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Ahmed Sékou Touré, Guinea (1922-1984).
Ahmed Sékou Touré was born in Guinea in 1922. The son of a Muslim farmer, Sékou
Touré was educated in the Koran at an early age and then went on to a French technical school in Conakry at the age of 14. Sékou Touré
was expelled in 1937,
after only one year of training, and worked several different jobs until he
passed his examination, qualifying him to take a position with the Post and
Telecommunications (PTT) Service in 1941. In 1945 he became Secretary General of the
PTT Workers' Union and a founding member of Houphouet-Boigny's Rassemblement Démocratique
Africaine (RDA) in 1946. By 1956 Sékou Touré won the
Parti Démocratique du Guinée (PDG) seat and became Mayor of Conakry. A staunch
Anti-Gaullist, Sékou Touré led the resistance to the De Gaulle Referendum
of 1958 proclaiming to De Gaulle: "We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in
slavery."
Guinea gained its independence under Sékou Touré in 1958. His early Presidency was
notably Leftist as he tried to forge a Socialist revolution through the early years of African independence. As his policies failed,
Sékou Touré filled the vacuum
with ever-increasing centralized rule and social tyranny. By the time of his death
in 1984, life expectancy in Guinea dropped to 40 years, business nearly evaporated,
Conakry was in a shambles, and the per capita GDP dropped to US $290.00.
Sékou Touré's career as a poet was limited to his Počmes militants (1978). A terse
volume of revolutionary poetry, Počmes militants can be regarded as much as
a treatise as an artistic expression. Austere and direct, what it lacks in literary
creativity it makes up for in vehemence and fervor. Počmes militants reflects Sékou
Touré's charismatic leadership style. It is a raw expression of his vision, void of
encumbering description:
Revolution is exigency (Lines 1-10)
"Let us resolutely destroy
Any betrayer of the Nation
Let us nail to the post
The murderers of BOIRO
These weapon-monsters
And the infamous causes
They oppose to liberty
To the right and dignity
Of the great People ever-valiant
Always streaming of sweat:"
Africa (Lines 18-30)
I am Africa
The Continent of tomorrow!
Neo-colonialism
Ferocious as subtle
Wishes to keep in shackles
Both my Mind and my Wealth.
Of the evils plaguing me still,
Most debasing is irresponsibility
My Peoples, henceforth
Heroic resistants,
Have joined the battle:
Destroying in order to renew.
Even Sékou Touré's foray into the role of women is marked by his zeal for human
reaction:
Woman of Africa (Lines 27-37, 53-64)
Women of Africa,
Women of the Revolution!
You will rise up to apex
You will journey endlessly
At a walking pace of the social Revolution,
To the rhythm of cultural progress,
In the train of economic boom
To the great and beautiful city
Of the exacting ends
And were in leading
Your brothers, your husbands and your children...
Women of Africa,
Women of the Revolution!
Equality is not offered,
It must be conquered.
To emancipate the women
Is to rid the society
Of its belmishes, its deformities.
The conquest of science,
The mastery of Technics
Will open to the Women the way
That of intra-social combat
Rendering her "subject and no longer object". |
