Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution (African Systems of Thought)

Youth, Nationalism, and the

Guinean Revolution Jay

St r ak er

Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution

African Systems of Thought Ivan Karp, editor Contributing editors James W. Fernandez Luc de Heusch John Middleton Roy Willis

Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution Jay Straker

Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis

This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2009 by James D. Straker All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Straker, Jay, date Youth, nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution / Jay Straker. p. cm. — (African systems of thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-253-35288-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 9780-253-22059-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Youth—Guinea—Political activity—History—20th century. 2. Political socialization— Guinea—History—20th century. 3. Guinea—History— Autonomy and independence movements. 4. Guinea—Politics and government—1958–1984. 5. Guinea—Social conditions— 20th century. 6. Guinea—Social life and customs. 7. Social classes—Guinea—History—20th century. 8. Theater and state—Guinea—History—20th century. 9. Nationalism— Guinea—History—20th century. 10. Postcolonialism— Guinea. 11. Revolutions and socialism—Guinea. I. Title. HQ799.G97S73 2009 966.5205—dc22 2008027256 1 2 3 4 5 14 13 12 11 10 09

To my mother, father, stepfather, and Lisa

Contents Acknowledgments

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

1. Introduction: Whose Re-imagined Community? 1 Part 1. Imagining and Instituting a New Youth

17

2. Envisioning Youth across the Border of Independence 19 3. Ideologies of Schooling, Teachers’ Authority, and Cultural Revolution 56 4. The Rise of Militant Theater 80 Part 2. Ventures and Misadventures in the Revolutionary Forest 105 5. Construing and Constructing the Nation’s Margins: Troubles with the Forest and Forestiers

107

6. Forestier Itineraries across Revolutionary Pedagogical Domains 133 7. Forestier Stories of Militant Theater: Discovering the Motives and Moralities of a Revolutionary State 176 8. Conclusion: Nationalism and Memory after the Revolution 204 Notes 215 Bibliography Index

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249

Acknowledgments

Funding for my pre-dissertation trips to Conakry and N’Zérékoré in the summers of 1997 and 1998 came from Emory University’s Graduate School, Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, and Institute of African Studies. Funding for principal research conducted in Conakry, Dakar, and N’Zérékoré from 1999 to 2001 was provided by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. My personal debts are long. First I wish to think my main advisers, Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz. They were the key figures in the development of my dissertation project and the most intellectually productive period of my life: my three years of interdisciplinary graduate coursework at Emory from 1996 to 1999. More than excellent mentors, I have come to consider them very close friends. Many thanks to Edna Bay for her valued knowledge, coaching, generosity, and friendship. Thanks to Deepika Bahri and Valérie Loichot for guiding me toward various comparative perspectives, and for helping me see new connections between literary studies and other domains of social and historical inquiry. The types of teaching I dream of pursuing are strongly influenced by their examples. Thanks also to the broader community of African Studies scholars and activists at Emory from whom I learned so much, while having some of the best times of my life. Particular gratitude goes to Kate Winskell, Dan Enger, Joanna Davidson, and Mike McGovern. Within my family, I thank my stepfather and Lisa for their encouragement, generosity, and hospitality. Thanks to my mother and father, my favorite people and best friends, for affirming from day one that any difficulties I ever had would be fleeting, and that they would be my ardent, effective allies in any circumstance. They have encouraged and helped me study and travel as widely as possible, to do what I long to do. As the daughter of my closest friend in

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Acknowledgments

Guinea once told me, “You can never repay what your parents do for you. You just strive to give something back when you’re able.” Expressing my debts to my friends in Guinea is harder still. My life consists of two books. The second (open) one began in the summer of 1989, when I first traveled to Guinea as a Peace Corps volunteer. Almost twenty years later, I think daily of the exceptional lessons in kindness, cunning, resiliency, and resolve gained from my experiences and conversations there. I am grateful for all the chances I have had to return, and look forward to others still to come. Special thanks go to Alain Koivogui, Bonaventure Théa, Alimako Onivogui, Pépé Lamah, Bernard Koneh, and Marie Koivogui.

Abbreviations

AOF

Afrique Occidentale Française

CEP

Certificat d’Etudes Primaires

CER

Centre d’Etudes Révolutionnaires

ENP

Ecole Normale Pédagogique

JRDA

Jeunesse du Rasssemblement Démocratique Africain

PDG

Parti Démocratique de Guinée

RDA

Rassemblement Démocratique Africain

UAJG

L’Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée

Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution

SENEG A L G

ie R am b

MALI

.

Ni

ge

rR

.

Koundara

Ko

ga

. nR

Boké Télimélé

gR fin

Gaoual Tougué

Dinguiraye

Pita

. aR

Fria

Boffa

Siguiri

Labé

Kouroussa

Dalaba

t al Fa

Kamsar

Ba

Tominé R.

.

PORTUGUESE GUINEA

Mamou

Dabola Ouré Kaba

Mandiana Kankan Faranah

Kindia

Dubréka

té

SCES DU NIGER

le n

Forécariah

Ko

ILES DE LOS

R.

CONAKRY

SIER R A L EONE

Kissidougou Macenta

Bandu

AT L A N T IC OCE A N

Beyla

Nzérékoré Ganta

GUINEA

NIMBA MTS.

IVORY COAST

LIBER I A

Principal Roads Railroads 0

100 miles

Map 1. The Republic of Guinea

1 Introduction Whose Re-imagined Community? —Papa, Sékou is dead. —Who told you that? —Listen to what the prime minister is saying! —No! That is not possible.1

Speaking with me in 2001 Alphonse Béavogui2 thought back to a morning of late March 1984, when he first heard of Sékou Touré’s death. Alphonse was preparing for a routine workday at the primary education inspection offices in the remote Guinean forest town of Lola. His daughter must have been startled by Alphonse’s seeming denial. She was only telling him what voices from Conakry, more than a thousand kilometers away, were conveying over the radio. She had no way of grasping what such news could possibly mean to her stunned father, a forty-four-year-old man whose biography had become inextricably entangled with the nationalist dreams and decisions of the “supreme guide” of the Guinean revolution now declared dead. For twenty-six years, state transformative powers rooted in the figure of Touré had bent Alphonse’s life in myriad unforeseeable and resented ways. Yet, at the moment of portended release from Touré’s machinations, Alphonse felt no joy but rather an inexpressible vertigo. Touré’s invasive revolutionary politics had made Alphonse into a different kind of man than he in his youth had aspired to be. The ideal future he had envisioned for himself and the forest people and the places he loved were now forever unreachable, buried in the

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Youth, Nationalism, and the Guinean Revolution

passage of postcolonial time. Even so, memories of the local adventures and misadventures that Touré’s revolutionary nationalist programs had coerced him into might themselves be treated as an irreplaceable cultural heritage. Alphonse and I knew that only firsthand narratives and reflections could rescue the memories from oblivion and grant them the longer life they deserved. He knew that I desperately wanted to hear his stories. With time, I came to understand some of the meanings and pleasures he derived from their telling. No postcolonial regime took matters of youthful cultural development and authenticity more seriously than the one led by Sékou Touré from 1958 to 1984. After I had studied the president’s and other officials’ visions of an ideal, youthful nation-state, Alphonse and a host of other Guinean forestiers 3 told me what it was really like to live, learn, and teach in that generally malfunctioning imagined community. They explained what it meant to be a young provincial citizen from the late 1950s through the early 1980s; what it meant to be cast as an exemplary bearer of national integrity, anti-imperialism, cultural authenticity, and a radical, hope-filled future; what it meant to try to forge an optimal life with and against the tireless, tempestuous workings of state power. Many aspects of these unofficial portrayals of revolutionary life corresponded to dismal reports already circulating in Guinean and international publications. But other aspects of that life stunned me with their multifaceted complexity, ambivalence, and jarring differences from what had been published about popular experience under Touré. The decidedly offended or dejected tone of broad stretches of personal narrative I heard in the forest often seemed to foreclose any possibility of affection for Touré or the ideals of the revolution. But before such expressions of alienation crystallized into a decisive condemnatory verdict, countervailing reflections would suddenly intervene. Recollections of diverse meanings and pleasures forged in the midst of struggles with state authority would surge to the fore. The forestier stories disrupted categorical pronouncements on the fate of Guinean revolutionary nationalism in the country’s most remote, volatile region. In the process they raised a host of fascinating questions for research and writing on Guinea and a range of other postcolonial and post-socialist settings within and outside the continent. By the time I began conducting primary archival and field research for this book in 1999, writing on Guinea’s revolution had assumed an almost crystalline clarity. The story line emerging from most accounts of the first twenty-six years of national experience was tragically simple. For a few magical years, beginning in 1958 with the country’s solitary break from de Gaulle’s Communauté française, the charismatic Sékou Touré had fooled his fellow citizens and international leftists into embracing his commitment and capacity to inau-

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gurate a new kind of socialist-revolutionary nation—one of which all Africans, indeed all people opposed to colonialism, could be proud. Only a few years later, by the mid-1960s, his powers of deception faltered. Frustrated by varied social and material obstacles to his grand revolutionary plans, Touré turned his thwarted genius toward the invention of subtle and spectacular forms of despotism.4 These arts of totalitarianism became an overriding passion, a series of channels for him to confront his own and others’ disappointments, resentments, and continued yearning for decisive transformations of everyday life. Oppositional elites cowered, fled, or died in Conakry’s infamous Camp Boiro.5 Meanwhile, rural populations stagnated as former dreams of freedom and development driving the enthusiasm of 1958 buckled under the spirit-crushing routines of official militancy, administrative coercion, and economic penury. Imagining better prospects anywhere else, huge numbers of the masses crossed undocumented into neighboring Senegal, Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Only in 1984, with the despot’s abrupt death, did genuine opportunities for internal emancipation and development arise. Conveyed with varying levels of hatred for Touré, compassion for the real and alleged oppositionists he punished or killed, and concern for the struggling peasantry, this aggregate story line possesses elements of truth. Yet, like all modern meta-narratives seeking to encompass and articulate a broad spectrum of popular experience over a considerable time, this overarching story line of “the revolution” suffers from severe socio-historical limitations. Hailing possibilities for a new dispensation of unprecedented national progress directed by (formerly) oppositional elites, the dominant narrative’s political force relies on “abstractions” rather than recognitions of what the Indian scholar Ranajit Guha has called the “real historical personalities” of subgroups constituting the oppressed, underdeveloped “people.”6 Like an array of developmentalist discourses circulating throughout the Third World, Guinean counterrevolutionary representations of the recent past had, in turn, strategically cast these impoverished “abstractions” as the “raw material” on which transnational elite visions of progress must be “worked.”7 The stories forestiers told me spurred critical reflections on what is at stake in the writing of “national” history, particularly about a place like Guinea that has provoked such pitched levels of disillusionment and denunciation. The dramatic play of memory among a specific set of individuals from the country’s forested margins called for substantial re-conceptualizations of nationalist and ethnic consciousness within what has been called “the prison-house of Guinea.”8 Most of the storytellers featured in this book were too well educated to represent the rural masses, but were also too alienated by revolutionary

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and post-1984 counterrevolutionary politics to establish themselves as powerholding elites.9 Their marginalized, exotic, ethnic identity factored crucially into the complex ambiguity and contradictions of their sociopolitical stances. Forestier memories of the not-so-distant past, recounted at the threshold of a new century shrouded in political and socioeconomic uncertainties, revealed glaring inadequacies in dominant condemnatory portrayals of the boldest, most adventuresome, and ruthless years of Guinean nationalism and nation building. They disrupted the binary social divisions, Manichean ethics, and blanket denunciations that have structured and fueled Guinean politics and historiography after Sékou Touré’s dramatic ascent to power in 1958. Their twists and turns, the very passion with which they were told, shed light on complex realms of provincial experience and reflection that have simply never been addressed in official discourse or in duly critical, but thematically limited, oppositional writings. When considered in relation to the existing mix of revolutionary propaganda and counterrevolutionary castigations, the stories constitute jagged expressive “fragments”10 that cannot be integrated into existing historical tableaux without shattering their schematic, static images of popular experience.11 During her 1980s conversations with Chinese factory workers who had come of age during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, anthropologist Lisa Rofel encountered analogously surprising, disruptive expressions of individual and generational memory. By that time, politically dominant post-Maoist discourses were claiming that the lives of these workers had been egregiously damaged by the environment of violent militancy that encompassed their youth. Yet, against a broad backdrop of state- and popularly sanctioned condemnations of Maoism’s most brutal juncture, the workers in question—who had indeed suffered from the late-1960s reforms—defied the validity of the reigning appraisals of their lives. [Various accounts] of the Cultural Revolution . . . objectify, clean up, make the past something one can hold on to while maintaining a comforting sense of the rationality of it all. Certainly the dominant versions of the Cultural Revolution ease the way for post-Mao reform. But the memories of the Cultural Revolution I encountered cannot be so easily contained. These memories tell other stories that challenge self-contained narratives. They are not “truer” recollections of the past, but narrative representations that construct knowledge about the past. As such, they create a politics of memory that leave open the closures that official political culture, intellectuals’ memoirs, and the social science literature attempt to impart to the Cultural Revolution.12

