist movement in Guinea so extraordinary. 46
>
> Who were the actors in this remarkable movement of masses and elites?
> Guinea's nationalist leaders, who articulated the broad-based
> progressive nationalism of revolutionary Europe, were the product of
> French assimilation policies, as well as a colonial educational system
> that was limited in both scope and substance. Graduates of programs
> designed to create an elite cadre?rather than a mass?of "Black
> Frenchmen," they belonged to a select, almost exclusively male,
> fraternity. While most went no further than primary school in their
> home regions, those who progressed to more advanced schooling in the
> capital found peers of diverse ethnic origins from across the
> territory. As new friendships were cemented through the new vernacular
> (French), ethnic barriers were weakened and cast aside. These new
> Western-educated elites increasingly thought of themselves as Guinean,
> rather than Malinke, Susu, or Peul.105 47
>
> In postwar Guinea, formal education remained the luxury of a few,
> and that education was rudimentary. There was no schooling beyond lower
> primary (sixth grade) in most parts of the country, and no education
> beyond upper primary (ninth grade) anywhere in the territory. The
> largest administrative districts were equipped with lower primary
> schools (écoles primaires élémentaires), which provided a maximum of
> six years of schooling to those who could afford it. Possession of a
> lower primary school certificate, certificat d'études primaires
> élémentaires (CEP), was sufficient for employment in the cadre
> subalterne, the lowest rung of the French civil service. Another three
> years of education were provided by the upper primary school (école
> primaire supérieure [EPS]) in the capital city. EPS graduates joined
> the middle-level government cadres (cadres moyens or cadres locaux). At
> the end of World War II, Guinea possessed only one upper primary school
> and one vocational school, both in Conakry. In 1945, with a population
> of just over two million, Guinea had only 7,900 pupils in upper and
> lower primary and vocational schools. Of the total, 7,417 were in the
> lower primary grades, and only 606 of these were girls.106 Thus, at the
> end of World War II, the number of Guinean évolués was minuscule?and
> virtually all of them were male. 48
>
> Students seeking education beyond the primary grades had to leave
> Guinea. Each year, a small number of EPS graduates won the right to
> attend one of the highly selective federal schools, which drew the best
> and the brightest from all the territories of French West Africa. The
> most prestigious of the federal schools was the école Normale William
> Ponty, located near Dakar, Senegal.107 Ponty students were trained to
> be teachers, assistant doctors, and assistant pharmacists, and for
> other civil service posts in the cadre commun secondaire. Although they
> constituted the elite among African civil servants, Ponty graduates
> could never rise to the top of the civil service system. Their diplomas
> had no equivalence outside French West Africa. Thus, they could not
> accede to the cadre supérieur, reserved for those with French diplomas.
> 108 With its relatively undeveloped educational system, postwar Guinea
> boasted very few Ponty graduates. In 1948, for instance, only eleven
> new Guinean students were admitted to the school.109 49
>
> Given the paucity of private investment, discrimination by
> European-owned enterprises, and obligations stemming from state-
> subsidized studies, most Western-educated Africans joined the colonial
> bureaucracy. They served in a wide range of civil service positions, as
> teachers, clerks, and accountants; postal, telegraph, and telephone
> workers; and assistant doctors, pharmacists, and veterinarians.110
> Because they were invested in the colonial system?and risked their
> livelihoods if they contested state policies?many civil servants,
> especially those in the highest ranks, joined officially sanctioned
> regional and ethnic parties and supported government directives. Most
> Ponty graduates fell within this category.111 Hence, Morgenthau notes,
> Guinean RDA leaders frequently "accused the Ponty graduates of
> betraying the masses, and called them the valets of the administration."
> 112 50
>
> The relatively privileged position of federal school graduates in
> the colonial system was one reason that they were generally hostile to
> the RDA. Class snobbery was another. Many considered the Guinean RDA
> leader, Sékou Touré, to be beneath them. 113 Sékou Touré had attended
> Qurnic school, lower primary school, and the vocational school in
> Conakry. When he entered the civil service, he became a postal clerk.
> Continuing his studies by correspondence, he ultimately qualified to
> work as an accountant in the Treasury. 114 Despite his comparatively
> advanced level of education, Sékou Touré was derided by his more
> credentialed rivals as an "illiterate," or at most a man with "a sixth-
> grade education." Even among his supporters, there was sometimes a note
> of disdain. A Peul aristocrat, Ponty graduate, and teacher, Bocar Biro
> Barry was unusual in his support for the RDA. 115 When he discussed
> Sékou Touré, however, his assessment was tinged with elitism: "Sékou
> was practically illiterate. He only had the CEP ... [His rivals] said,
> `Sékou, who is that? That's an illiterate. He doesn't know anything.'
> Because, effectively, he was self-taught. You know, as a diploma, he
> only had the certificat d'études [primaires élémentaires]." 116 51
>
> Although some Ponty graduates joined the RDA, most Guinean RDA
> leaders were the product of lower state schools. Equipped with only
> primary school certificates, they staffed the lower echelons of the
> colonial bureaucracy. Accorded a modicum of privilege that
> distinguished them from the nonliterate masses, but not enough to
> render them equal to Frenchmen, this class of intended collaborators
> grew increasingly frustrated by their unequal treatment and inability
> to rise above the lowest ranks of government service.117 Commenting on
> the uncertain loyalty of these lower-level elites, the governor of
> Guinea observed, "The most dubious elements are found among the semi-
> évolués, who sometimes have a fault-finding, duplicitous attitude, and
> who are on the lookout for any occasion to criticize and make demands."
> 118 It was these angry intellectuals who first agitated for a greater
> voice in political affairs and then spearheaded opposition to colonial
> rule. 52
>
> If elites are the first to imagine a nation, they cannot make their
> vision a reality without the support of a mass movement. The
> nationalist program, by its very nature, requires an alliance of
> divergent interests?an "imagined community" of comrades that masks any
> exploitation and inequality within it.119 In Guinea, the RDA's success
> was due to its ability to form a formidable ethnic, class, and gender
> alliance. It was this broad-based alliance that made the Guinean RDA a
> mass movement and permitted it to trump rivals that were constrained by
> their narrow ethnic, regional, and elite male focus. 53
>
> While the nationalist movement in Guinea was led by intellectual
> elites with their own vision of "the nation," it was first and foremost
> a movement of the masses?of peasants, workers, veterans, and women. The
> RDA did not introduce these actors to politics. Rather, during World
> War II and its aftermath, these groups instigated a panoply of
> anticolonial actions. Here I take issue with Breuilly, who contends
> that nationalist leaders generally "forge links with large parts of the
> population hitherto uninvolved in politics," and Tom Nairn, who asserts
> that the emergence of modern nationalism "was tied to the political
> baptism of the lower classes."120 I argue instead that the Guinean RDA
> targeted social groups already engaged in struggle against the colonial
> state: military veterans and urban workers fighting for equality with
> their metropolitan counterparts; male and female peasants burdened by
> the war effort and the demands of government-appointed chiefs; and
> urban women unable to provide for their families during the postwar
> economic crisis. Embracing the particular causes of these social
> groups, the RDA harnessed their energies and enticed them into the
> broader nationalist movement.121 54
>
> Key to the RDA's success was its focus on groups that had already
> mobilized themselves. It forged an unlikely alliance through consistent
> focus on areas of common interest determined by the groups involved:
> forced labor in the rural areas; abuses by government-appointed chiefs;
> racial discrimination in wages, benefits, and social services; and the
> promotion of health, sanitation, and educational programs and
> facilities. While other political parties concentrated on so-called
> "traditional" elites?chiefs, notables, and their allies?the RDA
> consciously focused on the majority of the population, polling their
> grievances and channeling their discontent. 55
>
> In the case of labor, active opposition to state demands began
> during the war, when thousands of forced laborers resisted the
> impositions of the war effort by deserting their workplaces.122 When
> forced labor was officially abolished in April 1946, tens of thousands
> of rural workers vacated their stations en masse. Official records
> reveal an extraordinary picture of labor unrest throughout the
> territory.123 This rural-based labor activity predated the trade union
> organizing that swept the urban areas in the late 1940s and early
> 1950s. While they focused on the urban rather than the rural areas,
> trade unions attempted to harness the popular discontent of workers
> that emanated from the grassroots. The RDA, in turn, built a powerful
> base in the urban working class. 56
>
> Likewise, it was the rural populace, rather than RDA leaders, who
> initiated popular resistance to the colonial chieftaincy. Serving as
> local agents of the colonial administration, canton and village chiefs
> forcibly recruited labor and military conscripts, requisitioned cash
> crops, and exacted onerous taxes from the rural population. They
> frequently abused their powers for personal ends, extorting labor,
> cash, crops, and livestock for their own use. Rural women, who were
> forced to perform much of the chiefs' unpaid labor and frequently were
> subjected to sexual abuse, were among the most vociferous and active
> opponents of the chieftaincy. So, too, were returning military
> veterans. Forcibly conscripted from the rural areas, these men had
> suffered devastating wartime experiences and postwar deprivations.
> Inspired by anti-fascist and anti-Nazi rhetoric, angered by their
> unequal treatment in comparison to their French counterparts, many
> veterans were deeply resentful of colonial authorities?be they European
> or African.124 57
>
> For the most part, colonial chiefs staunchly opposed the RDA,
> which seriously undermined their power base. With significant coercive
> powers at the local level, they were the primary obstacle to RDA
> expansion in the rural areas. Capitalizing on preexisting rural
> sentiment, the RDA helped to articulate grievances against the chiefs
> and coordinate the spontaneous actions of the population. Although it
> was the RDA, within the framework of limited self-government, that
> abolished the institution of the chieftaincy in 1957, it was a decade-
> long popular revolt that made that action possible.125 Had the
> institution survived, the referendum that brought national independence
> in 1958 might well have had a different outcome.126 58
>
> The first Guinean leaders to understand the importance of mass
> politics and the necessity of building a popular base were not the
> Ponty-educated intellectuals. Rather, they were trade union leaders,
> whose lives were closely linked to those of the nonliterate masses. Few
> of these men had advanced beyond lower primary or technical school.
> Even fewer had had opportunities to study outside of Guinea. The most
> prescient of these leaders was Sékou Touré. In 1945, Sékou Touré, then
> a young postal clerk, helped to establish a trade union for African
> postal, telegraph, and telephone workers.127 The following year, he
> organized the Union des Syndicats Confédérés de Guinée, which brought
> together all the Guinean affiliates of the French Communist Party?
