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Books by Ahmed Sekou Touré
Strategy and Tactics of the Revolution /
Africa on the Move / Militant Poems
The Political Leader
Considered as the Representative of a Culture /
African resistance to colonial penetration
Afrika and
imperialism / The doctrine and methods of
the Democratic Party of Guinea
Freedom through
culture /
Guinean revolution and social progress /
Islam for the people's benefit
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Remembering Ahmed Sekou Touré as Guinea Turns 50
By Norman Otis
Richmond
I have a
confession: I am addicted to Radio Netherlands. It is
not even a 50/ 50 love; it is more of a love / hate
thing. I love their International flavor. There is where
I can hear about what is happening from Afghanistan to
Zimbabwe. However, their coverage of African affairs on
many occasions makes me want to puke.
The West African
nation of Guinea turned 50 on October 2. A recent
feature on Radio Netherlands, Bridges with Africa,
"Guinea at 50: Going through a massive mid-life crisis"
made my blood run cold. It was a one-side attack on
Guinea's first president, Ahmed Sekou Touré (b. Guinea,
January 9, 1922; d. 26 March 1984).
As a youth Touré, along with Ghana's
Kwame Nkrumah, the
Congo's Patrice Lumumba and Algeria's
Ahmed Ben Bella
were some of the leaders that I and many of my
generation identified with.
While only a fool would attempt to defend the current
regime of
President Lansana Conte, only a bigger fool
would attempt to denigrate the role that Touré played in
the struggle for World African Liberation. Lansana has
been the head of state of Guinea since the death of
Touré in 1984. He took power in a military coup shortly
after Touré's death. A professional military man, he
actually fought against the heroic Algerian people on
the side of the French, during their war of liberation
against colonialism.
However, he did fight against the French for the
independence of Guinea after his involvement in Algeria.
Today, Guinea is one of the poorest countries on earth.
Touré helped lead
Guinea to independence from French colonial rule in
1958. In Cameroun, an armed uprising began in 1955 when
the UPC (Union des Populations de Cameroun) was declared
illegal. UPC had demanded the withdrawal of French
troops, an end to Cameroun's status as a United Nations
mandate, and a revolutionary land reform with the
slogan, "the land to those who till it." Without protest
the UN allowed the French troops to violently crush the
revolt. Western history books seldom write about the
revolt in the Cameroun.
A trade unionist,
Touré was able to help lead his nation to independence
by proclaiming, "We prefer dignity in poverty to
affluence in slavery."
After secondary schooling, he worked as a clerk and
trade union organizer, becoming a founder of the
Rassemblement Democratique Africain [RDA] in 1946. His
political base in Guinea depended in part on unionized
urban workers, in part on rural opposition to the system
of administrative chieftaincy imposed by the French.
This enabled him to lead the local section of the RDA,
the Parti Democratique de Guinée (PDG), and to emerge
along with the leaders of the UPC as one of the most
radical of the nationalist leaders in French West
Africa.
African people will remember Touré as a great Pan
Africanist who attempted to unite Africa and Africans
world-wide. It was Touré, along with Nkrumah and Mali's
Modibo Keita, who attempted to form a United States of
Africa in the 1960s. Nkrumah asked the Congo's Patrice
Lumumba to join this alliance before his assassination
on January 17, 1961.
Guinea was one of the first African nations to open its
doors to Overseas Africans. Six years after Guinea's
independence, a delegation from the
Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) visited Guinea on the
invitation of Touré. The politically astute
Harry
Belafonte made the arrangements. Belafonte is a direct
political descendant of the "tallest tree in our
forest," the great
Paul Robeson.
Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) has said that
Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi-born freedom fighter who made the
statement, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired,"
was one of the people who benefited from Touré and
Belafonte's gesture. Hamer loved the experience and
conveyed it to Ture:
"Oh, Stokely, the president came to visit. Oh, he was so
handsome, all in his white robes, and he was so kind."
Despite the language gap, she had spoken with everyone
she'd met. "Oh Stokely, those people be jes' like us.
The way they fix they hair, some of them. How they
stand, how they walk, even the way they carry they
babies."
It was Touré who
gave a base to the liberation forces in another West
African nation, so-called Portuguese Guinea. The
movement there was led by one of the world's foremost
theoreticians, Amilcar
Cabral (September 13, 1924-January 20, 1973). Cabral
was the leader of the PAIGC (The African Party for the
Independence of Cape Verde and Guinea).T he former French
colony of Guinea, became known as Guinea-Conakry and the
Portuguese colony came to be known as
Guinea-Bissau.
The Portuguese invaded Guinea November 1970 with the
intent to assassinate Touré and Cabral. The Portuguese
colonialist made a sensational attempt to invade
Guinea-Conakry. They were knocked out in early Mike
Tyson fashion.
The
PAIGC started the armed struggle against Portuguese
colonialism in 1963. But in the following years the
Portuguese suffered defeat after defeat. Toure's
government supported the PAIGC completely.
Mai Palmberg, the
editor of the book,
The Struggle for Africa
discussed the aborted invasion. Said Palmberg, "The
invasion proved to be a total fiasco, because PAIGC and
Guinea's defense forces were able to respond quickly and
drive the enemy out. It was later revealed that West
Germany and France had supported the Portuguese
invasion, and that their representatives in Conakry had
assisted the invasion forces."
While it is true
that Touré's relationship cooled with the
Soviet Union
in his later years, he nevertheless cooperated with them
against
Apartheid South Africa. When Apartheid South
Africans invaded Angola, the progressive forces
worldwide united with
Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The forces of reaction
supported Apartheid South Africa and puppet groups like
the
National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and the
National Union for the Total Independent of Angola UNITA.
Washington
expressed its disappointment and irritation at Touré's
transgression and warned that it would affect relations
between the two countries. Touré was defiant, informing
the Soviet ambassador: "You have permanent and
unconditional permission to use Conakry airport for all
flights relating to Angola." How will history evaluates
Touré? I believe the revolutionary forces of the world
will hold him up as a person who was on the right side
of history.
As for Radio Netherlands, they are merely the mouth
piece for imperialism and history will reflect that the
word "Apartheid" is of Dutch origin.
Norman Richmond is a Toronto-based
writer/broadcaster/human rights activist. Richmond can
be heard on CKLN-FM 88.1
www.ckln.fm Thursday's on Diasporic Music 8pm to
10pm and Saturday's on Saturday Morning Live 10am to 1pm
He can be r eached
norman@ckln.fm
This e-mail address is being
protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to
view it
.
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
posted 22 October 2008
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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