Going against the grain of dominant political discourse, Rofel’s interlocutors refused to see themselves as figures rendered abject by the brutalities of Maoist

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militancy.13 Likewise, the forestiers featured in this book refused to depict the complexity of their past experiences and personal character within the rigid interpretive frameworks advanced in prevalent oppositional commentaries. They spoke differently, with greater particularity and intensity, about the mercurial workings, sociocultural meanings, and moral effects of Touré’s often ruthless regime, excavating valuable knowledge from even the most trying years of Guinea’s own Socialist Cultural Revolution.14 Their alternative memories developed for cultural and historical reasons distinct from those Rofel observed, with different pressures and motivations at play. A grasp of these specific historical and psychosocial dynamics is crucial for an enriched understanding of the forest region, revolutionary Guinea, and contemporary Africa in the age of “the postcolony” and “Afro-pessimism.”15

The Battle-Scarred Landscape of Guinean Postcolonial Historiography For those craving the dramatic, one of Guinea’s appeals is surely the sheer intensity of the bitterness that its revolutionary history provoked among different citizens and international onlookers. Since gaining independence and entering its self-designated revolutionary era in 1958, Guinean nationalist politics have either completely enthralled or appalled most influential observers inside and outside the country. Most who have made any contribution to the corpus of writing on postcolonial Guinea have written with glowing enthusiasm or unremitting rancor.16 Intellectuals’ responses to the country’s postcolonial (under)development have generally been so visceral that they have felt little need to compare their views with those of diverse non-elites busy making do, avoiding mishaps, and seeking opportunities amid the many ventures in revolution and nation building. Writing on Guinea has typically been in the form of a monologue rather than a dialogue, let alone “polyphonic.”17 Perhaps no country has generated a historiographic record so thin in measured analysis and commentary, and so comparably rich in vituperative condemnation and defensiveness. How did such a small, seemingly undistinguished patch of the French empire become a source of such venomous views? Much of the answer lies in the political career of a single, complicated, and (for a great many) unforgettable man: Ahmed Sékou Touré, born in the Guinean savanna region of Farannah in 1922. For five decades the bulk of writing on postcolonial Guinea has centered on the words and actions of Touré, the nation’s charismatic leader from the advent of independence in 1958 until his death in 1984. Leader of the militant Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), and the most visible player in Guinea’s startling rise to nationhood, Touré

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leaped onto the international political stage with dramatic brio. His image flourished in the wake of Guineans’ massive rejection of membership in de Gaulle’s Communauté française at ballot stations throughout the country on the henceforth sanctified day of September 28, 1958.18 It was a bold, solitary “no” that resounded, and continues to resound, throughout the continent and much of the African diaspora. Touré was just thirty-six years old when his presidency began. The flamboyant leader’s penchant for Manichean oppositions and hyperbole decisively shaped the thematic parameters and rhetorical style through which the entirety of Guinean revolutionary experience has been addressed, by supporters and critics alike. In December 1959, just over a year into his presidency, the influential panAfrican publishing house Présence Africaine published a special issue on “Guinée Indépendante,” in which Touré was hailed by figures including Présence founder Alioune Diop,19 the poets Aimé Césaire and Jaques Rabemananjara, and the French historian Jean Suret-Canale. Contributors cited Touré’s spellbinding speeches and writings as authentic, authoritative depictions of the historical facts and collective spirit moving Guinea toward a militantly anticolonial, revolutionary model of nation building. Coverage also included a series of revolutionary songs originally composed in local languages. The Guinean historian Djibril Tamsir Niane introduced the songs, their sources, and their main themes. Yesterday the “civilized” African sung softly about his sorrows. He complained to the wind to whoever might want to listen. He sang in French or else in English. Today it’s the voices of the dwellers of the bush that we are going to make heard. Those who far from any school, far from all snobbery, have always drawn from the original source. It’s the voice of those who have suffered in silence, it’s the voice of the peasant, it’s the voice of the little people, the voice of the laboring people of Guinea that sings its faith in the future, its trust in its leader. These songs most often spring spontaneously from the masses. They are born each new day. . . . Here we have grouped some songs from the Coast, from the Fouta, and from Upper Guinea. This selection, very limited, nevertheless demonstrates the general extent of the poetic effusion blossoming all across the territory of Guinea in the wake of the Referendum.20

At this early postcolonial juncture, only minimal gaps existed between the images of Guinean politics and society that elite anticolonial intellectuals produced for international audiences and internal media coverage of contemporary affairs. No figure of influence within Guinea seemed willing or able to counter the dominant construction of Touré as an anticolonial hero leading a daring venture in nation building. The earliest scars in these representations formed in late 1961, when state

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forces cracked down brutally on Conakry students and teachers staging protests against local educational policies. Teachers were accused of continuing loyalty to delusive colonialist ideologies of education and, even worse, willfully transmitting those loyalties to their young charges, enticing them toward anti-national sensibilities and actions. By 1965, after a coup attempt known as “the traders’ plot,” the state leadership had completely severed ties with France and implemented intense surveillance of the local intelligentsia.21 A series of applied and envisioned pedagogical reforms within and beyond schooling reflected Touré’s increasing desire to rid the country of the Eurocentric knowledge exhibited by local intellectuals trained within the French colonial system. After one of his colleagues at the National Institute of Research and Documentation was arrested for political crimes and detained in Conakry’s infamous Camp Boiro, Guinea’s most famous literary artist, Camara Laye, left for Dakar, feigning a need for special medical treatment. He never returned to Guinea. The ensuing publication of his novel, Dramouss,22 a thinly veiled attack on contemporary Guinean sociopolitical affairs, fully announced Touré’s career as tyrant rather than hero.23 Touré’s 1968 declaration of a “Socialist Cultural Revolution” vowing intensified transformations of national economic and cultural processes, followed by his purging of scores of Guineans suspected of involvement in a 1970 Portuguese military invasion, alienated many remaining supporters while increasing the ire of opponents. By the early 1970s, state-controlled media casting Touré as hero bore little if any resemblance to what was being said about him by most Guinean and non-Guinean intellectuals living outside the country. In his prizewinning 1972 work, Le Cercle des Tropiques, the Guinean novelist Alioum Fantouré, writing in Europe, portrayed his homeland as a pathological dictatorship where imperious state agents ruled over a stagnant majority whose spiritual, intellectual, and physical faculties had been blunted by years of propaganda, intimidation, and deprivation.24 Writing in a different vein but to similar ends, Lansiné Kaba, teaching in the United States, published an important 1976 article titled “The Cultural Revolution, Artistic Creativity, and Freedom of Expression in Guinea.” Kaba cast the late 1960s as a threshold dividing an initial, relatively progressive chapter of political and cultural vigor from a subsequent (open) chapter marked by Touré’s voracious quest for control over all forms of symbolic and material action within the country. Like Fantouré, Kaba meant to leave no doubt of the completeness of Guinea’s slide into despotism or its leader’s power to bring the whole nation down with him.25 Touré’s death and the abrupt dismantling of his party-state in 1984 spurred little change in the evaluations of his leadership and his overall impact on the nation. On the fortieth anniversary of independence, the Guinean historian

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Sidiki Kobélé Kéita published a book-length biography that sought to restore Touré to the glorious status he had enjoyed at the height of his anticolonial fame.26 However, most of the postmortem writing on Touré sustained the deeply condemnatory tone of the 1970s.27 In a particularly searing indictment casting Touré as a terrifying executor of Frantz Fanon’s calls for anticolonial violence, the American literary scholar Christopher Miller framed Guinea as a territorial “prison-house,” the ultimate example of a “monological” state where any notion of pluralism or counterperspective simply failed to matter. 28 In the process of damning Touré, however, Miller made an error exemplifying the totalizing thought that he himself sought to combat. Just as Fanon’s writing denied “colonized people any history but that of oppression,”29 so, too, did Miller enshrine oppression as the transcendent theme around which all discussions of Guinean revolutionary experience had to revolve. In so doing, he slotted the masses into an abject state and thus curbed rather than fostered possibilities for understanding the real complexity of past experiences and current memories across Guinea’s vast and varied interior.

Other Pathways into Revolutionary Experience Echoing well-documented patterns in global developmentalist discourse,30 most Guinean oppositional texts characterize the prototypical revolutionaryera provincial subject as a one-dimensional figure concerned almost wholly with material survival, a person lacking any noteworthy capacities of imagination, thought, or synthesis—still less any type of comparative, cosmopolitan critical consciousness. The localities where this emblematic figure resided have been depicted as correspondingly dormant, utterly dependent on external forces for any dynamism or meaningful change.31 However, the poverty of such rudimentary sketches is revealed by only the briefest spell of fieldwork in the Guinean interior and a few discussions with local adults. Revolutionary ideologies and policies changed Guinean biographies and communities, quite often for the worse, but they did not empty the latter of socio-cultural complexity or make them any less worthy subjects of rigorous socio-historical investigation. The workings of the revolutionary state are typically cast as purely prohibitive, an ensemble of constraining impositions. This emphasis on rigidity masks the role that increasingly aggressive state incursions into communal life simultaneously played in forging historically novel forms and fields of sociopolitical action and thought. The tempestuous workings of authoritarian power can be seen to have expanded rather than reduced the range of materials on which individual memory could subsequently work, as individuals strove at different points in their lives to capture the meanings and values of particular ordeals

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and pleasures that were churned up, often unintentionally, by the ideas and actions of zealous revolutionaries. These extended horizons of experience and possibilities for critical thought have vividly shaped the social identities and historical imagination of youths who came of age during the revolution. The same holds true for the educators who were responsible for these youths’ cultural growth, political training, and physical contributions to national development. These youths and teachers were the social actors who wrestled most directly with burdens imposed by increasingly militant projections of ideal citizenship, material productivity, and cultural rehabilitation. In a polemical dynamic that resembles post-Mao political debate in China, Guinean oppositional texts seeking to explain what went wrong under “the revolution” have focused mainly on the irrationality, hypocrisy, and injustice of former state discourses and policies.32 The most compelling evidence for these arguments has come from the symbolic and literal wounds infl icted upon local intellectuals who were brave enough to confront and criticize Touré’s insatiable hunger for power. As in China, one can speak of a surge of “scar literature”33 composed by direct victims of Touré’s vengeance seeking to document for all time the dictator’s malevolence.34 Undertaken in a very different spirit and with different aims, this book pursues a far broader, multilayered exploration of the career of radical political visions and individual experience throughout postcolonial Guinea. My comparative theoretical compass and methodologies draw from scholars who have effectively combated the absolute, teleological narratives of local, national, and transnational history. Alternative readings of socio-historical change and confl ict developed by figures ranging from literary scholars Raymond Williams and Mikhail Bakhtin to Subaltern Studies pioneers Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee strongly inform this book’s attempts to enrich understandings of the intellectual roots and acutely uneven effects of various transformative visions embraced and imposed by Sékou Touré. The inadequacies of reigning notions of Touré’s revolution as an epoch about which one can draw eloquent conclusions become evident as previously marginalized perspectives and voices—all advancing richly textured, often ambivalent observations on the local workings of state power—are brought into the broader analytical picture.35 The result is a greatly expanded perception of the multiplicity of modalities and sites through which revolutionary politics operated, as well as the meanings ascribed to them by Guineans across distinct historical conjunctures, communities, and social positions. The various materials employed and juxtaposed across the chapters— including official political tracts, state and popular newspapers, educational journals, novels, poems, plays, photographs, and personal histories—reveal