> linked CGT. The CGT unions united workers of various ethnicities and
> civil service rankings, as well as previously neglected "auxiliaries,"
> who had no permanent civil service status.128 In 1948, Sékou Touré
> toured the territory, making contact with skilled and unskilled workers
> and Western-educated civil servants. He instigated the establishment of
> CGT branches in most of the major administrative districts.129 By 1952,
> the Guinean CGT boasted some three thousand members in twenty
> affiliated unions.130 59
>
> While the CGT unions included Western-educated civil servants,
> they were dominated numerically by nonliterate workers. It was the deep
> involvement of Sékou Touré with the latter that distinguished him from
> many of his peers. According to Bocar Biro Barry, Sékou Touré "created
> his trade union from the illiterates." He organized domestic servants,
> dock workers, laundrymen, and orderlies. Gradually, he added low-level
> government clerks. The CGT unions, in turn, served as the base for his
> political organizing. According to Barry,
>
> It was in this way that he created his trade union. It was in this way
> that he created his party. He found the elements of his party through
> the trade union?because the party was created from domestic servants,
> dock workers, and orderlies ... He first put himself at the level of
> the lowliest people in order to try to climb ... He was much smarter
> than [his opponents]. He began with nothing. He said, "We are the poor.
> I am with the poor. The teachers, they are bourgeois. The doctors, they
> are bourgeois. They are the big intellectuals. They speak a language
> that you don't understand. I come, we speak in Susu. We speak in
> Maninka. We understand one another." This is how, little by little, he
> won the little man of the streets. He launched his party from his trade
> union.131
> The Guinean RDA, like the CGT, was built from a mass base. Despite
> periodic internal struggles stemming from conflicting interests brought
> together in a single alliance, the party remained united throughout the
> preindependence period. 60
>
> Although the masses were rallied to the nationalist cause by
> intellectual elites, the process was not unidirectional. Masses as well
> as elites conceptualized and mobilized the nation. Nairn is correct in
> his claim that common people were "the ultimate recipients of the new
> message"?and responsible for much of its content.132 Their languages
> had to be spoken, their cultural forms respected, and their grievances
> addressed, or intellectual appeals would fall on deaf ears. Unlike
> rival parties, the Guinean RDA attained its strength by addressing
> preexisting popular grievances and promoting solutions for them. Thus,
> it was local-level actors who determined many of the basic claims on
> the nationalist agenda. 61
>
> Just as the concerns of the African masses influenced the demands
> of the African elites, nationalist thought was transformed on African
> soil. Africans did not simply import European concepts and adopt them
> as their own.133 Like its European counterpart, African nationalism was
> rooted in indigenous "cultural systems" that predated the nationalist
> struggle.134 On both continents, indigenous "cultural and political
> traditions," as well as "memories, myths, symbols and vernacular forms
> of expression," were harnessed to the nationalist agenda.135 Obviously,
> those in Africa differed significantly from those in Europe. 62
>
> African models diverged from European in other ways as well.
> Hobsbawm, Anderson, and Ernest Gellner stress the importance of mass
> education and "print capitalism" to the success of European nationalist
> movements.136 During the "Age of Revolution" (1789?1848), Europe
> experienced a dramatic growth in popular education. Books and
> newspapers increasingly were written in vernacular languages, rather
> than foreign tongues understood by only a tiny minority.137 According
> to Anderson, the widespread availability of printed material?and
> people's ability to read it?"made it possible for rapidly growing
> numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves
> to others, in profoundly new ways." These phenomena generated large
> literate populations who could imagine new kinds of communities, along
> with the technical means to mobilize them.138 63
>
> Critiquing Anderson, Anne McClintock contends that "mass national
> commodity spectacle," rather than print capitalism, has been modern
> nationalism's driving force. Nationalism is "invented and performed"
> through spectacle, she argues. It "takes shape through the visible,
> ritual organization of fetish objects" such as flags, uniforms,
> anthems, and mass rallies?in other words, "the myriad forms of popular
> culture." It is this mass spectacle that creates "a sense of popular,
> collective unity."139 64
>
> McClintock's analysis is particularly apt for the colonized
> world, where print capitalism and mass education were significantly
> less important than in Europe. In the case of Guinea, party tracts and
> newspapers, written exclusively in French, were not widely circulated
> outside the urban areas. Yet the population was predominantly rural-
> based and non-French-speaking. Moreover, the percentage of the
> population that could actually read was minute?and overwhelmingly male.
> Grievances, demands, and calls for popular mobilization, while
> articulated in the party press, had to be carried to the masses through
> other, largely aural and visual, means.140 65
>
> Mass spectacle was a critical feature of Guinean nationalism.
> Party elites and nonliterate militants constructed a vision of national
> unity through enormous rallies and intensive campaigning in the rural
> areas. Party slogans, symbols, uniforms, and, most importantly, song
> were the critical means by which the population communicated the
> anticolonial message and created an imagined political community. The
> party color (white) was sported at large public rallies, which often
> numbered two thousand or more. Speakers appealed to popular sentiment
> through culturally rooted images, anecdotes, and parables.141 In order
> to promote unity between people of diverse socioeconomic and ethnic
> backgrounds, the Guinean RDA adopted a uniform.142 It selected as its
> party symbol Syli, the powerful elephant "who does not forget," the
> mighty king of the beasts.143 The elephant was featured in countless
> songs, and on RDA women's bracelets, necklaces, and wrappers. Posters
> sporting hand-drawn elephants were plastered on walls and waved in
> demononstrations. Ballot designs were also aimed toward the nonliterate
> population, the white RDA ballot emblazoned with an elephant.144 66
>
> While Gellner, Anderson, and Anthony D. Smith imply that it was
> the party elites who devised popular means to appeal to the masses,145
> evidence from Guinea indicates that the nonliterate population created
> as well as received the nationalist message. Local activists inspired
> the party color and produced the uniforms and songs. Former RDA
> militants Léon Maka and Mira Baldé contend that the party color and
> uniform were primarily popular in origin. Maka attributed them to the
> RDA women's leader, Mafory Bangoura?a cloth-dyer and seamstress without
> formal schooling?and to rank-and-file members of the RDA women's
> committees; the role of Sékou Touré's wife was only tertiary.146
> Uniforms brought people together and strengthened their sense of
> collective identity, Maka claimed. How ever, because RDA members were
> generally from the lower classes, they could not afford expensive
> material. "There was no money. Cloth cost a lot," Maka recalled. "RDA
> women?market women?wore inexpensive cloth, while our adversaries wore
> large boubous made from luxury cloth, like silk." Since RDA women could
> not afford silk?or large quantities of any material?Maka observed,
>
> Andrée Touré and Mafory Bangoura made blouses that went just to the
> waist. These were called temuray. They were made out of percale, an
> inexpensive cloth. The wrapper was dyed in the fashion of the country.
> The [women] cloth-dyers did this with indigo. They gathered the indigo
> leaves in the bush and beat them with pestles. It was the women who
> decided that the blouse should be white. When the men saw that the
> women had adopted white, they, too, automatically began to wear it.
> Eventually, it became the national color of the RDA. Everyone wore it
> on public occasions. This was not done by decree from above. No, it was
> the people who decided to do it.
> Mira Baldé concluded, "And white was easy, because it was common.
> Percale was white. It did not cost much. So it was easy for the masses
> to obtain."147 67
>
> Grassroots actors brought ideas, practices, and methods to the
> nationalist movement that dramatically reshaped the whole. As the above
> example illustrates, African women were central to this process. While
> women's formative influence on African nationalist movements has been
> the subject of some scholarly inquiry, these studies have had little
> impact on nationalist theory more generally.148 As McClintock notes,
> "theories of nationalism have tended to ignore gender as a category
> constitutive of nationalism itself."149 And yet nationalisms emerge
> "through social contests that are ... always gendered."150 Proposing a
> feminist theory of nationalism, McClintock advocates "bringing into
> historical visibility women's active cultural and political
> participation in national formations."151 68
>
> Making women's participation visible requires a shift in focus
> from the literate elite to the nonliterate base, where women were the
> preeminent creators and performers of mass national spectacle. As
> Geiger demonstrates for the nationalist movement in colonial Tanzania,
> "women's work" included the creation and performance of nationalism
> through song and dance.152 Similarly, in Guinea, RDA women proudly wore
> their party uniforms as they sang and danced the nationalist message.
> Oral transmission of information was crucial to the success of the RDA,
> which targeted the large mass of Guineans who had little or no formal
> education. As traditional storytellers and singers, women were deemed
> the best sloganeers. They were the practiced creators of ideas, images,
> and phrases that appealed to the nonelite population.153 69
>
> Most significantly, it was nonliterate women who composed the
> songs that spread the nationalist message throughout the territory.154
> "The women composed these songs," claimed Fatou Kéïta, a Susu
> seamstress. "They did it spontaneously. There was not one author. When
> somebody found a song, they sang it. The next person heard it and sang
> it, and so on. It spread like that."155 Néné Diallo, a Peul cloth-dyer,
> agreed: "There were countless songs Day after day, songs were made up.
> Everyone sang songs. We repeated the songs of others as they did ours."
> 156 Fatou Diarra, a former militant of Malinke and Senegalese descent,
> recalled precisely how women mobilized through song:
>
> Women went to the markets every day If there was a new song, all the
> women learned it and sang it in the taxis, teaching one another. When
> there was an event, the leader went to the market with the song to
> teach it to the other women.
> After the 1954 elections, women sang at the markets that the
> colonial authorities had rigged the elections. "You women who go up,
> You women who go down. The other party has stolen our votes, Stolen the
> votes of Syli." All the women sang this song, so by the time they heard
> the election results, they already knew that they had been cheated,
> that the election had been rigged.157 70
>
> The June 1954 National Assembly elections, which pitted Sékou
> Touré against Barry Diawadou, were deemed fraudulent by independent
> outside observers. The official pronouncement of Barry Diawadou as the
> winner fueled public anger against the state.158 The message of
> betrayal?and steadfast adherence to the people's choice?was spread
> through song. Aissatou N'Diaye, an RDA activist of Tukulor-Senegalese
> ancestry, remembered the intense local reaction to the official
> results:
>
> When it was said that Sékou had lost, there was a popular revolt ...
