African
Revolutionary Writers, Part 3c
Ahmed Sékou Touré
Ahmed Sékou Touré was President of Guinea from independence
in 1958 to his death in 1984. Before becoming president of the country, he led a
trade union federation.
Sékou Touré led his country to vote against the neo-colonial
arrangement known as the “French Community”. It was the only one of many former
French African colonies to vote against. This was a heroic act for which Sékou
Touré has never been forgotten, or in the case of the French imperialists,
forgiven.
Later, Sékou Touré became well-known as one of the leaders
of the Non-Aligned Movement. Guinea attracted personalities including Miriam Makeba, who became Guinea’s
ambassador to the United Nations, and
her then husband the US Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, who changed
his name to Kwame Ture.
In spite of the celebrity he enjoyed in his lifetime, there
is surprisingly little of Sékou Touré’s legacy visible on the Internet today.
Even in hard copy, his output has been difficult to find. A 1979 book of Sékou
Touré’s called “Africa on the Move”, published in English, was finally located
in a library. From it the quotation in the downloadable document linked below
was extracted.
Sékou Touré’s posthumous opponents have been busier than his
supporters, so that there is plenty of off-hand denigration of the man to be
found, and also plain confusion, as in the current Wikipedia entry.
But there may be other reasons why this man’s memory is now so
obscure. He left many volumes of speeches, in hard copy, in French. He was keen
to leave a legacy. So why has this one-time giant of African politics, formerly
a household name all over the world, shrunk so much in terms of reputation?
The book “Africa on the Move” gives clues. It is more than
600 pages long, yet it reads like a conference report of the general secretary
of a trade union federation. It is the kind of document that has the same predictable
headings and the same voluminous narrative time after time, as if it was the “matters
arising” of an endless series of unresolved meetings. “Africa Going Round in
Circles” might have been a better title for this book.
Judge it for yourself from the quoted part, downloadable
below. It is clear, at least, that Sékou Touré based his output on “common
sense”, and on such touchstones as “efficiency”, “responsibility” and other presumed
universal values that constantly crop up in the text. Frankly, it is quite dull
and boring. Sékou Touré, contrary to what one might expect after his heroic
stand against neo-colonialism in 1958, turns out to be a “neutralist” (his
word). His politics are ad hoc and
appear personal, but are actually made up of the platitudes that capitalism
holds out in front of itself to cover itself. Like a typical reformist trade
unionist, Sékou Touré rejects the wickedness of capitalism but takes all of
capitalism’s lip-service to morality at face value. He never escapes from the
ideology of the bourgeois ruling class.
Sékou Touré never mentions any other politician, contemporary
or historical. It is not lack of knowledge or mental capacity that renders his
work unscholarly, but the absence of any correspondence with other thinkers.
Perhaps this is evidence of simple vanity (simple, but vast). If so, this would
also partly explain the lack of defenders for the memory of a man who quite possibly
bored his fellow-Guineans terribly, for the entire 26 years of an egocentric
presidency.
We have sought out the original words of revolutionaries,
including Sékou Touré’s. But contrary to our CU practice, we find that Touré
shunned the works of others. He ignores them all. His inclusion in our series therefore
stands as an example to show that there are those who hold themselves apart
from history, and to whom history consequently tends to return the same kind of
compliment: neglect. We include him anyway, and allow his supporters to defend
him if they will.
In a part of the book not quoted here, Sékou Touré relates
how his party (the PDG) is the one in a one-party state. He says that the
one-party rule was brought in for the sake of “efficiency”. Then he says that
subsequent to this original act, he has heard of something called National
Democracy which he regards as the same thing as the one-party state. Sékou
Touré saw something called NDR, but missed the democracy in it. Sad to say, Sékou
Touré missed the point.
Please download and read the entire text via
this link:
Further reading:
Frantz Fanon,
Pitfalls of National Consciousness, 1963 (18460 words)
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