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many confl icting viewpoints on revolutionary times, places, and selves. Only through examining particular resonances and tensions in such diverse texts and perspectives can a richer understanding emerge of the stakes for specific groups of Guineans as Touré’s vision of an ideal youthful nation surged to the fore of political thought (in the early sixties), grew increasingly experimental and aggressive (across the sixties and seventies), and then subsided quickly with his death in 1984. The range of materials and viewpoints encountered and analyzed cuts across the constraints of conventional disciplinary boundaries and their characteristic approaches to “power” and “resistance.”36 This more integrative, interdisciplinary orientation spurs new viewpoints on the forces that drive revolutionary political visions, alongside their unanticipated effects on diversely situated Guineans’ lives. The book begins by chronicling the ascent of Guinean youth to center stage of nationalist politics. The three chapters comprising part 1—“Imagining and Instituting a New Youth”—follow a series of turns in official pedagogical thought and action that cast young people as increasingly pivotal protagonists in a host of scripts envisioning radical transformations of Guinean towns, villages, and countryside. The chapters build upon one another to convey the unfolding complexity of specific visions of youth social dynamics and ideal development as they competed and diverged in the fi nal years of Guinée française and the first decade of the Popular Revolutionary Republic. They cast alternative light on Touré as a political thinker and strategist. Instead of framing the young president as a figure seduced by his own passion for domination, they present him as a responsive, often beleaguered political artisan striving to come to terms with a youth-centered social dynamic whose origins and trajectories seemed beyond his control. They demonstrate the profound impact that the material conditions, social conduct, and yearnings of diverse groups of youths had on Touré’s political imagination. Observations of youth around the country across the threshold of independence induced some of Touré’s worst nightmares of neocolonial mimicry, material selfishness, and popular reticence as he faced the formidable tasks essential to nation building. Yet, during the same period, more sanguine observations inspired some of the president’s effusive visions of the birth of a radiant national culture proudly embodied by rising groups of youths. Distinguished by their moral integrity, political ardor, and cultural enthusiasm, Guinean revolutionary youth—so Touré dreamed— would soon be admired and emulated throughout the pan-African world.37 Chapter 2 examines youth-centered commentaries advanced by French colonialists, liberal Guinean intellectuals, and ascending militants like Touré who ultimately strove to demolish both colonialist and liberal notions of op-

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timal youth development. In the midst of this wave of cultural attacks, Touré promoted unschooled and modestly educated rural youth to the highest rungs of the nation-building mission, precisely because of their minimal contact with French educational institutions and metropolitan cultural goods. Fueled by deeply felt anxieties and antagonism toward the intellectual elitism and Eurocentrism bred by colonial schooling, pedagogical reforms undertaken in the first decade of independence sought a thorough transformation of the historical consciousness, cultural sensibilities, and future aspirations of local youth. The revolutionary leadership hoped to create young African nationalists whose capacities and mentalities would distinguish them sharply from preceding generational cohorts who suffered the ill fortune of coming of age in a social environment contorted by French colonial power. The birth of this new youth would assure that the socioeconomic dynamics of the nation diverged radically from those that had deformed Guinée française. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the logic, contradictions, and modifications of a range of reforms instituted by the postcolonial state as it strove to combat the perceived flaws and to mobilize the virtues of the nation’s urban and rural, schooled and unschooled youth. They track two related story lines—one centered on the politics of schooling, the other on the politics of theater—that germinated from the leadership’s desperate desire to reorganize and reform youth in ways that would catalyze the emergence of an integrated, morally and culturally rehabilitated, nation. The revolutionary regime heavily criticized the effects of colonial schooling on the mind-sets and conduct of urban elite youths coming of age at the threshold of independence. At the same time officials hoped that forms and themes of instruction occurring in local schools might be remodeled in ways that could quickly multiply the numbers of Guinean youth both devoted to, and technically capable of, instituting substantial socio-cultural changes and material advances in their native communities. Chapter 3 tracks the complicated story of the revolutionary regime’s tireless, contested, and unevenly successful attempts to decolonize the constituent experiences and outcomes of schooling at a historical juncture where the number of students, teachers, and schools throughout the country was skyrocketing. At the same time that schooling reforms were drawing off so much of the new state’s energies and resources, other quite different developments were emerging around what revolutionaries chose to call “militant theater.” Chapter 4 explores the factors guiding the stunning rise of theater, encompassing a vast network of annual multi-genre performance competitions, to fervent political praise. In a remarkable turn of events, theater competitions gradually

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displaced school grounds as the revolution’s most prized sites for forging and exhibiting the radicalism of youth. Much to the regime’s delight, theater mobilized young voices and bodies in the creation, refi nement, and dissemination of dramatic plays, dances, and music heralding the superior moral integrity and cultural brilliance of revolutionary Guinea, (ideally) diverting popular attention away from the state’s failures to improve the well-being of much of the citizenry. Part 1 juxtaposes the observations, anxieties, and transformative desires of French and Guinean intellectuals and politicians powerful enough to have their views on Guinean affairs broadcast through print media and recorded public speeches. These individuals were based almost exclusively in the coastal capital of Conakry, though they commonly claimed to speak for the good of the entire territory/nation. Critical listening to their words—wavering from bold and optimistic to faltering and disillusioned—is crucial for understanding the historical career of Guinean nationalist cultural politics, and the cardinal importance of youth within that political realm. Yet such voices, no matter how painstakingly analyzed, can only take us so far toward grasping how the radical reforms of the revolutionary years shaped the lives and sensibilities of Guinea’s first postcolonial population of youths. To achieve a more detailed picture of the real complexity of the revolutionary era as a mosaic of interactive, conflicting social fragments, one must venture away from officialdom and the Conakry intelligentsia, and address more secluded domains of action, representation, and memory across the vast and varied interior of the country. It is no accident that the country’s remote région forestière became a primary site for uniquely aggressive stagings of state power. Nor is it accidental that these elaborate exhibitions of nationalist authority triggered exceptional degrees of local resistance, excitement, and ambivalence, along with reflections—still vivid today in the minds of many forestiers—on the meaning and value of the entire revolutionary saga. Addressing pivotal questions provoked, but unanswered, by the literary materials of the early chapters, part 2—“Ventures and Misadventures in the Revolutionary Forest”—explores the complex dynamism of cultural identities and political allegiances in Guinea’s most sociologically complicated, volatile region. Its chapters explore how young people in this region encountered, understood, and negotiated revolutionary measures bent on transforming their educational routines, social interactions with peers and elders, and orientations toward local ethnic traditions. Revolutionary pedagogical reforms triggered multiple, multifaceted disruptions of local life everywhere in Guinea. For various reasons—geographical, ecological, cultural, and religious—the southeastern forest marked the most tumultuous battleground in the state’s

Introduction

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13

efforts to proclaim and enforce its authoritarian power over the cultural and political development of all Guinean youths. Chapters 5 through 7 explore the dramatic entry of revolutionary politics into forest communities and their uneven effects on the individual lives of local youth. Chapter 5 surveys the multiple factors that structured the region’s liminal status as a troubling fragment of the nation, both in the general Guinean sociological imagination and, more particularly, in the minds of exceptionally influential Muslim Malinké-speaking elites like Sékou Touré. It traces the central events and long-term fallout of a brutal “demystification campaign” waged throughout forest communities from 1959 to 1961, involving the destruction of “fetishes” and other ritual objects central to the cultural and religious heritage of the region. Over the course of this campaign, various strata of state-backed militants strove to eliminate the material and psychosocial bases of long-standing Poro and Sande initiation traditions seen as egregiously primitive and antithetical to new nationalist development objectives that centered on youth. By 1961 thousands of these religious artifacts had been destroyed. During the same period, local elders responsible for initiation and other communal ritual regimens were publicly humiliated or officially tried for upholding “fetishism” and defying “demystification.” The trauma provoked by all these affairs was exacerbated by the ethnic identities of the attacking “militants,” a great many of whom represented the forest’s main “indigenous” ethno-linguistic groups—Kissi, Loma, Kpelle, and Kono—commonly grouped together under the ethnonym forestier. The impassioned involvement of youthful “insiders”—forestiers themselves—underscored the fragility, or outright failing, of traditional processes of social reproduction, and the emergence of an era where shared ethnic affiliation no longer provided a solid basis for mutual understanding or trust. Chapters 6 and 7 feature a series of personal recollections on what it was like to come of age as a forestier in the years just before, during, and after the massive demystification assault. Beyond generating portrayals of postdemystification youth consciousness in the forest, the narratives of these two chapters highlight local youths’ experiences of nationalist schooling reforms and militant theater programs that pressured them constantly, altering individual biographies in many unpredictable ways. Forestier accounts of revolutionary ventures and misadventures illuminate various, little-studied dimensions of the workings and misfirings of state power, as well as local individuals’ evolving perceptions of the revolution’s meanings for personal, familial, and communal histories across the region. The accounts heighten awareness of the troubles and fears created by the country’s ethnic and religious diversity—exhibited most poignantly in the forest—among revo-

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lutionary elites who, like Sékou Touré, were almost exclusively Muslim and deeply influenced by the Malinké cultural traditions of Guinea’s northeastern savanna. This engagement with the antagonistic interplay of ethnic identities is crucial for exploding mythic nationalist portrayals of Guinea—advanced in both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary discourses—as a territory harboring just two fundamental types of people: power-holding elites and the rural masses. A far greater number of meaningful social categories and affiliations contributed to the construction of the postcolonial nation and distinct “nation-views” within it. 38 Far from portraying predominately forestier communities as unified and uniform in their opposition to (Malinké) nationalism, the personal narratives of part 2 highlight the salience of socio-cultural distinctions within and across these very communities over the twenty-six years of the revolution. Recounted almost exclusively by individuals who attained educational levels far above the regional average, the stories underscore the fact that schooled and unschooled youth struggled with revolutionary power in profoundly different ways. Though subject to many unenviable ordeals, students generally avoided the most brutal revolutionary treatment that many young people suffered. These treatments included the abduction, sexual harassment, and beating of rural girls under the official guise of theater “recruitment” and “rehearsal.”39 Comparatively privileged in objective terms, contemporary students were also in favorable positions to witness the multiplicity of sites and strategies through which the state tried to exert its authority over local youth and entire communities. Students’ testimonies also bear witness to shifts in the relative importance of such sites and strategies over time. Students who began schooling after the “Socialist Cultural Revolution” of 1968 negotiated a more elaborate and draining pedagogical regimen than students who began schooling ten or even five years earlier. Teachers, too, wrestled with very different sets of professional and political burdens as increasingly militant educational reforms took hold. Inhabiting a zone removed from many forms of material exploitation endured by local peasants, but buried under the weight of official doctrine and multilayered pedagogical pressures constantly circulating within and around schools, forestier students and their teachers developed particularly sharp observations and assessments of the compulsiveness, ruthlessness, recklessness, and (sometimes) aesthetic and emotional splendor of the incursions of revolutionary politics into local life. Their memories of the era, combining sentiments ranging from visceral resentment to nationalist fervor, reflect and sustain the complexity of the places and time in which they came of age, or began their professional careers, or both. The very ways that the storytellers

Introduction

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15

frame, convey, and interpret their narratives showcase the distinctively multifaceted, responsive, agile, stubborn, and contradictory characteristics that forestiers fashioned over the course of the revolution. Like individual reflections collected in socialist-totalitarian settings ranging from China to Romania, the forestier stories “speak bitterness” and lay claim to “moral suffering.”40 Outlining intertwining fields of power and resistance, they produce vivid knowledge of mercurial nationalists and their politics, and the ways such actors and measures could be evaded, neutralized, bitterly endured, or selectively appropriated when consonant with yearnings for a better life. Yet the stories are much more than accounts of partially successful or doomed tactical maneuvers. They are active reflections on the protean character and “intimacy”41 of state power and “the revolution.” They revisit and interrogate the shifting, surprising power of an authoritarian “other’s” politics and cultural visions to infiltrate the core of the storyteller’s own marginalized, alienated spirit, in a process demonstrating both the embattled integrity and altered composition of the autobiographical “self.” It was amid pervasive political disillusionment and nearby cross-border violence that this book’s primary storytellers shared the youthful perceptions and ordeals that had made them into the kind of adult citizens they had become. Any faith in the moral integrity or socioeconomic visions of the nation’s second ruler, General Lansana Conté, had died. Meanwhile, this former “liberator” set his sights on a third decade in office. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, few countries, it would seem, could brandish a more miserable history of decolonization and nation building than Guinea.42 Few countries, one might further contend, could more directly confirm the validity of “Afro-pessimist” verdicts on the depth of the continent’s sociopolitical maladies, or the accuracy of incinerating critiques of the African “postcolony.” The memories awakened by the narrators, however, troubled rather than confirmed the bleak reports and prognoses advanced by various strands of Afro-pessimist thought. The reasons and stakes of their disruption of a more nihilistic historiography are addressed at various points in part 2, and are considered more fully in the conclusion. In anticipation of these later discussions, and another book to be written, it suffices to say that the narrators’ resentments toward Sékou Touré’s nationalism had not prevented them from becoming nationalists themselves. They harbored dreams of the emergence of a distinctive nation, or forested sub-nation, from the wreckage of “the postcolony.” Revolutionary-era experiences factored heavily, both negatively and positively, in imaginings of another political dispensation to be marked by very different economic, social, and moral relations. Staunchly critical observations of post-

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revolutionary youth figured centrally in formulations of desirable change and rehabilitated communities. Having spent their own most formative years at the front lines of nationalist pedagogical battles, the narrators had not forgotten Touré’s most compulsively reiterated lesson: the fate of all transformative visions hinges ultimately upon youth.