> Sékou was not in Conakry; he was campaigning in the interior ... We
> prepared songs for his return. We gathered at Fanta Camara's to prepare
> the songs. We asked the crowd to make up a song that would be sung ...
> He came at dusk or late afternoon ... By then the song was known to
> everyone in town, even to vagabonds. The song went like this:
>
>
>
> The saboteurs said they were the leaders
> Whereas Mr. Touré said he is not the leader
> But he gets to lead the country
> Look, people, at the RDA
> Look, people, at the RDA
> RDA women, unite
> Laugh with me, Touré
> Laugh with me, Touré.159
> Another song composed for the occasion, which was punctuated by mooing
> cows, derided Barry Diawadou's alleged victory as a fraud effected by
> inflated voter rolls. Vote rigging was deemed particularly notorious in
> the Futa Jallon, the candidate's home and bastion of the Peul
> aristocracy. Swaying and mooing like a cow, N'Diaye demonstrated how
> the people had sung:
>
>
>
> Look, people, at Barry Diawadou
> Look, people, at Barry Diawadou
> The cows have voted for you in the Futa
> "Mbu, mbe," we don't want you.160
> When Sékou Touré arrived in Conakry, a crowd of some 30,000 supporters
> received him, crying, "Syli! Syli!" and singing:
>
>
>
> The elephant has entered the city
> Yes, the elephant has arrived
> The city is full
> Because the elephant has arrived.161
> Women sang and danced all night in front of Sékou Touré's home,
> informing the world that despite the official results, Sékou Touré?the
> mighty elephant?was the people's choice.162 71
>
> With song as their chosen medium, RDA women praised the party,
> ridiculed the opposition, and commented on recent political events. The
> songs' idiom and content provide a window into the popular culture that
> sustained the nationalist movement. Sexually charged lyrics were
> common. Some were meant to shame political laggards, others to mock
> political rivals. Publicly disgracing hesitant or retrograde men, women
> humiliated them through songs that questioned their virility.163 Police
> reports describe RDA women, in groups of a hundred or more, parading
> through the capital city, carrying banners, singing political songs,
> and casting aspersions on Sékou Touré's chief rival, Barry Diawadou.
> Diawadou frequently was derided as being cowardly and uncircumcised?a
> mere boy rather than a real man.164 In one such song, he was accused of
> having fled from the capital city, an RDA stronghold, to the relative
> safety of the interior:
>
>
>
> Barry Diawadou left Conakry
> To go to Upper Guinea
> Because he found
> That Syli is always in the lead
> Barry was slapped like a dog
> The penis of Barry
> Is circumcised this time!165
> Although their political content was new, songs that ridiculed the
> virility of their male targets were in keeping with long-standing
> practices among Susu women. Historically, Susu women had used sexually
> explicit songs and dances to publicly humiliate and sanction men who
> had abused their wives. Party leaders?generally Western-educated male
> elites?were embarrassed by these practices and tried, unsuccessfully,
> to discourage them.166 The popular origin of this critical means of
> communication is thus beyond dispute. 72
>
> The waves of anticolonial protest that swept the African and Asian
> continents in the postwar decade were an amalgamation of elite and
> popular politics. Manifold acts of anticolonial resistance contributed
> to the development of full-fledged movements for national self-
> determination and independence. Many of these movements belonged to the
> progressive political tradition of "inclusive nationalism," in which
> ethnically and religiously diverse peoples were mobilized into a single
> nationalist movement. The product of both European and indigenous
> ideals, the nationalist movements were led by educated elites, but they
> were firmly grounded in the urban and rural populace. Only those
> movements that generated mass support were successful in bringing about
> national independence. Their leaders focused on population groups
> already engaged in anticolonial resistance and mobilized around
> grievances that these groups had previously identified. The momentum
> galvanized by the grassroots was thus directed toward the nationalist
> cause. While the lower classes responded to elite appeals, they also
> brought their own ideas and objectives to the anticolonial struggle.
> They employed strategies and methods that spoke to their concerns and
> images that resonated with their cultures. Thus, nationalist
> mobilization was neither top down nor bottom up. It was, unequivocally,
> both. 73
>
> Guinea's postwar nationalist movement, led by the Rassemblement
> Démocratique Africain, was emblematic of these trends. The Guinean RDA
> strove to build a nation from a population that was ethnically and
> linguistically heterogeneous. Party leaders focused on that which was
> common to the largest number of people: a shared precolonial history,
> religion, and experience of French colonialism. From this common past,
> a future as one nation was imagined, and the struggle to realize it was
> launched. Although they were mobilized by elites into the nationalist
> movement, "ordinary Guineans" were not passive recipients of ideas
> instilled from above. They brought their own ideas and experiences to
> the table, informing the ways in which nationalism was understood. The
> methods of mobilization, like the contents of the message, were
> influenced by the grassroots. Lower classes as well as elites adapted
> indigenous cultural forms for new purposes and made imported ones their
> own. 74
>
> Why revisit the case of Guinea nearly five decades after its
> independence? Because Guinea's postwar nationalist movement provides
> the raw material that allows us to better understand the interaction
> between leaders and the rank and file in imagining and creating a
> nation. It helps us to construct a new theoretical and methodological
> framework for nationalist mobilization throughout the colonized world.
> In this regard, Guinea's significance far outstrips its size. 75
>
>
>
> I would like to thank Mark Peyrot for urging me to write this article,
> and the Research and Sabbatical Committee at Loyola College for
> providing financial support. I am grateful to Timothy Scarnecchia, my
> colleagues in the Loyola College History Department, and anonymous AHR
> reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. Unless otherwise
> indicated, all translations from French language sources are mine, and
> I conducted all interviews, in collaboration with Siba N. Grovogui. I
> transcribed and translated the interviews that were conducted in
> French; those conducted in Susu and Malinke were transcribed and
> translated by Siba N. Grovogui.
>
> Elizabeth Schmidt is Professor of History at Loyola College in
> Maryland. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-
> Madison in 1987. Her books include Mobilizing the Masses: Gender,
> Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939?1958
> (2005); Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of
> Zimbabwe, 1870?1939 (1992); and Decoding Corporate Camouflage: U.S.
> Business Support for Apartheid (1980). Her 1992 book was a finalist for
> the African Studies Association's Herskovits Award and was named an
> Outstanding Academic Book for 1994 by Choice. Schmidt is currently
> working on a book entitled Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946?
> 1958, which examines the decade-long struggle between grassroots
> activists and nationalist leaders for control of the political agenda,
> in the context of Cold War repression. Her research on Guinea has been
> supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social
> Science Research Council, and the Fulbright program.
>
>
> Notes
> 1 Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880?1985 (New York,
> 1988), 148?149; Ruth Schachter Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-
> Speaking West Africa (Oxford, 1964), 400.
>
> 2 Centre des Archives d'Outre-Mer, Archives Nationales (de France)
> (CAOM), Carton 2181, dos. 6, Gouverneur, Guinée Française, Conakry, à
> Ministre, F.O.M., Paris, "Discours Prononcé par le Président Sékou
> Touré, le 14 Septembre 1958," September 15, 1958, #0191/CAB; Carton
> 2181, dos. 6, Gouverneur, Guinée Française, Conakry, à Ministre, F.O.
> M., Paris, "Motion du Parti Démocratique de la Guinée en Date du 14
> Septembre 1958," September 15, 1958, #0191/CAB; Carton 2181, dos. 6,
> Gouverneur, Guinée Française, Conakry, à Ministre, F.O.M., Paris,
> "Nouvelles Locales Reçues de l'A.F.P. en Date du 19 Septembre 1958,"
> September 19, 1958, #2276/CAB; "La Résolution," La Liberté, September
> 23, 1958, 2; Georges Chaffard, Les Carnets Secrets de la
> Décolonisation, 2 vols. (Paris, 1967), 2: 204, 206; Morgenthau,
> Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 219.
>
> 3 Interview with Bocar Biro Barry, Conakry, January 21, 1991. In his
> September 14 address, Sékou Touré made reference to the proindependence
> positions already taken by trade union, student, and youth
> organizations. CAOM, Carton 2181, dos. 6, "Discours Prononcé par le
> Président Sékou Touré, le 14 Septembre 1958." See also "Unanimement le
> 28 Septembre La Guinée Votera NON," La Liberté, September 23, 1958, 1?
> 2. Former university student leader Charles Diané also claims that
> Sékou Touré opted for the "No" vote in the eleventh hour?pushed by the
> student movement. Charles Diané, La F.E.A.N.F. et Les Grandes Heures du
> Mouvement Syndical étudiant Noir (Paris, 1990), 128?129.
>
> 4 See, for instance, "Unanimement le 28 Septembre," 1?2; "Les Résultats
> du Scrutin," La Liberté, October 4, 1958, 5.
>
> 5 Archives de Guinée (AG), AM-1339, Idiatou Camara, "La Contribution de
> la Femme de Guinée à la Lutte de Libération Nationale (1945?1958),"
> Mémoire de Fin d'études Supérieures, IPGAN, Conakry, 1979, 111.
>
> 6 Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 108; Chaffard, Les Carnets
> Secrets, 2: 177, 193?194, 196; Lansiné Kaba, Le "Non" de la Guinée à De
> Gaulle (Paris, 1989), 80?86; Pierre Messmer, Après Tant de Batailles:
> Mémoires (Paris, 1992), 234; Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope:
> Renewal and Endeavor, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York, 1971), 55.
>
> 7 De Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope, 55.
>
> 8 Chaffard, Les Carnets Secrets, 2: 194.
>
> 9 See, for instance, Sylvia G. Haim, ed., Arab Nationalism: An
> Anthology (Berkeley, Calif., 1962); Patrick Seale, The Struggle for
> Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945?1958 (New Haven, Conn.,
> 1965); Ray T. Smith, "The Role of India's `Liberals' in the Nationalist
> Movement, 1925?1947," Asian Survey 8, no. 7 (July 1968): 607?624; David
> G. Marr, Vietnamese Anticolonialism, 1885?1925 (Berkeley, Calif.,
> 1971).
>
> 10 Ayesha Jalal and Anil Seal, "Alternative to Partition: Muslim
> Politics between the Wars," Modern Asian Studies 15, no. 3 (1981): 415?
