The failed vision of a united Africa- part xiii

What you need to know:

  • During his presidency, Touré rejected Western influence and promoted freedom and self-reliance and the realization of a free one united Africa. His policies were strongly based on Marxism. He nationalized private investments vanquishing the Free Market Economy and embracing the Command Economy. In 1961 due to this ant-western posture he then won the Lenin Peace Prize as a result.

This week we continue to recount the story of the pan-African dream of Ahmed Sékou Touré who was the first President of Guinea. In 1960, believing that in a state of full control of power he will be able to forge ahead his quest for emancipation of the African conscious from colonial temperament; he declared Guinea a single Party State under the leadership of his Democratic Party of Guinea (PDG). Since then Sékou Touré was five times re-elected to seven year terms in the absence multiparty democracy.

During his presidency, Touré rejected Western influence and promoted freedom and self-reliance and the realization of a free one united Africa. His policies were strongly based on Marxism. He nationalized private investments vanquishing the Free Market Economy and embracing the Command Economy. In 1961 due to this ant-western posture he then won the Lenin Peace Prize as a result.

His approach revered African identity rejecting foreign involvement when he said: “Guinea prefers poverty in freedom to riches in slavery” He once also told the Western leadership that: “We have told you bluntly, Mr. President, what the demands of the people are. We have one prime and essential need: our dignity. But there is no dignity without freedom. We prefer freedom in poverty to opulence in slavery”

His autocratic rule made him fail to institute democracy in Guinea and was critisized by Guineans in the diaspora and activists in Europe. Although there was widespread condemnation of his strong rule Sékou Touré still believed that he was predestined to fight imperialism to the end.

This unbending posture of denial to the claims of dictatorship was evident from his responses when he was once interviewed by the African Magazine and had this to say: “I don’t know what people mean when they call me the bad child of Africa. Is it that they consider us unbending in the fight against imperialism, against colonialism? If so, we can be proud to be called headstrong. Our wish is to remain a child of Africa unto our death”

His associates in the liberation and unification of Africa in West Africa were Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, William Tubman of Liberia and Modibo Keita of Mali; of whom in 1963, the trio, was the frontline supporter for the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Therefore, at the African Summit Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Touré and his colleagues were among the 32 other African States presidents who met and established the OAU.

When Nkrumah his friend was overthrown in a 1966, he offered him asylum in Guinea and gave him the honorary title of co-President. Like Nkrumah; Touré was a giant of pan-Africanism and even befriended African-American pan-African activists such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, to whom he later offered them asylum. While living in Guinea and in appreciation to the two pan-African leaders; Stokely Carmichael, took the two leaders’ names as his; he was called Kwame Ture.

Distancing himself from the West, Touré became a pan-Africanist fighter of African integrity as was quoted in a Political Dictionary of Black Quotations as saying: “To take part in the African revolution, it is not enough to write a revolutionary song. You must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves” As a leader of the Pan-Africanist movement, he consistently ridiculed colonial powers not to dare and interfere in African internal affairs.

His extraordinary pan-Africanist stance soured his relations with the USA and after the overthrow of Nkrumah; Touré blamed the CIA that it intended to destroy Ghana. Since then he became a socialist who got help from the USSR. During its first three decades of independence, Guinea developed into a socialist state, which merged the functions the PDG party with the various functions of government and its institutions. This unified party-state control took over the country’s socio-economic and political life.