Part 1 Imagining and Instituting a New Youth

2 Envisioning Youth across the Border of Independence

One of the most fascinating features of anticolonial nationalisms across the world has been their transformation of some of the humblest members of local society into icons of the moral valor and stakes of revolt against the dominant imperial regime. Frantz Fanon was perhaps the most eloquent twentiethcentury proponent of the necessity of launching marginalized, overlooked colonial subjects into the forefront of plans for anticolonial struggle, national sovereignty, and nation building. Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms the spectator crushed to a nonessential state into a privileged actor, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History. It infuses a new rhythm, specific to a new generation of men, with a new language and a new humanity. Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation. Its defi nition can, if we want to describe it accurately, be summed up in the well-known words: “The last shall be first.”1

In some of the most important work on Third World nationalisms since Fanon, Partha Chatterjee has argued that anticolonial assaults on imperial power throughout Asia and Africa have been driven by the specification and strengthening of shared commitments among people of a colonized territory to defending the cultural and spiritual practices that underpin the integrity of local society against the political machinations of colonialist outsiders. Colo-

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nialists dominated subjugated zones through superior material force, technical capacity, and politico-economic organization, but these “triumphs” would prove fleeting as long as the essential sources and symbols of local collective cultural identity retained their vigor. Offering the configuration and career of nationalism in colonial India as an emblematic drama of anticolonial ideals and strategies, Chatterjee writes: The discourse of nationalism shows that the material/spiritual distinction was condensed into an analogous, but far more powerful, dichotomy: that between the outer and the inner. The material domain, argued nationalist writers, lies outside us. . . . Ultimately it is unimportant. The spiritual, which lies within, is our true self; it is that which is genuinely essential. It followed that as long as India took care to retain the spiritual distinctiveness of its culture, it could make all the compromises and adjustments necessary to adapt itself to the requirements of a modern material world without losing its true identity.2

Further exploring the internal logic and unfolding of Indian nationalism, Chatterjee traces the emergence of women as icons of the nation-in-themaking. He details how images of women’s ideal conduct within the spiritually impregnable confi nes of the Indian home provided Indian (male) nationalists the cultural conviction and confidence they needed to wage their successful, often morally compromising, tactical war on the British. In a gendered division of labor necessitated by Britain’s material domination of India, elite Indian men entered fields of mundane struggle aimed at transforming reigning power relations. Their lives and personal characters were thus inevitably entangled with British ways of seeing, speaking, and acting in the world. These entanglements compromised claims they might have previously made to spiritual detachment and cultural integrity in the face of the imperial yoke. As men immersed themselves in treacherous political matters, women were asked to take a fundamentally different path through which they would retain and exhibit incontrovertible marks of India’s deep-rooted spiritual and cultural differences from the West. The spirituality of her character had to be stressed in contrast with the innumerable ways men had to surrender to the pressure of the material world. The need to adjust to the new conditions outside the home had forced upon men a whole series of changes in their dress, food habits, religious observances, and social relations. Each of these capitulations now had to be compensated for by an assertion of the spiritual purity of women. They must not eat, drink, or smoke in the same way as men; they must continue the observance of religious rituals that men were fi nding difficult to carry out; they must maintain the cohesiveness of family life and solidarity with kin to which men could not now devote much at-

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tention. The new patriarchy advocated by nationalism conferred upon women the honor of a new social responsibility, and by associating the task of female emancipation with the historical goal of sovereign nationhood, bound them to a new, and yet entirely legitimate, subordination.3

I cite Fanon’s and Chatterjee’s work because of their mutual affi nities and importance in shaping contemporary colonial and postcolonial studies,4 and also because their analyses and conjectures on “the emerging nation” contrast so sharply with the ways that nationalism and notions of exemplary citizenship evolved in Guinea. Much has been made of interconnections between Fanon’s anticolonial militancy and the visions of decolonization espoused and enforced by Sékou Touré.5 The extent of these connections has been exaggerated. The field of brutal conflict shaping the Algerian nationalism studied so intensely by Fanon bears minimal resemblance to what was happening at the same time in Guinea. Rhetorically, Fanon and Touré were kindred spirits, but despite their common membership in the French empire, the political and cultural landscapes in which they dwelled and dreamed were worlds apart. Even more glaring are the differences between Guinean nationalism and Chatterjee’s conclusions. In contrast to the Indian case, one fi nds in the initial emergence of Guinean nationalism a remarkable lack of confidence about both the defining characteristics of national culture and which subjects might most authentically embody it. The clarity of the Indian nationalist vision on these matters was replaced in the early stages of Guinean nationalism by rather clouded, contradictory perceptions and projections. There were more yearnings for, than clear renderings of, an ideal nation-bearing and nation-building subject.6 This chapter traces the suspenseful emergence of Guinean nationalism’s iconic subject: rural youth. It sheds alternative light on some of Fanon’s and Chatterjee’s central observations on common features of anticolonial nationalisms. In the process it highlights the adversarial and often contradictory elements of the social themes and communicative forms that inspired and structured the rise of nationalist politics in Guinea. Though Guinean leader Sékou Touré has been both celebrated and scorned for the kind of vengeful speed with which he adopted many of his most combative reform measures, the conditions driving the radicalization of Guinean nationalist politics did not occur in a flash. The calls for increasingly “revolutionary” pedagogical practices and socio-cultural militancy among youth, which became defining traits of Guinean nationalist politics, developed from a longer antagonistic process, encompassing several distinct phases that were themselves shaped by various symbolic and material stakes. This chapter explores the complex history of the fascination of Guinean

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revolutionary nationalism with rural youth, and describes how these youth came to be collectively prized and praised as the country’s ideal nation-making subjects. This narrative of the quest for an exemplary young nationalist persona involves a series of local visions of socio-cultural development and citizenship that was articulated in the tumultuous period between 1950 and 1961. The first crucial vision examined here belonged to the ambitious, imaginative (within limits) mid-century governor of Guinée française, Roland Pré. The fi nal one comes from Conakry newspaper coverage of the Guinean postcolonial state’s first major youth-triggered political crisis, a teachers’ strike led by local students in 1961. In looking into these two instances that offer contrasting pedagogical viewpoints, there arise two intermediary textual portrayals of young Guineans’ lives. The central portion of the discussion compares the ideal schema of youth development and citizenship that was promoted in a late-colonial elite oppositional newspaper to the schema advanced in the first book-length study of postcolonial Guinean politics and sociology among the nation’s youth, authored by Sékou Touré less than five years later. Each of these visionary texts offers poignant snapshots of dramatic changes in observations and imaginings of Guinean youth. Through them, one can see and make sense of the turn toward rural youth as the most promising heroes of the entire nation-imagining, nation-building, and nation-governing adventure.

A Governor’s “Programme” In November 1950 the chief administrator of Guinée française, Governor Roland Pré, delivered a major policy statement to the territorial assembly in Conakry later transcribed and titled “Un Programme pour le développement social de la Guinée française.” Pré’s writings, which included a fascinating, impassioned book-length study of Guinea’s long-term socioeconomic prospects under French rule,7 attest poignantly to vigorous reformist impulses, but also hesitations and contradictions that haunted late-colonialist imaginings of ideal African subjects and communities. The Programme is an exceptionally clear, compact statement of the nature and limitations of the French authorities’ visions of Guinean society and of the sensibilities of youth at the threshold of a decade of dramatic changes that would ultimately end French rule over the territory. The first striking aspect of the Programme is that it carves Guinean society into three social realms, without much consideration of their possible interrelations. These categories were “the populations of the bush, those of our rapidly growing towns, and those of these young elite évolués being born in Guinea today.”8 Territorial society was never seen as a whole but always

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through this tripartite schema. The Programme’s other most striking aspect is its highly uneven portrayal of the relevance of differently situated youths for understanding the sociological dynamics of each of the three realms. Though demographically superior to their urban counterparts, whose behaviors both fascinated and disgusted Pré, the plight of rural youth is almost completely ignored. It is only school-attending urban elites, constituting a tiny fraction of the population, who are deemed ready to grasp the true possibilities of Pré’s vision of a “new Guinea” beginning “to spring to life in 1950.” 9 No form of collective consciousness or sense of shared historical struggle is accorded to Guinean youth as a whole. Imagining Guinean youth as a unified, or potentially unified, collective actor was irrelevant to Pré’s effort to map the most salient features of the territory’s present conditions and possible futures. In a study of representations of African youth and Africa’s future in French literature of the 1920s and 1930s, Janòs Riesz has shown that, for writers of the period, “the future is there, only it is entirely on the side of the European and European youth. African youth can only be the object of this future-turned work: object of civilization, of education, of military training, of philanthropic care.” Contrasting these literary depictions of African youth with contemporary depictions of French youth, Riesz states that, whereas in the latter texts, “the state of youth and infancy is a state or passage leading to a future of responsibility and self-determination,” the former texts suggest that “African youth leads nowhere, or only to a state of ‘big child’ under European domination.”10 References to youth in Pré’s Programme, delivered a decade after the closing point of Riesz’s study, avoid the kind of blatant imperialist and racist stereotypes highlighted by the literary scholar. Yet it is unclear how distinct Pré’s perspectives on Guinean youth actually were from those prevalent in the interwar literary works. Did Pré as territorial governor, in contrast to earlier French writers, think of African youth experience—beyond a special circle of young evolués—as a “state of passage” opening onto significant sociopolitical responsibilities? Or did he consider it a period of life having only physiological importance, taking the individual no further toward critical intelligence and independently conceived action than he had been capable of as a child? The questions are particularly relevant regarding the first socio-demographic realm addressed by Pré, “traditional rural society.” “In its immense majority,” the governor observed, “our Guinean population still lives in bush villages that have only been grazed by contact with the modern world. It has conserved practically intact its traditional social structure, its chiefs, its beliefs, its customs.” Any notable effects of French authority on local social dynamics had been positive. Liberty and justice had increased