> 454; Farzana Shaikh, "Muslims and Political Representation in Colonial
> India: The Making of Pakistan," Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (1986):
> 539?557; Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab History and the Nation-State: A
> Study in Modern Arab Historiography, 1820?1980 (New York, 1989);
> Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism?A History: Nation and State in
> the Arab World (Malden, Mass., 2000); David E. F. Henley,
> "Ethnogeographic Integration and Exclusion in Anticolonial Nationalism:
> Indonesia and Indochina," Comparative Studies in Society and History
> 37, no. 2 (April 1995): 286?324; Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: Between
> Islam and the Nation-State, 3rd ed. (New York, 1997); Robert H. Taylor,
> The Idea of Freedom in Asia and Africa (Stanford, Calif., 2002).
>
> 11 Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and
> Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875?1939 (New Delhi,
> 1979); Nasir Islam, "Islam and National Identity: The Case of Pakistan
> and Bangladesh," International Journal of Middle East Studies 13, no. 1
> (February 1981): 55?72; Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate:
> The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920?1945 (Princeton, N.J., 1987);
> Dilip M. Menon, Caste, Nationalism and Communism in South India:
> Malabar, 1900?1948 (Cambridge, 1994); Sanjay Seth, "Rewriting Histories
> of Nationalism: The Politics of `Moderate Nationalism' in India, 1870?
> 1905," AHR 104, no. 1 (February 1999): 95?116; Hanna Batatu, Syria's
> Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their
> Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1999); Taj-ul-Islam Hashmi, "Peasant
> Nationalism and the Politics of Partition: The Class-Communal Symbiosis
> in East Bengal, 1940?1947," in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, eds.,
> Region and Partition: Bengal, Punjab and the Partition of the
> Subcontinent (New York, 1999), 6?41.
>
> 12 See Gail Minault, "Urdu Political Poetry during the Khilafat
> Movement," Modern Asian Studies 8, no. 4 (October 1974): 459?471; Gail
> Minault, "Islam and Mass Politics: The Indian Ulama and the Khilafat
> Movement," in Donald E. Smith, ed., Religion and Political
> Modernization (New Haven, Conn., 1974), 168?182; Gail Minault, The
> Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in
> India (New York, 1982); Sandria B. Freitag, "The Roots of Muslim
> Separatism in South Asia: Personal Practice and Public Structures in
> Kanpur and Bombay," in Edmund Burke, III and Ira M. Lapidus, eds.,
> Islam, Politics, and Social Movements (Berkeley, Calif., 1988), 115?
> 145.
>
> 13 Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in
> India (Berkeley, Calif., 1994); James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties:
> Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire
> (Berkeley, Calif., 1998); Nels Johnson, Islam and the Politics of
> Meaning in Palestinian Nationalism (Boston, 1982); Ted Swedenburg, "The
> Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936?1939)," in
> Burke and Lapidus, Islam, Politics, and Social Movements, 169?203.
>
> 14 Pamela Price, "Revolution and Rank in Tamil Nationalism," Journal of
> Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (May 1996): 365.
> For the use of indigenous cultural and religious symbols and
> practices by resurgent Asante nationalists in independent Ghana, see
> Jean M. Allman, "The Youngmen and the Porcupine: Class, Nationalism and
> Asante's Struggle for Self-Determination, 1954?1957," Journal of
> African History 31, no. 2 (1990): 263?264, 272, 274?277; Jean Marie
> Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent
> Ghana (Madison, Wis., 1993), 6, 9?10, 16?17, 19, 28, 41?46, 49, 62, 65,
> 97, 131, 140, 160, 183?184; Pashington Obeng, "Gendered Nationalism:
> Forms of Masculinity in Modern Asante of Ghana," in Lisa A. Lindsay and
> Stephan F. Miescher, eds., Men and Masculinities in Modern Africa
> (Portsmouth, N.H., 2003), 203?206.
>
>
> 15 Israel Gershoni, "Rethinking the Formation of Arab Nationalism in
> the Middle East, 1920?1945," in James Jankowski and Israel Gershoni,
> eds., Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East (New York, 1997),
> 25.
>
> 16 See, for instance, James S. Coleman, "Nationalism in Tropical
> Africa," American Political Science Review 48, no. 2 (June 1954): 404?
> 426; James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley,
> Calif., 1958); Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (New
> York, 1957); David Apter, Ghana in Transition (Princeton, N.J., 1963);
> Robert I. Rotberg, The Rise of Nationalism in Central Africa: The
> Making of Malawi and Zambia, 1873?1964 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965); Robert
> I. Rotberg, "African Nationalism: Concept or Confusion?" Journal of
> Modern African Studies 4, no. 1 (May 1966): 33?46; Carl G. Rosberg,
> Jr., and John Nottingham, The Myth of "Mau Mau": Nationalism in Kenya
> (Stanford, Calif., 1966); John Lonsdale, "The Emergence of African
> Nations: A Historiographical Analysis," African Affairs 67, no. 266
> (1968): 11?28; J. M. Lonsdale, "Some Origins of Nationalism in East
> Africa," Journal of African History 9, no. 1 (1968): 119?146.
>
> 17 See, for instance, Coleman, "Nationalism in Tropical Africa," 407?
> 408; Lonsdale, "Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa," 119?120,
> 140?141, 146; Lonsdale, "Emergence of African Nations," 11, 25.
>
> 18 Coleman, for instance, maintained that "the student of political
> nationalism is concerned mainly with the attitudes, activities, and
> status of the nationalist-minded Western-educated elite." Coleman,
> "Nationalism in Tropical Africa," 425.
>
> 19 Lonsdale, "Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa," 146.
>
> 20 Lonsdale, "Emergence of African Nations," 25; see also Lonsdale,
> "Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa," 119.
>
> 21 Lonsdale, "Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa," 140?141,
> 146.
>
> 22 Susan Geiger, "Tanganyikan Nationalism as `Women's Work': Life
> Histories, Collective Biography and Changing Historiography," Journal
> of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 468?469.
>
> 23 Susan Geiger, TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of
> Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955?1965 (Portsmouth, N.H., 1997), 14, 66.
>
> 24 See Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa,
> 219?254; Jean Suret-Canale, La République de Guinée (Paris, 1970), 141?
> 146, 159?172; Claude Rivière, Guinea: The Mobilization of a People,
> trans. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), 51?
> 82; Victor D. Du Bois, "Guinea," in James S. Coleman and Carl G.
> Rosberg, Jr., eds., Political Parties and National Integration in
> Tropical Africa (Berkeley, Calif., 1970), 186?215; L. Gray Cowan,
> "Guinea," in Gwendolen M. Carter, ed., African One-Party States
> (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), 149?236. Other well-known works perpetuate the
> top-down approach of earlier scholars. Yves Person, for example,
> conflates the Guinean RDA with the person of Sékou Touré, erroneously
> assuming that the party leader had "autocratic power" in the
> preindependence period and that he imposed his will on the party.
> Sylvain Soriba Camara and 'Ladipo Adamolekun present grand narratives
> of events, once again focusing on governing and party structures,
> policies, and leaders. Yves Person, "French West Africa and
> Decolonization," in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, eds., The
> Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonization, 1940?1960 (New Haven,
> Conn., 1982), 141?172; Sylvain Soriba Camara, La Guinée Sans La France
> (Paris, 1976); 'Ladipo Adamolekun, "The Road to Independence in French
> Tropical Africa," in Timothy K. Welliver, ed., African Nationalism and
> Independence (New York, 1993), 66?79; 'Ladipo Adamolekun, Sékou Touré's
> Guinea: An Experiment in Nation Building (London, 1976).
>
> 25 Sidiki Kobélé Kéïta, Le P.D.G.: Artisan de l'Indépendance Nationale
> en Guinée (1947?1958), 2 vols. (Conakry, 1978). Unfortunately, Kéïta's
> two-volume work has not been circulated widely outside of Guinea.
>
> 26 See, for instance, Margarita Dobert, "Civic and Political
> Participation of Women in French-Speaking West Africa" (Ph.D.
> dissertation, George Washington University, 1970); Claude Rivière, "La
> Promotion de la Femme Guinéenne," Cahiers d'études Africaines 8, no. 31
> (1968): 406?427. Dobert does not focus exclusively on Guinea or the
> postwar nationalist period. Rivière focuses primarily on Guinea's
> postindependence period.
>
> 27 Camara, "Contribution de la Femme."
>
> 28 Studies of Muslim-Hindu violence and the partition of India are
> notable exceptions to this generalization.
>
> 29 See, for instance, Walker Connor, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for
> Understanding (Princeton, N.J., 1993); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and
> Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York, 1994); Michael
> Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
> (New York, 1998).
>
> 30 E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Program, Myth,
> Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1992), 102, 121; E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age
> of Empire, 1875?1914 (New York, 1987), 143, 146; E. J. Hobsbawm, The
> Age of Capital, 1848?1875 (New York, 1975), 84, 89. See also Partha
> Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
> Discourse? (Minneapolis, 1993), 9.
>
> 31 Henley refers to this phenomenon as "integrative," as opposed to
> "inclusive," nationalism, which he contrasts with "exclusive"
> nationalism. See Henley, "Ethnogeographic Integration," 286, 289?290.
>
> 32 These themes are expanded upon in my recent book. See Elizabeth
> Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the
> Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939?1958 (Portsmouth, N.H., 2005).
>
> 33 Geiger, TANU Women, 14.
>
> 34 See E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789?1848
> (London, 1962).
>
> 35 For an in-depth discussion of this subject, see Schmidt, Mobilizing
> the Masses.
>
> 36 For further elaboration, see Elizabeth Schmidt, "`Emancipate Your
> Husbands!' Women and Nationalism in Guinea, 1953?1958," in Jean Allman,
> Susan Geiger, and Nakanyike Musisi, eds., Women in African Colonial
> Histories (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 282?304; Schmidt, Mobilizing the
> Masses, chap. 5.
>
> 37 First delivered as a lecture in 1882, this essay has been published
> in English as Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?" in Geoff Eley and
> Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York, 1996),
> 42?55.
>
> 38 Miroslav Hroch, "From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation:
> The Nation-Building Process in Europe," in Eley and Suny, Becoming
> National, 61; Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival
> in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of
> Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, trans. Ben Fowkes
> (Cambridge, 1985), 4?5. See also Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
> since 1780, 87.
>
> 39 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
> and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York, 1991), 6?7. See also
> Anthony D. Smith, State and Nation in the Third World: The Western
> State and African Nationalism (New York, 1983), 6.
