African Revolutionary Writers, Part 3c
Ahmed Sékou
Touré
Before becoming President of
Guinea at independence in 1958 – a position he held until his death in 1984 – Ahmed
Sékou Touré led a trade union federation.
At an early stage in his
presidency, Sékou Touré led his country to vote against the neo-colonial
arrangement known as the “French Community”. Guinea was the only one of many
former French African colonies to vote against.
This refusal of
neo-colonialism was the 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 the exiled South African singer 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.
Yet in spite of the celebrity
he enjoyed in his lifetime, there is surprisingly little of Sékou Touré’s
legacy visible on the Internet today. Likewise 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 attached document 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, for example.
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?
His own book, “Africa on the
Move”, gives clues as to why this might be so. It is more than 600 pages long,
yet it reads like the 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 on-going 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, attached. 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 his 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 commonplace 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 so 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.
For this series, we have
sought out the original words of revolutionaries, including Sékou Touré’s. But
contrary to our own 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.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Ahmed Sékou
Touré, Africa’s Future and the World, 1979.
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