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under colonial rule, but without transforming rural communities in any fundamental way. “The peasant society,” Pré assured the assembly, “remains for the most part solid: it is suited to the state of evolution of its inhabitants; it also helps them enjoy the benefits of conditions of security and solidarity that emanate naturally, in rural life, from traditional links to family and tribe.”11 These lyrical, celebratory images of organic social cohesion in the countryside, however, clashed with Pré’s view of the material challenges facing the same rural communities. Although the state of psychosocial equilibrium in peasant society was admirable, its members nonetheless lived very poorly, “often in particularly precarious nutritional conditions,” owing to the persistence of ancestral agricultural practices in an era of population growth ushered in by France’s establishment of regional peace. For Pré, Guinea’s peasants were essentially good people pursuing their material survival in highly misguided, primitive ways. The rural aims outlined in his Programme were relatively simple, but the stakes were high, for wrong steps in implementing rural reform could destroy social customs underpinning political stability in the vast interior. “How,” Pré asks, “can we develop the living standard without overturning the [life] structure?”12 The sociological aims of Pré’s vision of rural reform are of greater interest than its more technical and logistical recommendations. Though the governor in many respects matches the profile of the late-colonial, pro-development “modernizing bureaucrat” sketched by Frederick Cooper,13 he argued repeatedly for the maintenance, even intensification, of standing forms of “customary” authority. Effective state-scripted rural development policies should solidify rather than disrupt dominant social hierarchies grounded in deference toward elders and chiefs. Although Pré acknowledged that development would require novel forms of education and the training of African technical agents whom he referred to as “basic cadres,” he never hailed youth as an important force for material improvements in the countryside. He even questioned the real value of formal schooling in rural settings, arguing that vaguely outlined centers for “mass education” directed at the technical and civil training of peasants, “young and old,” were far more crucial to rural progress than the work being done by rural primary schoolteachers and their young pupils.14 The Programme never conveyed any sense that young people in rural settings might be better equipped than others to perform actions necessary to the positive transformation of local life. The blatant marginalization of youth in a major social-development policy statement may reflect anxieties that such youth were indeed ready to produce changes but ones that would disrupt the social stability cherished by colonial officials. It could also be, as Riesz’s study suggests, that the very existence of progressive social visions in

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unschooled, illiterate rural youths was simply beyond Pré’s own cultural imagination. Whichever perspective is more accurate remains a matter of conjecture. Most significant is Pré’s stated confidence that the measures he espoused “would not trouble the traditional equilibrium of the old indigenous rural society; on the contrary their application will provide a potent means for revivifying and entrenching its traditional organization.”15 The governor’s only specific mention of youth in conjunction with rural society came in his closing remarks on the theme. It was, however, young Guinean elites living at a distance from the interior, not peasant youth, who were invoked. Assessing the positive consequences of rural reform for the future of Guinée française as a whole, Pré remarked: I think it is preferable for Guinea to modernize its traditional social organization, drawing on its customary Chiefs, Notables, and peasants [to form] a new rural economy, rather than sustain a passive conservatism that could one day pose a shock for young evolués and future leaders coming out of our own metropolitan schools and returning to a customary society that could not change with the times.16

Pré felt that, should the colonial administration permit continued rural stagnation, young African elites, outraged by, and perhaps ashamed of, the abject conditions of their countrymen, would resort to impulsive, radical reforms. Such an imagined turn of events could not be more opposed to colonialist hopes for gradual material progress within a stable rural social order. Right to be worried about the possibilities for revolutionary fervor in the country, Pré was wrong in his speculations about the symbolic power the countryside might have in such a movement. When Guinean politicians headed by Sékou Touré ascended to authoritarian power in 1958 they held that it was young elites steeped in Francophone learning, not rural subjects, who stood in most desperate need of reeducation and retraining. Further, these elites should be inspired rather than demoralized by what they could learn through exposure to rural productive practices, knowledges, and sensibilities. There was, conversely, minimal difference in late-colonialist and revolutionary assessments of the threats that urban life posed to youths’ proper moral development. Somewhat ironically, given his residence in Conakry, by far the largest town in the territory, Governor Pré’s depictions of urban experience lacked the clarity or consistency of his rural scenarios. They contain broad stretches of pessimism punctuated by instances of sudden enthusiasm. Pré saw the exodus of rural youth to the city as a “phenomenon” impossible to slow, let alone stop. Unlike the rural realm, whose communities exhibited many admirable traits inscribed in tradition, social conditions in Guinea’s urban quarters held

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no charms for the French observer. Yet despite his general castigation of the distorting effects of emergent urban dynamics on African mentalities, Pré was nonetheless intrigued by the internal states of the new urban youth. He stressed these subjects’ liminal position relative to prior generations’ lives in the countryside and, at the same time, any semblance of proper, ordered modern urban experience. These youths’ detachment from traditional society was deliberate, a move taken to free them from “old tribal constraints often [lived] as the intolerable domination of elders.” But their move, in fact, brought no positive freedom at all, locking migrant youths instead into the most squalid material and moral environments marked by “deplorable sanitary conditions, the social isolation and abandonment of individuals, the growth of idleness and vagabondage, the influence of unrest and disorder.”17 However convenient it was for Pré to chart the typical experiences of urban youth through keywords such as “isolation,” “abandon(ment),” “idleness,” “vagabondage,” “degradation,” “cinema,” “drinking bouts,” and “nightlife,” the subjective states of the young navigators of urban quarters eluded him. Although by 1950, six decades into French governance, a chief administrator like Pré might feel sure (however wrongly or correctly) of his grasp of social codes structuring rural life, he was troubled by the seeming amorphousness of local urban spaces and the jagged edges of African urban society. Urban Africans’ actions were, to borrow Johannes Fabian’s words, “low on normativity,” mercurial in relation to “custom,” difficult to predict.18 Thus integrating the urban piece in the tri-partite mosaic of Guinean society into a comprehensive script for state-authored territorial progress was more difficult. Pré’s comments on urban policy, marked alternatively by moments of timidity and boldness, attested to his uncertainties as sociologist and administrator. Pré’s fascination with the pathological conditions in which most urban youths were living failed to move him to concrete policy formulations that might help these subjects improve their circumstances in the short term. Pré argued for the necessity of apprenticeships but refrained from committing significant financial resources to their creation. At the level of administrative action, the problems facing unschooled urban youths or those who had quit school for various reasons triggered as little response as the plights of their rural peers. It is unsurprising that at independence in 1958 the hunger for schooling as the sole obvious means for improving a young person’s life chances would be so sharp in most Guinean communities, putting massive demands on the emerging postcolonial state. Nor is it surprising that contemporary secondary-school students in Conakry, aware of their potentially great socioeconomic advantages as the nation’s best-educated persons, resisted revolutionary social ideologies calling them to fuse their ambitions and energies

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with those of unschooled youths throughout the nation. Observations of intense late-colonial socioeconomic stratification had inspired them to compete passionately for limited spots in post-primary schools precisely in order to evade the difficult conditions that most unschooled and school-leaving youths around them struggled against.19 It is remarkable, after all his disillusionment with urban youth social dynamics and the tentativeness of his proposals for urban reform, that the colonial governor still clung to a vision of Conakry one day blossoming into a grand city. In his book, L’Avenir de la Guinée française, Pré, insisting that his hopes for Conakry were “no fairy tale nor Wells-like futuristic fantasy,” sketched the following urban tableau: During the day, the town of Conakry will teem with a population drawn by its administrative centers, its private offices, its port, its commercial houses. In the evening calm will return and, from the balconies of its buildings, one will be able to gaze at the countless lights of the Loos islands, the sparkling fringe of the north coast of Taïnakry, and dominating the entire horizon, the potent smokestacks of the Kaloum mines where work continues at night as well as by day.20

One senses in such passages that Pré’s primary political and affective investments in urban Guinea were not linked to people at all but to material structures symbolizing order, modernity, productivity, and profit. Apparently he believed that the creation of imposing material icons of modern economic conditions would bind Africans in their midst to behaviors exhibiting the same degree of modern civility and efficiency. The comportment of Africans should, in Pré’s thinking, eventually mirror the modernization of the city.21 Should this assimilation and emulation not occur, the entire spectacle of the modern capital, as a space potentially illustrating the beneficial transformations wrought by colonial rule, would become a loathsome monument to failure. Indeed, as of 1950, only one small segment of the Guinean population was potentially capable of inaugurating a reign of order and progress in places like Conakry. These were the elite students Pré referred to as évolués. Pré’s comments on young elites are less interesting in themselves than in their differences from nationalist-revolutionary representations of the same social category that would arise at the end of the same decade. His thoughts on évolués lacked references to concrete problems marking his portrayals of rural and urban realms. Pré strove, not without contradictions, to frame the challenge of elite formation as if were autonomous from the contemporary hardships shaping common young and adult lives, in uneven ways, throughout the territory. While insisting upon the distinctness of elite youth from the rest of the population, he also saw the need to connect its newly acquired forms of ex-

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pertise to the practical requirements of specific territorial projects: “an Elite whose training was detached from reality would be a source of confusion more than a generative, directing force.” In a surprisingly organic metaphor, Pré stated that, “these men [cadres], Guinea must fi nd them within itself and thus draw them from among its own children. . . . A population that did not draw a great portion of its leaders and technicians from its own would be ‘a body without a soul’ and it would be impossible to expect progressive effort from it.”22 On the one hand, the rigidly bounded cartography Pré imposed on African society forced him to see “les cadres” as an autonomous social entity. On the other, his role as governor obliged him to imagine these cadres’ concrete contributions to territorial progress, and clarify points where the interests and capacities of the new elites could merge with and strengthen positive, progressive inclinations among the less enlightened social categories. One might guess that primary schooling would be the crucial institutional site for enlarging the scope of the rational sensibility exhibited by young évolués. Indeed Pré asserted that “this elite and these cadres can only expand rapidly if we develop basic milieux from which they can be recruited, by which I mean primary school attendees . . . The effort in this sector must be massive.”23 The postcolonial leadership would share Pré’s desire to dramatically increase the quantity of schools and pupils. Enrollment rates began to rise significantly in the mid 1950s, reaching 10 percent in 1958. By 1965, seven years into independence, about one-third of all Guinean children were attending primary school, an impressive achievement crucial to validating the revolutionary regime’s claims to be an effective engine for national progress.24 Radically unlike revolutionary officials, Pré showed little concern for where new schools should be established. His recurrent emphasis on necessary enrollment increases could easily involve intensified recruitment in Conakry and the regional capitals, leaving rural youth largely untouched. Pré’s toleration, if not advocacy, of a prolonged, substantial gap between urban and rural educational levels would become sheer blasphemy after independence, when revolutionary leaders would insist on schooling’s unifying function across country and city as the principal motor for spreading and intensifying nationalist sentiment. Equally disturbing and even offensive for nationalist pedagogical thought was the emphasis on the French language as a unique or irreplaceable basis for modernization. Beyond increasing the sheer number of elites eligible for significant technical and administrative responsibilities, expanding primary education would, according to Pré, develop “the use of French language and Western modes of thinking . . . [as] one of the most efficient ways to spiritually train young individuals, in the same way that writing and mathematics are ways to extend mental faculties beyond the elementary stages bounded by the limits of simple memory.”25

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Antagonism toward the cultural imperialist prejudices inherent in such statements would strongly influence postcolonial policies in a range of cultural and developmental domains including schooling. Shared massively by administrators serving in French West Africa and elsewhere, Pré’s confidence in the capacity of basic French education to determine the direction of youths’ psychosocial growth was taken quite seriously by the postcolonial leadership. The colonial governor and other officials’ affirmation of French education and its unique capacity to convince non-Western pupils of the deficiencies of their local languages, cultural patrimonies, and forms of knowledge would haunt and shape postcolonial plans for national schooling, as well as several other prominent arenas of youth activity, especially “militant theater.”26 However tempting it is to directly compare the contents of Pré’s “Programme” and Sékou Touré’s post-independence thoughts on the conditions and predicaments facing differently situated Guinean youths, one must first examine a crucial, interceding current of youth-centered sociopolitical representations that surged forth at the threshold of national independence. This current took public form in an elite oppositional newspaper, La Voix des Jeunes (The Voice of Youth). A critical examination of La Voix, innovative in its formal and thematic composition, furthers our understanding, just as much as Pré’s Programme, of the complex social pressures and imaginings that eventually drove Guinean nationalist politics to become so virulently defiant of French influence, and so absorbed with questions of youths’ cultural authenticity and militancy.