>
> 40 Guinea is a classic example of Breuilly's "idea of the nation as a
> project, a unity to be fashioned out of the fight for independence."
> John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Chicago, 1994), 7.
>
> 41 Interview with Néné Diallo, Conakry, April 11, 1991. When discussing
> party policies or initiatives, informants frequently attributed them
> personally to Sékou Touré, secretary-general of the Guinean branch of
> the RDA.
>
> 42 Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 145; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
> since 1780, 18?19; Thomas Hodgkin, African Political Parties: An
> Introductory Guide (Gloucester, Mass., 1971), 163?164.
>
> 43 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and
> Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J., 1993), 10, 26, 74.
>
> 44 Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900?1945,
> trans. Till Gottheiner (New York, 1971), 383, 391. See Sékou Touré's
> critique of African education under French colonialism: Sékou Touré,
> "Le Leader Politique Considéré Comme le Représentant d'une Culture,"
> Présence Africaine, nos. 24?25 (February?May 1959): 104?115; Sékou
> Touré, "L'élite Africaine Dans Le Combat Politique," Discours
> Enregistré du Président Sékou Touré Adressé aux Membres du Congrès des
> Hommes de Culture Noire, March 26, 1959, in Sékou Touré, L'Action
> Politique du Parti Démocratique de Guinée (Paris, 1959), 161?176.
>
> 45 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New
> York, 2000), 31?78; Sékou Touré, "L'élite Africaine Dans Le Combat
> Politique," 161?176; Eileen Julien, "African Literature," in Phyllis M.
> Martin and Patrick O'Meara, eds., Africa, 3rd ed. (Bloomington, Ind.,
> 1995), 297?298; Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 110, 179;
> Smith, State and Nation in the Third World, 55; Hodgkin, African
> Political Parties, 163.
>
> 46 Sékou Touré, "L'élite Africaine Dans le Combat Politique," 161?176;
> Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 11, 14,
> 137?138, 144?146; Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 110, 179;
> Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 172, 174?176; Smith, State and
> Nation in the Third World, 54?55.
>
> 47 Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS), 2G47/121, Guinée Française,
> Affaires Politiques et Administratives, "Revues Trimestrielles des
> événements, 3ème Trimestre 1947," December 5, 1947, #389 APA; Manning,
> Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 3, 179.
>
> 48 While studying in France in 1952, Fodéba Kéïta established Les
> Ballets Africains, which consciously borrowed dance forms and themes
> from all the Guinean ethnic groups, blending them into a new "Guinean"
> whole. Kéïta was also an accomplished playwright and poet in the
> Négritude tradition. In 1960, Guinean scholar D. T. Niane committed to
> writing the legendary oral epic "Sundiata," which celebrated the
> founding of the thirteenth-century Mali empire. See Muriel Devey, La
> Guinée (Paris, 1997), 290; Aly Gilbert Iffono, Lexique Historique de la
> Guinée-Conakry (Paris, 1992), 98; Morgenthau, Political Parties in
> French-Speaking West Africa, 14, 251; Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan
> Africa, 176; D. T. Niane, Soundjata, ou l'Epopée Mandingue (Paris,
> 1960).
>
> 49 Gabriel d'Arboussier, "Une Dangereuse Mystification de la Théorie de
> la Négritude," La Nouvelle Critique, no. 7 (June 1949): 34?47; Peter S.
> Thompson, "Negritude and a New Africa: An Update," Research in African
> Literatures 33, no. 4 (2002): 143, 146, 148; R. W. Johnson, "Sekou
> Touré and the Guinean Revolution," African Affairs 69, no. 277 (October
> 1970): 351. After independence, Sékou Touré developed his own theories
> of African socialism and the African personality?and continued his
> vehement critique of Négritude. See, for instance, Sékou Touré, "Le
> Leader Politique Considéré Comme le Représentant d'une Culture," 104?
> 115; Sékou Touré, "L'élite Africaine Dans Le Combat Politique," 161?
> 176; Sékou Touré, "The Republic of Guinea," International Affairs 36,
> no. 2 (April 1960): 169; Ahmed Sékou Touré, Revolution, Culture and
> Panafricanism (Conakry, 1978), 11, 13, 71, 97, 175?177, 190?191, 196?
> 204.
>
> 50 Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 380?382, 387,
> 391, 487; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa,
> 14?15, 23, 85; Cowan, "Guinea," 153?154, 157?158. See also Anderson,
> Imagined Communities, 115?116, 140.
>
> 51 "The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789)," in
> John A. Maxwell and James J. Freidberg, eds., Human Rights in Western
> Civilization: 1600 to the Present (Dubuque, Iowa, 1991), 26.
>
> 52 Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 387, 391;
> Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 14; ANS,
> 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Kankan, "Renseignements
> A/S Conférence Publique du R.D.A. du 30 Oct. 1954," November 5, 1954,
> #2894/1119, C/PS.2. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 118, 140?
> 141; Smith, State and Nation in the Third World, 31; Hodgkin,
> Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 170; Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and
> States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of
> Nationalism (Boulder, Colo., 1977), 328?330, 436.
>
> 53 For an in-depth discussion of these issues, see Frederick Cooper,
> Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and
> British Africa (New York, 1996); Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts:
> The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857?1960
> (Portsmouth, N.H., 1991); Nancy Ellen Lawler, Soldiers of Misfortune:
> Ivoirien Tirailleurs of World War II (Athens, Ohio, 1992); Catherine
> Coquery-Vidrovitch, "Nationalité et Citoyenneté en Afrique Occidentale
> Français\[e\]: Originaires et Citoyens dans Le Sénégal Colonial,"
> Journal of African History 42, no. 2 (2001): 285?305; Schmidt,
> Mobilizing the Masses, chaps. 2 and 3.
>
> 54 Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 85.
>
> 55 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 88.
>
> 56 Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 84?86, 88?89; Hobsbawm, Age of Empire,
> 144, 146?147; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 19?20, 33,
> 63, 87?88, 102. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 135.
>
> 57 ANS, 21G13, "état d'Esprit de la Population," December 1?15, 1950;
> Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 233.
>
> 58 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 14?15,
> 85.
>
> 59 Ibid., 23, 25?26; Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 169, 233; Cooper, Decolonization
> and African Society, 159.
>
> 60 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 227.
>
> 61 AG, 2Z27, "Syndicat Professionnel des Agents et Sous-Agents
> Indigènes du Service des Transmissions de la Guinée Française,"
> Conakry, March 18, 1945; Personal Archives of Joseph Montlouis: Letter
> from Joseph Montlouis, Conakry, to Jean Suret-Canale, Conakry, April 5,
> 1983; interviews with Mamadou Bela Doumbouya, Conakry, January 26,
> 1991, and Joseph Montlouis, Conakry, March 3 and 6, 1991; Kéïta, P.D.
> G., 1: 176, 180, 186; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking
> West Africa, 229; Johnson, "Sekou Touré and the Guinean Revolution,"
> 351?353.
>
> 62 ANS, 17G573, "Les Partis Politiques en Guinée, 1er Semestre 1951";
> 17G573, Gendarmerie, A.O.F., "En Guinée Française," September 12, 1951,
> #174/4; 17G573, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Conakry, "Rapport
> de Quinzaine du 1er au 15 Octobre 1951," #1847/1019, C/PS.2; 17G573,
> Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Revue Trimestrielle, 3ème
> Trimestre 1951," November 24, 1951; 17G573, Comité Directeur, P.D.G.,
> "Analyse de la Situation Politique en Afrique Noire et des Méthodes du
> R.D.A. en Vue de Dégager un Programme d'Action," ca. January 14, 1952;
> Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 241?242; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-
> Speaking West Africa, 26, 98; Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa,
> 147.
>
> 63 See Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses, chaps. 5, 6, and 7. For a more
> general discussion of this phenomenon, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and
> Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism
> (Princeton, N.J., 1996), 183?217.
>
> 64 Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry
> into the Foundations of Nationality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1966),
> 97. See also Hroch, "From National Movement to the Fully-Formed
> Nation," 61.
>
> 65 Walter Rodney, "Jihad and Social Revolution in Futa Djalon in the
> Eighteenth Century," Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 4,
> no. 2 (June 1968): 269?274. The Malinke (Mandinka/Mandinga/Mandingo)
> are part of the greater Mande social formation. Their language is
> called Maninka. The Fulbe are sometimes referred to as "Fulani," a
> Hausa term, or "Fula," a Mande term. In Guinea, the Fulbe are divided
> into Tukulor, originally from the Futa Toro (Senegal), and Peul, from
> the Futa Jallon (Guinea). The term "Peul" is a French corruption of the
> word "Pullo" (singular form of "Fulbe"), which is the term used by the
> people to describe themselves. The language of the Fulbe is Fulfulde;
> that of the Peul is Pulaar. The term "Jallonke," or "men of the
> Jallon," refers to the people of a region, rather than an ethnic group.
> The Jallonke trace their roots to several populations. The Susu, part
> of the greater Mande group, settled in the Futa Jallon in the
> thirteenth century. They displaced or absorbed most of the original
> inhabitants, including the Limbas, Landumas, Bagas, and Bassaris. The
> resulting population was referred to collectively as the Jallonke. See
> Andrew F. Clark, From Frontier to Backwater: Economy and Society in the
> Upper Senegal Valley (West Africa), 1850?1920 (Lanham, Md., 1999), 41,
> 44?47; Jacques Richard-Molard, Afrique Occidentale Française (Paris,
> 1952), 93; Rodney, "Jihad and Social Revolution," 270.
>
> 66 Rodney, "Jihad and Social Revolution," 269?284.
>
> 67 Umar Tall's mid-nineteenth-century empire extended eastward from
> French military bases on the lower Senegal River to the ancient city of
> Timbuktu on the Niger River. His capital, Dinguiraye, was in the Futa
> Jallon. Some decades later, Samori Touré built an empire that included
> Upper Guinea and the forest region and extended eastward to modern
> Ghana. See Rodney, "Jihad and Social Revolution," 269?284; A. S. Kanya-
> Forstner, "Mali-Tukulor," in Michael Crowder, ed., West African
> Resistance: The Military Response to Colonial Occupation (New York,
> 1971), 53?79; Yves Person, "Guinea-Samori," trans. Joan White, in
> Crowder, West African Resistance, 111?143; Daniel R. Headrick, The
> Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth
> Century (New York, 1981), 119?120; Philip Curtin, Steven Feierman,
> Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times
> to Independence, 2nd ed. (New York, 1995), 343?351.
