Ahmed Sékou Touré

Ahmed Sékou Touré

Ahmed Sékou Touré (born January 9, 1922 in Faranah , Faranah region , Guinea ; † March 26, 1984 in Cleveland , Ohio ) was the first president of Guinea after independence from 1958 until his death.

Life

Touré was born the son of an Islamic Malinke farmer and a Malinke woman, his mother was a granddaughter of Almamy Samory Touré . After attending a Koran school early on , he attended the French technical school in Conakry for a year . In 1937 he was expelled from school after organizing a hunger strike. In order to complete his secondary school education despite being expelled from school, he took correspondence courses until 1941, which worked by correspondence. He worked in various jobs before finally passing his exam in 1941 and working for PTT (Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) . In 1945 he founded the SPTT ( Syndicat des Postes, Télégraphes et Téléphones) the union of post and telecommunications workers, the first union in French Guinea, and in 1946 became the union's first general secretary. In 1946 he was a co-founder of Félix Houphouët-Boigny's Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) party , from which the anti-colonial Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) emerged in Guinea in 1947 . In 1948 he became chairman of the Guinean Workers' Confederation , the Guinean branch of the French communist trade union Confédération générale du travail (CGT).

In 1956 he became a member of the French National Assembly for Guinea and mayor of Conakry in the same year . When the country achieved semi- autonomy in the territorial elections and the PDG became the strongest political force, Touré took over the vice-presidency of the Territorial Assembly. With the proclamation of independence on October 2, 1958, Sékou Touré became president of the new state. This year he made a statement against the referendum of French President Charles de Gaulle : "  Nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l'esclavage  " ("We prefer poverty in freedom to wealth in slavery").

The withdrawal of all financial and administrative support by France caused Touré to turn to the Soviet Union and solidified the rule of the unity PDG. In the following years, Touré advocated pan-African socialism and gave considerable support to the liberation movements in southern Africa, as well as the PAIGC ( Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde ), the African liberation movement against Portuguese rule in neighboring Guinea-Bissau .

Sékou Touré was friends with the Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah , whom he admired and whose political philosophy he shared. It was therefore not surprising that after being overthrown in a military coup in February 1966, he offered asylum to Nkrumah in Guinea and made him Honorary President of Guinea.

A staunch Pan-Africanist, Sékou Touré organized the Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union in May 1959 and was one of the founders of the Organization of African Unity ( OAU) in May 1963.

During his almost three decades reign as Syli ('big elephant') he established a dictatorship in Africa, under which thousands of politically unpopular people were tortured and liquidated. The country of Guinea recorded at least two million refugees during this period. Despite abundant harvests and numerous mineral resources, malnutrition prevailed. Towards the end of his term in office, he was forced to change his domestic politics from 1980, mainly due to increasing protests, especially by the women of Guinea. In terms of foreign policy, he tried to get economic aid for his country again by turning to the West. Under Giscard d'Estaing he achieved a reconciliation with France. He also traveled to other African countries and acted successfully as an intermediary.

Sékou Touré died in 1984 during heart surgery in Cleveland (Ohio, USA).

He left behind his wife Andrée Touré and a son named Mohamed Touré.

Political work

Sékou Touré's time as a member of the French communist-oriented CGT undoubtedly influenced his political views significantly. He also spent time, for example, in trade union seminars in Prague. He himself admitted, "It would be absurd to deny that I have read a large number of Mao Tse-tung's writings in addition to those of all the great Marxist philosophers." Known for his long, lively speeches, Sékou Touré left behind a rich body of collected speeches and other political writings, comprising 28 volumes in French (25 in English), as well as theoretical writings.

Many academics like Lapido Adamolekun and Yves Bénot have observed that Sékou Touré not only refused to steer Guinea on a clear path to socialism, but also deliberately downplayed the role of ideology in building a new society. In his eyes, Guinea initiated a revolution that was specifically African, outside any ideological frame of reference, and stubbornly resisted choosing between capitalism and socialism. For Touré, the main function of ideology was to mobilize the masses for the political and economic development of Guinea. It was not until the eighth National Congress of the PDG in 1967 that Touré Guinea officially steered towards socialism: “The fundamental option of the Democratic Party of Guinea is the establishment of a socialist society [...] We have to be clear about this: We have committed ourselves to socialism . That is an irrevocable fact. ”Sékou Touré's socialist conception clearly stems from the orthodox definition of scientific socialism :“ Socialism [...] finds expression in the effective exercise of political, economic and cultural power by the working class. ”Similar to Nkrumah, Touré is versatile his general choice of ideology, specifically his conception of Marxism, which he saw more as a means that can be adapted to specific situations and less as an end.

Honors

• 1959: Special level of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

literature

• Panaf Great Lives: Sékou Touré , London 1978.
• Revolutionary People's Republic of Guinea: Socialism as an alternative without choice . In: Heinrich Bechtoldt: States without a nation. Socialism as a power factor in Asia and Africa . Stuttgart 1980, pp. 299-311.

Web links

Commons : Ahmed Sékou Touré  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Information about Ahmed Sékou Touré (French)
• Literature by and about Ahmed Sékou Touré in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Guy Martin: African Political Thought . Ed .: Springer. 2012, ISBN 978-1-137-06205-5 , pp. 93 .
2. ↑ The elephant . In: Der Spiegel . No. 12 , 1960 ( online ).
3. ↑ Peter Scholl-Latour : Murder on the great river: A quarter of a century of African independence . dtv, 1991, ISBN 3-423-11058-9 , pp. 24-25.