La Voix des Jeunes The first edition of La Voix appeared in January 1956, and its fourth and fi nal edition came in April of the same year. Produced six years after Pré’s Programme, the paper expressed the vigor of anticolonial sentiments that were emerging around the plight of contemporary Guinean youths. In the article “Becoming Aware,” in its second issue, a contributor wrote: Youth also want to “say their piece.” Why not when one knows that in the fields, in the workshop, in the offices, in the factories, at the construction sites, in the armies, youths constitute the bulk of those who work, who slave away, who struggle, who suffer? . . . Youths are also the ones pitilessly exposed to social ills and inequities of all kinds.27

In its third issue, the paper’s general treasurer, none other than soon-tobe president Sékou Touré, attempted to increase subscriptions. His evocation of the tensions shaping youth consciousness in what was essentially a sales pitch is notable for its dramatic flair as well as its pedantic overtones. The force

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and fluency of Touré’s plea to young readers, and his attribution of substantial, untapped transformative power to this generational bloc as a whole, foreshadowed the ready passion with which Guinea’s most famous politician would return to youth-centered issues over his long presidential career: Young boys, young girls, scattered individuals who until now live in isolation, anxiety, and hesitation; break out of this torpor, this guilt-ridden obscurity, take knowledge of your duty, of the great role that you must play in society, grasp that youth is the hope of a country that defends itself, that develops itself, and that aspires to happiness and well-being. Take courage, advance with a firm step to subscribe, to make your comrades subscribe, your friends, your acquaintances.28

Although many moments in La Voix, like Touré’s pitch, employed militant rhetoric anticipating the self-consciously revolutionary vocabulary of the post-independence era, the contributions cannot in any way be reduced to the embryonic formulations of later nationalist ideologies and policies. Neither Touré’s Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG)29 nor any other party determined the paper’s contents or tone. The paper’s subtitle presented it to readers as the monthly journal of “L’Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée (UAJG)”—or the “Organization for the Action of Guinean Youths.” La Voix exhibited pluralist qualities absent from both official colonial and postcolonial portrayals of youth-centered problems and policies. Alongside its paramount concerns with the (un)employment and living conditions of urban youths, La Voix featured articles depicting youths’ perspectives on topics ranging from local sports facilities and youth cultural centers called Maisons des Jeunes (Houses of Youth), to details of Guinean elites’ studies and travels in France. The paper was generally quite sympathetic to the desires and worries of local youths in ways altogether absent from Pré’s writings. Although as president Sékou Touré was adept at generating compelling sketches of youths’ social awareness and yearnings for change, his youth-centered observations were sharply marked by his own particular vision of the nation’s ideal political direction. Descriptive moments outlining contemporary youth sensibilities “in themselves” were always displaced by far more prescriptive statements underscoring youth consciousness as it “ought to be.” The late-colonial rhetorical field in which pieces for La Voix were composed and distributed had broader communicative possibilities than that which most intellectuals and young people would inhabit after 1958, when PDG domination of national cultural and youth development policies fully crystallized. In contrast to the Manichean paradigms that structured post-independence portrayals of colonial power and vilified almost all forms of French socio-cultural

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intervention, articles in La Voix characterized colonialist action in far more ambivalent or contradictory terms. Stories castigating administrative policies or inaction in country and city stood alongside others celebrating the benefits that local young elites could gain through increased exposure to various Western institutions and cultural goods. Of the range of issues addressed in La Voix, three are particularly crucial: the attempt to construct a collective, encompassing image of Guinean youth as a cohesive political subject; its depictions of young peasants; and its portrayals of the significance of Maisons des Jeunes for Guinea’s growing number of urban-educated youths. (The latter two issues, as will become apparent, substantially undercut the paper’s early emphasis on territorial youths’ fundamental sociopolitical unity.) Studying these aspects of the paper’s descriptive and rhetorical aims helps one understand the complex, sometimes contradictory nature of anticolonial sentiments and pedagogical visions circulating in the period just before the emergence of the official revolutionary nationalism that would dominate Guinean political life from the end of the 1950s until Sékou Touré’s death in 1984. The first issue of La Voix contained a transcription of a 1955 report delivered by the UAJG’s president and general secretary to Guinea’s territorial assembly, the same audience addressed by Roland Pré’s “Programme.” The report opened with an outline and defi nition of young people’s situation, stating: “The word ‘youths’ applies equally to school-age children, to university students, to the young herder, to the apprentice, to the young worker, to the unemployed, to young girls of the countryside, [to those at] technical training centers, and the great federal and metropolitan schools.”30 This definition of youth departed radically from anything in Pré’s Programme, which never perceived Guinean youths living in sharply differentiated social settings as sharing any kind of social identity forged by common generational belonging. Young individuals negotiating profoundly different life circumstances—from students at university to “young girls of the countryside”—all fell within the explicitly age-based social category with related concerns that would be given organizational voice by the UAJG. But what defining sets of experiences could such a diversely constituted subject really share? The 1955 UAJG report offered a simple answer. All the youths mentioned struggled with diffi culties: “In general, in towns, rural zones, as well as beyond our borders, Guinean youth face rather difficult life conditions.”31 Remarkable in its opening statements for its differences from the Programme, the report in turn becomes extraordinary for its similarities with Pré’s colonialist text. Beginning with an expression of genuine concern with the problems posed for Guinean youths by current socioeconomic pressures, it

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quickly turns to emphasize the problems posed by Guinean youth for contemporary affairs. Critical focus falls on urban migration: Urban hubs constitute dangerous points of attraction and gathering for rural youth. In these artificial settings, these uprooted youth are generally doomed to unemployment. Detribalized, debilitated by hunger and want, they become easy prey to fearsome social ills and temptations of all kinds: making do, thefts, rapes, banditry, forming anti-social groups. Prostitution of young girls and young women begins and increases every day.32

Although the report pointed vaguely to far-reaching “economic and social disorders” in the interior, its authors, like governor Pré, remained almost exclusively preoccupied with urban youth. Lack of schooling figured prominently in their description of blighted young urban lives: “In the educational domain, one notes with anguish that barely eight Guinean youths out of a hundred can even pretend to any learning in French. The others are helpless, diabolically left to the street, to all its depravities, condemned to expand the ranks of juvenile delinquents.”33 Remarkably, the report never called for a substantial increase in school construction in the interior that might reduce the sense of socioeconomic stagnation driving so many rural youths to migrate toward the squalor of city streets in the first place, harboring hopes for education or employment that would only end in further distress. Beneath the gestures of sympathy and encouragement for rural youths that surface across each issue of La Voix, there was simultaneously a steady relegation of these youths’ struggles and sensibilities to the margins of the paper’s main political and cultural agendas. One would think from reading any issue that more youths inhabited urban than rural areas, which was not at all the case. Guinea’s population was still overwhelmingly rural at the moment of independence. In the late 1950s the population of Conakry, including a considerable number of Frenchmen and other expatriates, was only around seventy thousand, whereas the territory’s total population numbered three million.34 Despite initial declarations of generational unity and solidarity, contributions to La Voix steadily implied that peasant youths somehow failed to match up with the complex social and psychological characteristics of their urban or urbanizing peers. Urban youths were viewed throughout as navigating fields of experience that were more unstable, overdetermined, menacing, and simply exciting, making them optimal subjects for far more compelling stories and probably higher levels of readership. Urban youth thus won disproportionate critical attention. While articles such as one focused on youth and the peasantry35 scorned the tentativeness of colonial policies meant to combat declin-

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ing conditions in the interior, their perceptions of rural youths’ sentiments were generally as unimaginative and unsympathetic as Governor Pré’s. Reading them, one discerns that urban youth should evolve and become different kinds of persons than they presently were, whereas rural youth should, ideally, remain the same, that is, stay in their place of birth and perform the same agricultural work, though more efficiently and profitably than their parents. The absence of any robust advocacy of primary schooling for children in rural communities—or even any outline of a future in which young peasants would attend school near home—was symptomatic of the limits of the UAJG’s interests in markedly changing the lives of rural youth. The condition of becoming and self-transformation that defi nes youth as a unique stage in individual development was far more readily imaginable and attributable to young people in Conakry than their counterparts in the interior. Only the former were automatically, “always-already,” thoughtfully and thoroughly incorporated into the paper’s concerns. The latter remained at its margins, appearing and disappearing according to the rhetorical gains that could be made through their fleeting invocation. The asymmetries in the paper’s coverage of contemporary youth were further reflected in the types of attention it granted to the practical and symbolic import of Maisons des Jeunes. The March 1956 issue of La Voix devoted two articles to these cultural centers for youths. One addressed the already existing Maison in Conakry, the other an un-built Maison in the northwestern town of Boké. Examined together, the stories reveal much about French and elite Guinean notions of ideal youth mentalities and pedagogical settings in the mid-1950s. As will become clear, many of these notions glorifying metropolitan forms of cultural experience and knowledge would come under vigorous attack almost immediately after independence, when the Touré regime tried to rewrite the personal characteristics and actions marking the ideal young national citizen. La Voix criticized local Conakry youth for taking inadequate advantage of a newly constructed Maison described as “one of the most beautiful and vast of the AOF.”36 It listed all the opportunities that had been placed at the feet of local youths, underscoring their good fortune and privilege relative to their counterparts in the interior. Conakry’s Maison drew together “ideal peaceful conditions and equipment for fruitful activity: views of the ocean, diverse games ( Judo, dominoes, basketball, foosball, ping-pong), library, reading room, gymnasium, running water, electricity.”37 While indicating that the Maison was open to a general public, the story makes it clear that the expected clientele was fully literate. Alongside reference to the impressive dimensions of the Maison’s library and reading room, the

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story celebrates “the precious patrimony of centuries” encased within them, wherein “youths can expand their experience of things and men, perfect themselves, cultivate themselves, and thus refashion themselves as masters of their destiny.” Beyond its literary holdings, the Maison hosted dances and other “social, artistic, and cultural activities that it would be regrettable for youths to neglect or under-appreciate.”38 The Maison was presented as a site for the cultivation of socio-cultural distinction to be pursued by a select set of educated, highly motivated youths. They would gather in this unique space, “in a climate of perfect camaraderie, healthy, varied, and informative leisure activities, to learn about one another, to share perspectives and enlarge their comprehension of a range of issues which they would have never contemplated alone.”39 The precise sociopolitical ideas that the article’s author foresaw emerging from this casual mingling of urban elites are unclear. Most striking is his espousal of a general scheme of elite formation that essentially mirrored Governor Pré’s conception of une jeunesse évoluée as a distinct caste occupying physical and psychological spaces sharply differentiated from the urban and rural masses. One might contend that lavish praise for the local Maison in La Voix was simply flattery, a strategic miming of the language of “the civilizing mission” aimed at inciting the French administration to further acts of “generosity” that might benefit Conakry youth and the population as a whole. This point is probably accurate, but it does not erase the significance of the paper’s public advocacy of a model of elite formation that placed literate urban youths staunchly outside and above the daily fields of experience in which the great majority of Guinean youths struggled. The paper’s position on this matter is crucial. It forces us to grasp that when Sékou Touré waged his symbolic and material assaults on reigning notions of ideal youth citizenship after independence, his wrath targeted Guinean intellectuals steeped in admiration of metropolitan cultural riches at least as much as it targeted official French propagandists like Roland Pré.40 Indeed the 1956 article on the Conakry Maison offers a far clearer sketch of the types of youth development scenarios that Touré detested than any set of youth-centered images found in Pré’s Programme. An article on the northwestern Guinean town of Boké in the same issue examined colonial politics and Guinean youth predicaments from a different perspective, yet one that still attributed immense authority to the colonial administration and metropolitan forms of knowledge. The absence of a Maison des Jeunes in Boké exemplified the administration’s dissimulative tactics and real neglect of Guinean youth outside Conakry. Highlighting the gap between the official language of planning and the actual absence of construction, the article reported that local youth

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were still waiting to have a Maison des Jeunes since 1951. It is painful to note the frustrating plight facing the fi rst town of the territory to welcome the French penetration. It is also regrettable to give youth a chance to discover the trench that divides spellbinding promises and their realizations.41