>
> 68 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 73. Duara makes
> similar claims for premodern China, India, and Japan; see Prasenjit
> Duara, "Historicizing National Identity, or Who Imagines What and
> When," in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 152.
>
> 69 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 234;
> see also Lonsdale, "Emergence of African Nations," 28.
>
> 70 For a general discussion of this tendency, see Renan, "What Is a
> Nation?" 52?53; Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, "Introduction," in
> Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 8; Duara, "Historicizing National
> Identity," 164?165; Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 161; Lonsdale,
> "Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa," 143. For alternative,
> more critical readings of precolonial African political leaders, see
> Jean Suret-Canale, "La Fin de la Chefferie en Guinée," Journal of
> African History 7, no. 3 (1966): 459?493; Martin Klein, Slavery and
> Colonial Rule in French West Africa (New York, 1998).
>
> 71 Person, "Guinea-Samori," 112; Headrick, Tools of Empire, 119?120;
> interview with Bocar Biro Barry, Conakry, January 21, 1991. For more
> critical views of Samori Touré, see the following papers, which were
> presented on the panel "Samori Toure One Hundred Years On: Exploring
> the Ambiguities," Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association,
> Philadelphia, Pa., November 13, 1999: David C. Conrad, "Victims,
> Warriors, and Power Sources: Portrayals of Women in Guinean Narratives
> of Samori Toure"; Saidou Mohamed N'Daou, "Almamy Samory Toure: Politics
> of Memories in Post-Colonial Guinea (1958?1984)"; Emily Osborn, "Samori
> Toure in Upper Guinea: Hero or Tyrant?"; Jeanne M. Toungara,
> "Kabasarana and the Samorian Conquest of Northwestern Cote d'Ivoire."
>
> 72 Smith notes that ethnicity "is more about cultural perceptions than
> physical demography." What is at issue is not actual descent, but "the
> sense of ancestry and identity that people possess." Anthony D. Smith,
> "The Origins of Nations," in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 117,
> 122. See also Hroch, "From National Movement to the Fully-Formed
> Nation," 65; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West
> Africa, 234?235.
>
> 73 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 234?
> 235; Sidiki Kobélé Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou Touré: L'Homme et son Combat Anti-
> Colonial (1922?1958) (Conakry, 1998), 22?24, 28?29; Hodgkin, African
> Political Parties, 30; Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 174;
> Smith, "Origins of Nations," 121.
>
> 74 Quoted in Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West
> Africa, 235. The orthography of African names was inconsistent during
> the colonial period. While "Samori" is now the preferred spelling,
> "Samory" is an accepted variant.
>
> 75 Historic "resisters" at times collaborated with the colonial
> administration, usually to forge alliances against rival African
> rulers. This more complicated reality was rarely acknowledged by the
> RDA. For a discussion of the ambiguous roles played by Bokar Biro Barry
> and Alfa Yaya Diallo, see Suret-Canale, "Fin de la Chefferie en
> Guinée," 465?467; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 147?148.
>
> 76 Interview with Bocar Biro Barry, Conakry, January 21, 1991; Siba N.
> Grovogui, personal communication, April 26, 1999; Suret-Canale, "Fin de
> la Chefferie en Guinée," 464?471; Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule, 46,
> 143, 147?148, 189; Iffono, Lexique Historique de la Guinée-Conakry, 19,
> 119?120, 134?136, 171?172; Thomas E. O'Toole, Historical Dictionary of
> Guinea (Republic of Guinea/Conakry), 2nd ed. (Metuchen, N.J., 1987),
> 16, 30.
>
> 77 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 235;
> O'Toole, Historical Dictionary of Guinea, 34.
>
> 78 Interviews in Conakry with Léon Maka, February 20, 1991, and Joseph
> Montlouis, February 28, 1991; Siba N. Grovogui, personal communication,
> 1991.
>
> 79 For similar trends elsewhere, see Minault, Khilafat Movement; Burke
> and Lapidus, Islam, Politics, and Social Movements; Gelvin, Divided
> Loyalties.
>
> 80La Liberté, December 28, 1954, quoted in Morgenthau, Political
> Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 235.
>
> 81 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 236?
> 237. See also Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 61; ANS, 17G586,
> Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements Objet: Réunion
> Publique R.D.A. à Conakry et ses Suites," September 8, 1954, #2606/942,
> C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> Objet: Fêtes Musulmanes à Conakry," May 26, 1955, #1054/439, C/PS.2;
> Hodgkin, African Political Parties, 136.
>
> 82 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 71.
>
> 83 Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 61.
>
> 84 Interview with Aissatou N'Diaye, Conakry, April 8, 1991. See also
> interview with Néné Diallo, Conakry, April 11, 1991.
>
> 85 ANS, 17G586, "Fêtes Musulmanes," May 26, 1955. See also Hodgkin,
> Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 162?163.
>
> 86 ANS, 17G573, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> Objet: Incidents à Conakry," October 26, 1954, #2850/1094, C/PS.2.
>
> 87 Quoted in Hodgkin, African Political Parties, 138.
>
> 88 ANS, 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> Objet: Suite aux Incidents de Tondon," February 18, 1955, #389/160,
> C/PS.2. M'Balia Camara, an officer of the RDA women's committee and
> wife of the RDA president in Tondon (Dubréka circle), was killed by a
> canton chief during a rampage against RDA supporters. The day she was
> struck, February 9, 1955, was subsequently commemorated by the RDA and
> set aside to honor women's role in the struggle for national
> emancipation. "Incidents Graves à Tondon, Canton de Labaya, Cercle de
> Dubréka," La Liberté, February 15, 1955, 1; "Les Grandioses Obsèques de
> Camara M'Ballia," La Liberté, March 1, 1955, 1; Camara, "La
> Contribution de la Femme," 132; interview with Aissatou N'Diaye,
> Conakry, April 8, 1991.
>
> 89 For similar use of indigenous symbols by Asante nationalists in
> colonial Ghana, see Allman, "Youngmen and the Porcupine," 263?264, 267,
> 272, 274?277; Allman, Quills of the Porcupine, 6, 9?10, 16?17, 19, 28,
> 41?46, 49, 62, 65, 97, 131, 140, 160, 183?184.
>
> 90 Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 59?60; ANS, 17G613, Guinée
> Française, Services de Police, Conakry, "Renseignements A/S Situation
> en Guinée, à la Veille du Dépot des Listes aux élections Cantonales du
> 31 Mars Prochain," March 9, 1957, #555/247, C/PS.2; 17G613, Guinée
> Française, Services de Police, Conakry, "Renseignements A/S Réunions
> Diverses tenues à Conakry," May 29, 1957, #1223/480, C/PS.2.
>
> 91 ANS, 17G613, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Conakry,
> "Renseignements A/S Fête R.D.A. Donnée en l'Honneur de Bassikolo dans
> la Nuit du 26 au 27 Janvier 1957," n.d., #235/107, C/PS.2; 17G613,
> "Situation en Guinée," March 9, 1957. See also 17G586, "Fêtes
> Musulmanes," May 26, 1955.
>
> 92 Quoted in Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 60. See also ANS,
> 17G613, "Situation en Guinée," March 9, 1957.
>
> 93 Siba N. Grovogui, personal communication, October 1991.
>
> 94 Judith Van Allen, "`Aba Riots' or Igbo `Women's War'? Ideology,
> Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women," in Nancy J. Hafkin and
> Edna G. Bay, eds., Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic
> Change (Stanford, Calif., 1976), 60?62, 71?73. For a similar practice
> among Ga women in colonial Ghana, see John Parker, Making the Town: Ga
> State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth, N.H., 2000), 52,
> 60?61.
>
> 95 Renan, "What Is a Nation?" 53.
>
> 96 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 52?53, 113?114; Smith, State and
> Nation in the Third World, Preface.
>
> 97 "General Act of the Conference of Berlin (1885)," in Bruce Fetter,
> ed., Colonial Rule in Africa: Readings from Primary Sources (Madison,
> Wis., 1979), 38.
>
> 98 Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 138. See also Smith,
> State and Nation in the Third World, 27.
>
> 99 Selecting names and regions associated with particular ethnic
> groups, RDA leader Moricandian Savané wrote, "The misery which kills
> TOGBA of Macenta is the same as that of Samba of Upper Guinea, Soriba
> of lower Guinea, or Diallo of the Fouta Djallon." Moricandian Savané,
> La Liberté, August 18, 1954, quoted in Morgenthau, Political Parties in
> French-Speaking West Africa, 233.
>
> 100 See Smith, "Origins of Nations," 107, 113, 116; Hobsbawm, Nations
> and Nationalism since 1780, 20, 33, 63; Breuilly, Nationalism and the
> State, 6.
>
> 101 Kevin C. Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of
> Identity (New York, 2003), 75?76.
>
> 102 Ibid., 76.
>
> 103 For a more general discussion of these issues, see Hobsbawm,
> Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 136?137; Mamdani, Citizen and
> Subject, 21?25, 33, 37?61.
>
> 104 Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 7.
>
> 105 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 20.
> See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 121?122. Anderson makes the
> crucial point that imperial languages become the new vernaculars of
> colonized peoples. In Guinea, the common vernacular was French. It was
> the sole language of education, beginning in primary school. For the
> educated elite, speaking in French was second nature. Anderson,
> Imagined Communities, 113, 133?134, 138; Suret-Canale, French
> Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 341, 380?382, 487; Morgenthau,
> Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 11, 39; Kéïta, P.D.
> G., 1: 73.
>
> 106 ANS, 2G43/109, Guinée Française, Chef du Service de l'Enseignement,
> "Rapport Statistique Annuel sur l'Enseignement, Année Scolaire 1942?
> 1943," Conakry, August 1943; 2G45/131, Guinée Française, Chef du
> Service de l'Enseignement, "Rapport de Rentrée, Année Scolaire, 1944?
> 1945," Conkary, January 13, 1945. See also AG, 5B47, Guinée Française,
> Gouverneur, Conakry, à Ministre, F.O.M., Paris, October 25, 1947,
> #711/APA; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa,
> 10?13, 20, 219; Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou Touré: L'Homme et son Combat, 11, 30?
> 31; Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 147; Manning, Francophone Sub-
> Saharan Africa, 100?101.