The elusiveness of the coveted Maison indicated more than Boké’s inferior rank in the hierarchy of administrative concerns. It also testified to local youths’ marginal opportunity to have the modernizing experiences that all youths needed to contribute effectively to territorial progress: “It is truly a heavy responsibility to participate in the building of a country. To succeed will alone does not suffice. One has to have been prepared over a long stretch. . . . This demand [for a Maison] is thus justified by real needs and clearly expressed by a youth thirsting for culture and eager to develop its personal character.”42 By not constructing the Maison the administration was blocking local youths’ access to vital pathways of personal enlightenment. The youths desired and required concrete engagements with novel forms of experience and knowledge from which they had been excluded for geographical and political reasons. The article casts these coveted forms as “culture.” Access to the special zone of culture enshrined in the Maison was linked to gains in awareness and competencies allowing young individuals to expand their talents and capacities, and to deploy them for the improvement of their community and territory as a whole. It is worthwhile to compare this late-colonial framework of “growththrough-culture” with traditional ideas of initiation, many of which were (also) soon to be attacked by the postcolonial state. Within the traditional framework of initiation as an irreplaceable engine of social reproduction, local youths thirst for forms of knowledge and ability that already circulate within the community, but whose access is strictly denied them because of their inferior position in age-based hierarchies. In contrast, the plea for the Maison as a condition for Boké youths’ initiation into modernity was formulated on the premise that the existing storehouse of local culture, in all its secular and sacral forms, was wholly inadequate for youths’ optimal individual and collective development in a time of potentially vast changes. Advancing an argument resonating with Pré’s earlier assertions of the limitations of African languages vis-àvis French, the Boké story implied that traditional cultural resources on their own were blatantly deficient for the “awesome responsibility” of developing the country. Increased external interventions favoring and furthering Guinean youths’ transformative capacities were essential. The implicit and explicit devaluing of indigenous culture articulated in the Maison stories and elsewhere in La Voix was confronted and combated, though often in uneven and contradictory ways, in the militantly anticolonial cultural

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rhetorics that quickly distinguished and drove Guinean post-independence politics. New keywords and themes describing the conduct and yearnings of ideal youth, such as “dis-alienation” and “authenticity,” became dominant in official discourse, marking a substantial shift from the urbane and largely assimilationist cultural ideals expressed in La Voix. Rather than anxious spectators eagerly awaiting assistance from France or elsewhere to become sufficiently modern, Guinean youths, in city and especially in country, were recast as competent social protagonists already prepared and entitled to spearhead positive, dramatic changes in themselves, in their peers, and in the material environments where they dwelled. Nationalist attempts to redefi ne and vigorously mobilize the capacities and potentials of differently situated youths were eloquently recorded in what is perhaps Sékou Touré’s most important book, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne (hereafter, L’Action).

The President’s L’Action In September 1958 Guinea was the sole territory in French West Africa to reject membership in the Communauté Française championed by French leader Charles De Gaulle. The vigor of the popular mandate stating a firm “no” to continued subordination within the French empire brought the country fame and scrutiny throughout the world.43 Thirty-six-year-old Sékou Touré, the mayor of Conakry and leader of the dominant Parti Démocratique de Guinée became president of Guinea’s First Republic, and thus leader of the first independent nation in Francophone Africa. The popular rejection of the French proposal and abrupt assumption of sovereignty spawned a compelling image of Guinea as a distinctive society willing to blaze a trail that would dramatically distance it from both French authority and neighboring territories that opted to join the Communauté. Even today most Guineans are proud of their compatriots’ aggressive claim to independence and yet remain keenly ambivalent about the short- and longer-term effects of the defiant idealism marking the moment. On taking office, Touré was acutely sensitive to Guinea’s status as a test case for the possibilities and pitfalls of African nationalism, knowing that his regime’s endeavors would be minutely observed by both sympathetic and antagonistic individuals, organizations, and governments. As will become clear over the remainder of this book, Touré was convinced that social transformations embodied and enacted by Guinean youths could sufficiently demonstrate the merits of Guinea’s unique political venture to all internal and international onlookers. Touré’s L’Action, composed mainly of speeches delivered from 1959 to 1961,

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was the first book devoted to the topic of postcolonial Guinean youth. Its chapters provide windows on an exceptionally formative period of modern Guinean history, one in which “revolutionary youth” emerges as the paramount subject for imagining a distinctive national future. Youth is repeatedly framed as the key collective protagonist whose increasing knowledge and actions over time would guide Guinean nation building in directions benefiting all citizens. But alongside its pervasive enthusiasm over the general potential of contemporary youth, L’Action is haunted by ambiguities and contradictions regarding which types of young persons, in view of their backgrounds, training, and dispositions, would be optimal icons, participant actors, and surveyors of the nationunder-construction.44 These uncertainties sharply distinguish Touré’s early nationalist writing from the Indian nationalist texts highlighted in the work of Partha Chatterjee. In the latter, the contours and characteristics of the sovereign nation and the tradition-bearing, refi ned women who poignantly embodied and “enshrined” it were felt to be already in place. Touré’s writing, in contrast, never truly locates its ideal, paradigmatic national subject. That his focus is on the young is without question, but do they dwell in city or country? Are they schooled or unschooled? L’Action contains many memorable, impassioned declarations, illustrating Touré’s superior rhetorical skills, but the book is even more intriguing for its efforts and general failure to announce defi nitively which kind of young person was best equipped and most needed to represent and perform ideal citizenship. Employing terms as broad as those Touré himself preferred, the choice was essentially between the best-educated young elites studying almost exclusively in Conakry, or their rural peers, largely ignored by the likes of Governor Pré and the editors of La Voix, living without access to schooling, at the opposite (more common) end of the socio-cultural spectrum of the nation’s youth. Touré’s speaking and writing through late 1961 never resolved this ambiguity. Perhaps unfortunate for Guineans is that events partially outside presidential control eventually pressured him to place the main burdens for fulfilling his political dreams on the shoulders of rural youth. Touré’s political success, like that of any other postcolonial politician, depended on promises of material improvement to the people he claimed to represent—or, at the very least, the elimination of massively unpopular forms of economic exploitation shaping colonial-era life in country and city. He also insisted, however, that the benefits of national sovereignty would be most potently felt outside the material realm, especially in domains of collective cultural activity and individual and public morality. While the president was outlining the roles of the nation’s new youthful protagonists, he was also announcing his regime’s intention to intervene vigorously in the character for-

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mation and productive activities of all Guinean youths regardless of their geographical and socioeconomic position. His theorizations of a historically novel ensemble of youth sensibilities and actions were linked inseparably to his vision of an equally unique kind of radical African authoritarian state. The early youth-centered speeches featured in L’Action thus open a window on an emerging postcolonial state’s creative explorations into political and pedagogical power. A critical challenge Touré embarked on in his first years as leader was to shift the state’s primary role in the young nation from that of political emancipation from the colonial yoke to the more complex program of internal sociocultural transformation. The colonial legacy was never bracketed or forgotten in the new revolutionary discourse, but Touré did strive to convince Guineans that national citizenship would entail new burdens and responsibilities for all. The transition from colonial subject to national citizen must not be perceived purely as an escape from arduous labor and struggle. Reference to a contemporary literary text is helpful in examining some reigning popular visions of nationalist politics just prior to independence, and highlighting their sharp differences from Touré’s ideas on the proper forms and ends of anticolonial politics after the historic “no” of 1958. Emile Cissé’s Faraloko, the last pre-independence novel published by a Guinean author, treats the misadventures of a young Guinean métis named Nî.45 After seven years away from home on a scholarship in Paris, overcome by nostalgic longing, Nî returns to his native village of Faraloko in northeastern Guinée française. During the last leg of his homeward voyage he falls into conversation about local conditions and political sentiments with a truck driver calling himself “Saint-Germain.” The following dialogue ensues. —Tell me, Saint-Germain, are you politically active? —O yes! I am “erdia” one hundred percent. —RDA [Rassemblement Démocratique Africain]? —Yes, but unfortunately not all blacks understand that the “erdia” works for blacks. I pray to Allah that he will help the “erdia” because the “erdia” said that our country will be independent with total democracy: all the unemployed will gain access to a lot of money that is sleeping in whites’ and Lebanese’s cashboxes. And then, everyone will be able to say what he wants, everyone will write the observations he wants in the newspaper. You’re “erdia” too? —I hope, with all my heart, that my brothers will be free and happy. I will work toward that with all my powers. But I don’t want our beautiful country falling, one day, under the domination of an individual or a minority of individuals. For the moment, I don’t engage in political militancy, I just pursue my studies.46

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Cissé’s two characters convey, comically and poignantly, some of the stark divergences in Guinean youths’ social experiences and expectations at the threshold of independence. The difference in their recent personal training— one dominated by the grimy work of driving and maintaining an old transport truck in a peripheral zone of the interior, the other by advanced Francophone schooling—provokes equally major differences in their imaginings of Guinea’s future. Saint-Germain’s intimations of the messianic powers of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA)—the French West African political organization that helped launch the careers of such massively influential figures as Sékou Touré, Léopold Senghor, Félix Houphouët Boigny, and Modibo Kéita47—brilliantly reflect what could be called the emancipatory current of popular support for nationalist politics.48 Meanwhile, Nî upholds a classical liberal position stressing the individual’s right to autonomy from public political pressures.49 When Touré took power, he strove to persuade all Guineans, but particularly youths, to adopt a very different philosophy of proper relations between self and state. He was bent on authoring a new political sensibility and a novel kind of citizenship that would eschew both the fantasies of abundant wealth and total freedom voiced by Cissé’s Saint-Germain and the intellectual aloofness expressed by Nî. Read today, Faraloko is at once prophetic, ironic, and tragic. The enthusiasm at the prospect of independence represented by SaintGermain would soon be exhausted through forced, increasingly insincere, collective repetitions of support for the postcolonial government. Meanwhile, those who desired the intellectual autonomy and privacy embodied by Nî often suffered exile, political imprisonment, or even death in detention.50 For Sékou Touré, it was essential that the advent of national independence not become synonymous in popular thought with ideas of freedom, emancipation, or material plenty. Only in stark contrast with the worst forms of colonial forced labor should the time and space of the nation be perceived as a stage for liberation from moral and material struggles. Guinea would only truly qualify as a nation when its citizens fully grasped the necessity of refashioning both themselves and the persons and environments around them. Three years after the dramatic break from France, Touré told attendees at a conference on educational reform that the nation, as he imagined it, had not yet truly been born. You know that the colonial regime is dead, that legally the colonial regime no longer exists in Guinea. This means that we are now forever in a sovereign regime, an independent regime; but between the formal, theoretical right and the social, economic, and political reality, there is a disjunction. In all the affairs of the Nation one must necessarily overcome the rift that exists between the theoretical right and the practical exercise of this right. This rift will only be over-

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come by education, by training, by the physical and intellectual blossoming of each individual and the people.51

Touré stressed that Guinea possessed neither sufficient numbers of exemplary citizens nor an integrated national character. The Guinean nation was not automatically born with the rejection of De Gaulle’s referendum but would only emerge out of strenuous collective symbolic and material labor. Its new status on the world map would not lead, inevitably, to the improvement of Guinean lives. Countering these possible types of complacency, Touré framed independent Guinea as a kind of half-nation, only partially alive and formed, whose full emergence would require considerable sacrifices from all citizens. As reflected in the term l’Emancipation in the title of L’Action, the idea of freedom was inherent in official revolutionary discourse well after the advent of independence, but the meaning of this freedom was interlaced with inescapable historical and political obligations. Youth, more than any other segment of the population, was freed from colonial constraints on its range of possible actions, with nothing other than a few identifiable and reparable flaws to keep it from participating fully in the project of national construction. Youth had the most to gain from the freedoms and generative commitments posed by the challenges of nation building. In a speech addressing “a new youth,” Touré sketched the lamentable state of youth in colonial times. Formerly, in this same country, there was a young generation, that to which your seniors belonged; a youth different from yours because it was placed neither objectively nor subjectively in conditions resembling those you know today. That youth of your fathers struggled against a thousand and one contradictions stemming from colonization that could only disappear through the colonial regime’s liquidation.52