>
> 107 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 147; Morgenthau, Political
> Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 12?23; Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou
> Touré: L'Homme et son Combat, 11, 30.
>
> 108 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 142, 147; Suret-Canale, French
> Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 373?374, 377?378, 388; Morgenthau,
> Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 11?13, 15; Manning,
> Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 80, 81, 84, 101.
>
> 109 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 147.
>
> 110 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 12?13"
> >
>
> 111 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 142?143; Morgenthau, Political
> Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 20, 251; ANS, 17G573, "Rapport
> Général d'Activité 1947?1950," presenté par Mamadou Madéïra Kéïta,
> Secrétaire Général du P.D.G. au Premier Congrès Territorial du Parti
> Démocratique de Guinée (Section Guinéenne du Rassemblement Démocratique
> Africain), Conakry, October 15?18, 1950. For a more general discussion
> of this phenomenon, see Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 48.
> Notable RDA adversaries among Ponty alumni in Guinea included several
> members of the French parliament: National Assembly deputies Yacine
> Diallo, Mamba Sano, and Barry Diawadou and Council of the Republic
> senator Fodé Mamadou Touré. Another Ponty graduate was Framoï Bérété,
> president of the anti-RDA ethnic association Union du Mandé, and a
> member of the equally hostile Comité d'Entente Guinéenne. The
> vehemently anti-RDA secretary-general of the Guinean teachers' union,
> Koumandian Kéïta, was a graduate of école Normale de Katibougou, the
> Ponty equivalent in the French Soudan. Morgenthau, Political Parties in
> French-Speaking West Africa, 222, 224?225; R. W. Johnson, "The Parti
> Démocratique de Guinée and the Mamou `Deviation,'" in Christopher Allen
> and R. W. Johnson, eds., African Perspectives: Papers in the History,
> Politics and Economics of Africa Presented to Thomas Hodgkin
> (Cambridge, 1970), 368; interviews in Conakry with Bocar Biro Barry,
> January 21, 1991; Léon Maka, February 20, 1991; and Fodé Mamdou Touré,
> March 13, 1991.
>
> 112 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 20?
> 21.
>
> 113école Normale de Katibougou graduate Koumandian Kéïta, an arch-rival
> of the RDA and secretary-general of Guinea's powerful African teachers'
> union, was a case in point. The deep antipathy that he and Sékou Touré
> shared was both personal and political. ANS, 2G53/187, Guinée
> Française, Secrétaire Général, "Revues Trimestrielles des événements,
> 1953: 3ème Trimestre," September 12, 1953, #862/APA; 2G55/150, Guinée
> Française, Gouverneur, "Rapport Politique Mensuel, Août 1955,"
> September 28, 1955, #487/APAS/CAB; 2G57/128, Guinée Française, Police
> et Sûreté, "Synthèse Mensuelle de Renseignements Novembre 1957,"
> Conakry, November 25, 1957, #2593/C/PS.2; AG, 2D297, Guinée Française,
> Secrétaire Général du Comité de Coordination des Syndicats de
> l'Enseignement Primaire Public de l'A.O.F., Conakry, à Gouverneur,
> Conakry, October 11, 1954, #1/CCE; interview with Bocar Biro Barry,
> Conakry, January 21, 1991.
>
> 114 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 147; Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou Touré:
> L'Homme et son Combat, 24, 29, 32, 36; Sidiki Kobélé Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou
> Touré: L'Homme du 28 Septembre 1958, 2nd ed. (Conakry, 1977), 29, 31;
> B. Ameillon, La Guinée: Bilan d'une Indépendance?(Paris, 1964), 49; AG,
> 1E41, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Fiche de Renseignements
> Biographiques Relative à M. Sékou Touré," January 2, 1956.
>
> 115 Bocar Biro Barry is a grandson of Almamy Bokar Biro Barry. However,
> he spells his first name differently.
>
> 116 Interview with Bocar Biro Barry, Conakry, January 21, 1991; Kéïta,
> Ahmed Sékou Touré: L'Homme et son Combat, 10?11, 30; Suret-Canale,
> République de Guinée, 142. Morgenthau contends that strains between the
> more and less educated Guinean elites were comparable to those that
> existed in colonial Ghana. Basil Davidson writes that those who
> mobilized for the Convention People's Party, which ultimately became
> the ruling party of independent Ghana, were derisively referred to by
> more educated opponents as "Standard VII Boys" or, in reference to
> homeless youths who organized for the party by night and slept on
> porches, "verandah boys, hooligans, flotsam and jetsam, town rabble."
> Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 20?21;
> Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame
> Nkrumah, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo., 1989), 68, 70. See also Apter, Ghana
> in Transition, 167, 207?208; Hodgkin, African Political Parties, 30?31.
>
> 117 Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 142?143; Morgenthau, Political
> Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 12, 20, 251. See also Breuilly,
> Nationalism and the State, 48?49; Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 151;
> Coleman, "Nationalism in Tropical Africa," 412.
>
> 118 AG, 5B49, Guinée Française, Secrétaire Général chargé de
> l'Expédition des Affaires Courantes, pour le Gouverneur, Conakry, à
> Haut Commissaire, Dakar, "Revue des événements du Quatrième Trimestre
> 1947," February 17, 1948, #35/APA.
>
> 119 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. See also Hroch, "From National
> Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation," 67.
>
> 120 Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 19?20; Tom Nairn, The Break-up
> of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London, 1977), 41.
>
> 121 For further elaboration, see Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses.
>
> 122 ANS, 2G43/25, Guinée Française, "Rapport de Tournée Effectuée du 27
> Janvier au 9 Février par M. Chopin, Administrateur des Colonies,
> Inspecteur du Travail, dans les Cercles de Conakry-Kindia-Forécariah,"
> Conakry, April 2, 1943; 2G43/25, Guinée Française, Gouverneur, "Rapport
> sur le Travail et la Main d'Oeuvre de la Guinée Française Pendant
> l'Année 1943," Conakry, July 24, 1944, #994/IT; 2G46/50, Guinée
> Française, Inspecteur des Colonies (Pruvost), Mission en Guinée,
> "Rapport sur la Main d'Oeuvre en Guinée," Conakry, July 13, 1946,
> #116/C; 2G46/50, Guinée Française, Inspecteur du Travail, "Rapport
> Annuel du Travail, 1946," Conakry, February 15, 1947, #66/IT.GV.
>
> 123 ANS, 2G46/50, "Rapport sur la Main d'Oeuvre," July 13, 1946;
> 2G46/50, "Rapport Annuel du Travail, 1946." See also Virginia Thompson
> and Richard Adloff, French West Africa (New York, 1969), 492.
>
> 124 See Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses; ANS, 2G41/21, Guinée Française,
> "Rapport Politique Annuel, 1941"; 2G42/22, Guinée Française, "Rapport
> Politique Annuel, 1942"; 2G46/50, "Rapport sur la Main d'Oeuvre," July
> 13, 1946; 2G47/121, "Revues Trimestrielles des événements, 3ème
> Trimestre 1947"; AG, 1E42, Guinée Française, "Renseignements," Cercle
> de Kankan, January 26, 1945, #66/C/APAN/31/1/46; 1E37, Guinée
> Française, Cercle de Gaoual, Subdivision Centrale, "Rapport Politique
> Annuel, Année 1947"; Suret-Canale, "Fin de la Chefferie en Guinée,"
> 462, 464, 467, 470, 479?480; Suret-Canale, République de Guinée, 95?98,
> 137?139; Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 80, 322?
> 325, 327, 341?342; Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 87?88, 99?102, 331; Klein, Slavery
> and Colonial Rule, 212?213; Babacar Fall, Le Travail Forcé en Afrique-
> Occidentale Française (1900?1945) (Paris, 1993), 279.
>
> 125 For further discussion of rivalry between "traditional" and
> "modern" elites in African nationalist movements, see Seton-Watson,
> Nations and States, 328?329, 341, 437.
>
> 126 Suret-Canale, "Fin de la Chefferie en Guinée," 459?460, 492; Kéïta,
> P.D.G., 2: 147; interview with Mamadou Bela Doumbouya, Conakry, January
> 26, 1991.
>
> 127 AG, 2Z27, "Syndicat Professionnel des Agents et Sous-Agents
> Indigènes du Service des Transmissions de la Guinée Française,"
> Conakry, March 18, 1945; interviews with Joseph Montlouis (assistant
> secretary-general, postal, telegraph, and telephone workers' union),
> Conakry, March 3 and 6, 1991; Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou Touré: L'Homme du 28
> Septembre, 41.
>
> 128 Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 180.
>
> 129 ANS, 17G573, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> A/S Activité de Certains Africains R.D.A.," February 24, 1948, #229/76
> C; AG, 1E38, Guinée Française, Cercle de Kankan, "Rapport Politique
> Annuel, Année 1948"; 1E38, Guinée Française, Cercle de N'Zérékoré,
> "Rapport Politique Annuel, Année 1948." See also AG, 5B49, Guinée
> Française, Inspecteur des Affaires Administratives, pour le Gouverneur,
> Conakry, à Haut Commissaire, Dakar, September 11, 1948, #596/APA.
>
> 130 ANS, 17G529, Guinée Française, "Liste des Organisations
> Professionnelles," 1952; 17G271, Gouverneur de Guinée Française,
> Conakry, à Haut Commissaire, Dakar, "A/S Activité Syndicale," February
> 25, 1952, #85/APA; Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking
> West Africa, 414.
>
> 131 Interview with Bocar Biro Barry, Conakry, January 21, 1991.
>
> 132 Tom Nairn, "Scotland and Europe," in Eley and Suny, Becoming
> National, 84?85; see also Nairn, Break-up of Britain, 100; Anthony D.
> Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge, 1995), 40.
>
> 133 See Chatterjee's critique of Anderson in this regard. Chatterjee,
> Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 19?22; Chatterjee, Nation
> and Its Fragments, 4?5. See also Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67,
> 113, 116, 135, 140?141.
>
> 134 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12. See also Smith, "Origins of
> Nations," 111, 124.
>
> 135 Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, 40, 47. See also
> Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 49.
>
> 136 Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 135?136; Gellner, Nations and
> Nationalism, 63, 89; Anderson, Imagined Communities, 36?40.
>
> 137 Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 133, 135?136; Hobsbawm, Nations and
> Nationalism since 1780, 59.
>
> 138 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24?25, 36?37, 40.
>
> 139 Anne McClintock, "`No Longer in a Future Heaven': Women and
> Nationalism in South Africa," in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 260,
> 273?274. See also Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 64, 67?68.
>
> 140 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 23. For a discussion of these
> issues in Africa more generally, see Hodgkin, African Political
> Parties, 134?139.
>
> 141 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 238?
> 239, 243?244; interview with Léon Maka and Mira Baldé (Mme. Maka),
> Conakry, February 20, 1991; ANS, 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de
> Police, Kankan, "Renseignements A/S Arrivé Kankan, Sékou Touré et
> Conférence Publique du 9 Novembre 1954," November 13, 1954, #2936/1142,
> C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Kindia,
> "Renseignements A/S Passage à Kindia du DéputéDiallo Sayfoulaye et
> Compte-Rendu de Mandat de ce Parlementaire," July 17, 1956, #1396/503,
> C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Mamou,
> "Renseignements A/S Visite Parlementaire à Mamou," July 23, 1956,
> #1444/512, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police,
> Conakry, "Renseignements A/S Réunion Publique d'Informations tenue le
> Jeudi 30 Août 1956, par le DéputéDiallo Saï foulaye, à Conakry, Salle
> de Cinéma `VOX,'" August 31, 1956, #1761/619, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée
> Française, Services de Police, Conakry, "Renseignements A/S Conférence
> Publique d'Information, tenue le 16 Septembre 1956 par le P.D.G.-R.D.A.
> au Cinéma `VOX' à Conakry," September 17, 1956, #1907/658, C/PS.2. See
> also Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, 150, 159; Hodgkin,
> African Political Parties, 134?139; Thompson and Adloff, French West
> Africa, 60.
>
> 142 Interviews in Conakry with Léon Maka and Mira Baldé, February 20,
> 1991; Fatou Kéïta, April 7, 1991; and Aissatou N'Diaye, April 8, 1991.
> See also Barbara A. Moss, "Clothed in Righteousness and Respect: The
> Use of Uniforms within Zimbabwean Women's Ruwadzano in the Methodist
> Church," paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the African Studies
> Association, Atlanta, Ga., November 3, 1989.
>
> 143 Morgenthau, Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 238;
> Hodgkin, African Political Parties, 36, 38; Messmer, Après Tant de
> Batailles, 234.
>
> 144 ANS, 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> Réunion Privée des Femmes R.D.A. à Conakry," October 7, 1954,
> #2765/1033, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, Labé,
> "Renseignements Objet: Situation Politique à Labé dans la Première
> Quinzaine de Novembre 1954," November 23, 1954, #2999/1180, C/PS.2;
> Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 77; Chaffard, Les Carnets
> Secrets, 2: 177; Ruth Schachter-Morgenthau, Le Multipartisme en Afrique
> de l'Ouest Francophone Jusqu'aux Indépendances: La Période Nationaliste
> (Paris, 1998), photograph 29, following 230; Kéïta, Ahmed Sékou Touré:
> L'Homme et son Combat, photograph "Carte de Voeux 1955 de Sékou Touré,"
> following 136.
>
> 145 See Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 49; Smith, Nations and
> Nationalism in a Global Era, 40, 47; Smith, "Origins of Nations," 120;
> Anderson, Imagined Communities, 140.
>
> 146 Interview with Léon Maka and Mira Baldé, Conakry, February 20,
> 1991. For Mafory Bangoura's background, see "Les Femmes s'Organisent,"
> La Liberté, August 18, 1954, 4; Kéïta, P.D.G., 1: 340, 345; Camara, "La
> Contribution de la Femme," 43?44; interviews in Conakry with Bocar Biro
> Barry, January 29, 1991; Léon Maka, February 20, 1991; Aissatou
> N'Diaye, April 8, 1991.
>
> 147 Interview with Léon Maka and Mira Baldé, Conakry, February 20,
> 1991. See also interview with Aissatou N'Diaye, Conakry, April 8, 1991.
>
> 148 See Geiger, "Tanganyikan Nationalism as `Women's Work'"; Geiger,
> TANU Women; LaRay Denzer, "Constance A. Cummings-John of Sierra Leone:
> Her Early Political Career," Tarikh 7, no. 1 (1981): 20?32; LaRay
> Denzer, "Women in Freetown Politics, 1914?61: A Preliminary Study,"
> Africa 57, no. 4 (1987): 439?456; Cheryl Johnson, "Grassroots
> Organizing: Women in Anti-Colonial Activity in Southwestern Nigeria,"
> African Studies Review 25, no. 2 (September 1982): 137?157; Cheryl
> Johnson, "Madam Alimotu Pelewura and the Lagos Market Women," Tarikh 7,
> no. 1 (1981): 1?10; Nina Emma Mba, Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women's
> Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900?1965 (Berkeley, Calif.,
> 1982); Cora Ann Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and
> Social Change in Kenya (Boulder, Colo., 1992); Timothy Scarnecchia,
> "Poor Women and Nationalist Politics: Alliances and Fissures in the
> Formation of a Nationalist Political Movement in Salisbury Rhodesia,
> 1950?6," Journal of African History 37, no. 2 (1996): 283?310; Cherryl
> Walker, Women and Resistance in South Africa (London, 1982). Many
> studies emphasize women's contributions to male-dominated nationalist
> movements?rather than their fundamentally formative roles. In the case
> of Guinea, Margarita Dobert's 1970 doctoral dissertation skims the
> surface of women's anticolonial activities. Far more insightful and
> analytical is Idiatou Camara's unpublished undergraduate thesis, "La
> Contribution de la Femme de Guinée à la Lutte de Libération Nationale
> (1945?1958)." See Dobert, "Civic and Political Participation of Women";
> Camara, "Contribution de la Femme."
>
> 149 Quoted in Eley and Suny, Becoming National, 259.
>
> 150 McClintock, "`No Longer in a Future Heaven,'" 260.
>
> 151 Ibid., 261.
>
> 152 Geiger, "Tanganyikan Nationalism as `Women's Work,'" 467, 469, 471?
> 472; Geiger, TANU Women, 162. For further discussion of women's
> involvement in the "ideological reproduction of the collectivity" and
> of women as "transmitters of its culture," see Nira Yuval-Davis and
> Floya Anthias, "Introduction," in Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias,
> eds., Woman-Nation-State (London, 1989), 7, 9?10.
>
> 153 Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 65; Mamadou Tounkara,
> "Autour d'une Musique," La Liberté, November 9, 1954, 3; interview with
> Fatou Diarra, Conakry, March 17, 1991.
>
> 154 See Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 80; Schmidt, Mobilizing
> the Masses, chap. 5; Schmidt, "`Emancipate Your Husbands!'"; interviews
> in Conakry with Léon Maka, February 20, 1991; Fatou Diarra, March 17,
> 1991; Néné Diallo, April 11, 1991; Fatou Kéïta, May 24, 1991.
>
> 155 Interviews with Fatou Kéïta, Conakry, April 7 and May 24, 1991. See
> also interview with Léon Maka, Conakry, February 20, 1991.
>
> 156 Interview with Néné Diallo, Conakry, April 11, 1991.
>
> 157 Interview with Fatou Diarra, Conakry, March 17, 1991. See also
> Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 80.
>
> 158 Centre de Recherche et de Documentation Africaine (CRDA), Claude
> Gerard, "Incidents en Guinée Française, 1954?1955," Afrique
> Informations, no. 34 (March 15?April 1, 1955): 5?7; Morgenthau,
> Political Parties in French-Speaking West Africa, 103, 106, 240.
>
> 159 Interview with Aissatou N'Diaye, Conakry, April 8, 1991.
>
> 160 Ibid. See also interviews with Fatou Kéïta, Conakry, April 7 and
> May 24, 1991.
>
> 161 CRDA, Gerard, "Incidents en Guinée Française, 1954?1955," 9;
> Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 78. See also interview with
> Fatou Kéïta, Conakry, May 24, 1991.
>
> 162 Camara, "La Contribution de la Femme," 79.
>
> 163 Interviews in Conakry with Léon Maka, February 20, 1991; Léon Maka
> and Mira Baldé, February 25, 1991; Fatou Kéïta, April 7, 1991; ANS,
> 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements,"
> September 8, 1954. For similar use of song elsewhere in Africa, see
> Shirley Ardener, "Sexual Insult and Female Militancy," in Shirley
> Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women (London, 1975), 29?30, 36?37; Caroline
> Ifeka-Moller, "Female Militancy and Colonial Revolt: The Women's War of
> 1929, Eastern Nigeria," in Ardener, Perceiving Women, 132?133; Van
> Allen, "`Aba Riots' or Igbo `Women's War'?" 60?61; Mba, Nigerian Women
> Mobilized, 150; Geiger, "Tanganyikan Nationalism as `Women's Work,'"
> 473. Asante and Ga women in colonial Ghana also challenged men they
> deemed cowardly?and thus effeminate?in the face of British colonialism;
> see Obeng, "Gendered Nationalism," 193, 202?204; Parker, Making the
> Town, 52, 71. The feminization of colonized males, and women's ridicule
> of them, is discussed in Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 69?71.
>
> 164 ANS, 17G586, "Réunion Publique R.D.A. à Conakry," September 8,
> 1954; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements A/S
> R.D.A. Conakry," April 19, 1955, #811/332, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée
> Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements Objet: RDA à Conakry,"
> April 27, 1955, #867/353, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de
> Police, "Renseignements Objet: Incidents en Guinée," June 3, 1955,
> #1095/463, C/PS.2; 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police,
> "Renseignements Objet: R.D.A. à Conakry," June 6, 1955, #1106/469, C/PS.
> 2. See also 17G573, Guinée Française, Services de Police,
> "Renseignements A/S Attroupement R.D.A. devant le Commissariat de
> Police de Mamou, le 15 Mai 1956," May 19, 1956, #929/324, C/PS.2; AG,
> 1E41, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements A/S
> Conférence Publique tenue le Lundi 14 Janvier 1957 à Conakry, Salle du
> Cinéma `VOX,' par le P.D.G.-R.D.A.," January 15, 1957, #89/50/C/PS.2.
>
> 165 ANS, 17G586, Guinée Française, Services de Police, "Renseignements
> Objet: R.D.A. Conakry," June 14, 1955, #1158/490, C/PS.2. The Susu song
> was transcribed and translated into French by the police. The English
> translation is mine.
>
> 166 Siba N. Grovogui, personal communication, 1991.
>
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