Age-based hierarchies governing traditional communal social dynamics had also distorted the minds and lives of the nation’s youth: “Before your generation, there were many youths relegated to the ranks of society’s most ignorant members. In fact, the common expression formerly characterizing intergenerational relations was ‘you’re too young,’ which meant: ‘you’re ignorant, you don’t know what’s going on, you’re incapable, you can’t change anything.’ ”53 If youths were arch victims of layered forms of oppression permeating the colonial experience, they also stood to be both key symbols and central protagonists in Guinea’s break from systematic oppression. Touré stressed mutually reinforcing relations between the comparatively superior, though still flawed, mind-sets of contemporary Guinean youths and the waxing vigor of the nation-state as a whole. He signaled the recently observable emergence

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of “a passionate youth, an active youth that knows that the value of existence is measured by the sum of useful actions accomplished by a man or a people,” and further elaborated: “We can say that the nation itself is young. It is young because it has just entered a new life, because the structures forming it today didn’t exist a few years ago . . . [because] its new methods correspond to a deep transformation of the past.”54 The new postcolonial youth had the good fortune of freedom from the narrowly limited (un)consciousness of colonial generational cohorts. But fearing that these liberated youths would stray in undesirable directions, Touré was quick to assign this cohort new guidelines for proper social analysis and action. Postcolonial youths could distinguish themselves as original, in step with the unfolding emergence of the nation, only to the degree that their internal dispositions and observable actions fit with the images of ideal youth citizenship promoted by state authority. Whereas colonial-era youths had been told they could not change anything, postcolonial youths would be called on to change one thing or another—whether some aspect of themselves, their local cultures, or their material environments—at all possible occasions. In assigning youth a role of constant transformation, Touré ascribed his regime a parallel role in which it would basically shadow the political and cultural endeavors of youths in order to best monitor and guide their direction. For youths to become “national” and “revolutionary,” for them to enact the subjective and objective transformations desired of them, state administrators would always have to be ready and willing to push young people toward proper critical perspectives and actions in a vast array of settings and circumstances. In the ideal scenario of nation building that Touré envisioned, youths dwelling in Guinea’s diverse communities would pursue wide-ranging activities attesting eloquently and incontrovertibly to the transformative will of the postcolonial state. But emphasizing the iconic and heroic value of youth was not without its problems for the new regime. Though it was appealing to cast youth as a collective subject mirroring the social dynamics of the nation as a whole, relying on the special symbolic capacities of youth also entailed high political risks. The concrete behaviors of young individuals and groups in the country’s cities, towns, and villages could just as easily reveal intrinsic flaws in revolutionary ideologies, or their practical irrelevance, as they could confirm their legitimacy and beneficial force.55 There was nothing new in Touré’s perceptions that contemporary young people did not automatically appear to be intrinsic agents of hope for Guinea’s future. Roland Pré saw the “detribalized youths” migrating and lingering in Conakry without any genuine educational or employment options as deeply threatening portents, symbolically and materially, for Guinea’s chances at be-

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coming a recognizably modern, progressive society. Though they had some notable differences with Pré’s colonialist politics, most Guinean intellectuals contributing to La Voix des Jeunes held similar views on which types of youths inspired optimism, skepticism, or despair for Guinea’s path across the latter half of the twentieth century. In La Voix, as in Pré’s Programme, only the besteducated Guinean youths studying in Conakry (or Dakar or Paris) provided convincing beacons of hope. Underemployed urban youth seeking pleasure and potential economic gain through a range of deplorable actions in more or less pathological settings were, in fact, threatening obstacles to territorial development, intimating a possible increase in destructive behaviors and anomie across time. Although both La Voix and the Programme granted substantial consideration to difficult material conditions in the interior, both essentially ignored the subjective states of rural youths who had not left home, despite these youths still greatly outnumbering their urban/urbanizing peers. For a handful of reasons suggested above, rural-dwelling youth simply failed to capture the imagination or concerted interest of either the governor or many latecolonial oppositional elites. Touré’s L’Action envisioned Guinean youths’ present and possible future circumstances through essentially the same tri-partite schema shaping the Programme and La Voix. Although perhaps even more scornful in tone, critical observations of the activities and psychological character of underemployed urban youths in L’Action essentially echoed those advanced in the late-colonial texts. Other depictions and judgments of contemporary Guinean youth sociology found in the book, however, marked distinctly new types of pedagogical vision. L’Action contains little, if any, of the enchantment with young évolués so crucial to visions of ideal youth and territorial development in both the Programme and La Voix. In L’Action, elite youths pursuing post-primary education are cast explicitly as part of the actual problem rather than the apparent glimmering solution to the nation’s struggles to develop socially and economically. In L’Action, Touré argued that this upper stratum of Guinean youth could only help develop their country if they were willing first to submit themselves to self-critique and personal reform. These youths, the president indicated in no uncertain terms, needed to undergo forms of social revolution within their own psyches and orientations toward the future before they could be ready to contribute concretely to national progress. If they failed to retrain themselves to imagine individual and collective futures differently than they had been encouraged to in colonial-era classrooms, they would stand as obstacles and enemies rather than laudable and rewarded agents of revolutionary nation-building ventures. Touré’s assertions that elite youths proud of their superior schooling cre-

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dentials had actually been mis-educated and mystified in colonial schools contrasted starkly with the previous public statements of French and Guinean intellectuals on the values of formal education and the special role of young elites in local socioeconomic affairs. But even more remarkable was Touré’s complete recasting of the role of rural youths in the life of the nation. In L’Action rural youths, long relegated to the shadows in both colonialist and oppositional visions of Guinea’s possible futures, became symbols and actors of the greatest importance, indeed figures upon whom the nation’s fate would ultimately depend. In a radical reversal of any vision of ideal youth formation and citizenship that was articulated in the Programme or La Voix, L’Action insisted that rural youths constituted the nation’s most valuable human resources. Radically unlike educated and uneducated urban youths, rural youths possessed a deep intuitive understanding of the moral legitimacy of militantly anticolonial ideologies and policies, having never been seduced by the illusory attractions of the colonial capital and the metropolitan biases purveyed in French schools. Whereas urban youths remained ensnared in self-deceptions and counterproductive actions and aspirations promulgated by colonial (mis)rule, rural youths stood clear-minded, sincere, and “ready for the revolution,”56 the core convictions of which they already knew in their hearts. One of Touré’s greatest hopes in the first years of his presidency was to reduce the dramatic gaps between the elite Conakry youths whose psychological flaws were so readily observable and the young rural peasants he eagerly heralded as intuitive, ready revolutionaries. Given the country’s acute dearth of individuals adequately educated to serve as teachers and functionaries around the country, Touré also knew that contemporary youths already on the way toward post-primary educational certification simply must be integrated into his nation-building scheme. More or less severely flawed in ideological terms, these budding elites were nonetheless invaluable components of any feasible scheme of national progress. A remarkable speech printed in L’Action vividly shows Touré struggling to fi nd ways to condemn the undesirable tendencies of elite youths and basically shame them toward self-reformation, while also attempting to enchant them by forecasting the personal rewards they could win by aligning with properly revolutionary modes of social conduct. The speech in question is titled “Discours aux élèves à la fermeture des lycées et collèges” (“Speech to Students at the Final Day of High Schools and Junior Highs”). Cues within the title of the speech—only two lycées existed outside Conakry in 1961—and within the main body certify that it was given in Conakry. The nation of the “Discours” consists of two prototypical places with real and imagined characteristics: Conakry and “the interior.” Underlining the current interconnections and

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disconnections of these realms, Touré strove to force his young addressees to unlearn and overturn their more or less newly acquired urban prejudices, reevaluate rural moralities, knowledges, and lifeways, and reconsider their own personal progress in terms of their ability to work productively with unschooled rural peers. The “Discours” unfolds with Touré artfully imagining his listeners leaving the capital for the annual “summer” vacation the following day. Soon they would find themselves amid socio-cultural settings and arenas of productive labor from which they had been estranged by increasing immersion in urban life. In sharp contrast to Roland Pré’s statements a decade earlier, Touré projects positive results from the initial shock effect of the encounter between the youths Pré proudly called évolués and the rural masses. Anticipating the possible outcomes of the Conakry students’ ventures into the interior, Touré combined stern warnings and encouragement: If you come with a sense of superiority before youths who have not gone to school, you will have failed. Youths living the revolution daily will show you your uselessness by isolating you. In contrast, if upon your arrival these youths feel that you talk with them without arrogance but on a level of equality and comradeship, if you express yourself not in academic phrases but simply in Soussou, in Malinké, in Guerzé,57 you will enter rapidly among the militants because through your work you will have won the confidence of your comrades.58

The didactic thrust of the “Discours” pivots around this compressed drama in which Touré foresees how an absolutely crucial youth-centered sociopolitical problem might be overcome. That problem might be phrased: How could the postcolonial regime stress the reality of urban/rural differences among contemporary youth while simultaneously affirming the ultimately unified character of the nation, conceived ideally as a kind of transcendent, integrated collective personality? The president’s response to this challenge proceeds through several imagined scenarios. The first focuses on the individual student who, having finished another year’s schooling, arrives at the rural site where he is to spend the annual grandes vacances. In initial encounters with local youth, this hypothetical protagonist behaves arrogantly, displaying his sense of superiority, conspicuously exhibiting his intellectual distinction by voicing French “academic phrases.” The behavior is naturally resented by his rural counterparts. The latter, whom Touré casts as already firmly in step with the process of national construction, demonstrates the new arrival’s fundamental irrelevance in communal affairs by distancing themselves from him, leaving him isolated. Rural youth constitute a kind of univocal chorus before which the singular visiting peer initially reveals his ignorance of emergent revolutionary so-

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cial codes stressing the values of collective cooperation over claims to personal distinction. By generating a fear of social exclusion, Touré pushes the protagonist—the figurative image of any of the students present at his speech— to choose an antithetical, properly revolutionary course. In the second scene, the protagonist treats his rural counterparts as equals, conversing in the local language. In a statement that would never be uttered by a French administrator, or even by most Guinean intellectuals writing for La Voix, Touré stressed that the young student rediscovering rural society will find previously overlooked gaps and weaknesses in his own cherished academic training. The urban(ized) youth should be duly humbled when he grasps that youth in the interior “who have not learned a foreign language, who have not learned math, possess rich understandings of the social dynamics of the village, of the flora, of the fauna of the region; they understand perfectly languages of regions you have partly forgotten.” Commenting on these refi ned forms of perception and expression seemingly automatically cultivated by rural youths, Touré chided the school-attending youths before him, warning, “it will be difficult for you to match them.”59 Humbling his addressees was obviously one goal of the “Discours,” but certainly not the only one. If Touré felt that Conakry-educated youths really had nothing unique or positive to contribute to his sociopolitical designs, he might have simply tried to close or curb the expansion of post-primary schools in the capital. Except for the crucial, exceptional instance of the “teachers’ strike” discussed below, he made no such move. Instilling humility in young elites was a means toward a greater political end, namely, to teach his listeners the kinds of works the revolutionary regime expected of them, and the types of rewards they might earn through their realization. The focal dramatic episode awakening the elite student to his “real” position in national society ends with an emphasis on work. Elsewhere in the “Discours,” youths’ desired physical contributions to national construction are briefly conveyed: “Our youth, in the construction of schools, dispensaries, roads, public squares, and mosques, has furnished infi nitely more effort than that given by any other social category.”60 Within the central episode, however, it is not material labor but the forging of productive social relations across educational boundaries that is valorized. Touré imagines a day when rural youths might feel that a dialogue with urban-educated peers is pleasurable and encouraging instead of demeaning, offensive, or simply useless. Success or failure in fostering these sentiments hinged fundamentally upon the social carriage and expressive style of the so-called évolué. The “Discours” proposed a kind of contract to Conakry students. In it these youths were required to labor like all Guineans for national improvement. But the types of labor they were asked to perform differed from those

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executed by non-elites. Directly following his celebration of rural sets of knowledge exceeding the mental reach of his chastised urban(ized) addressees, Touré suddenly shifts registers to applaud the very same youths’ unique talents and potentialities. He incites this audience to contribute their special expressive skills to establish a symbiosis between what those [rural] youth represent and your capacities in order to enrich collective action undertaken for the benefit of the village or the Party. Once the Party has made a decision, it is necessary that you, youth that have just left the collège,61 place yourself at the center of the youth group devoted to the fulfillment of this measure.62

Touré thus cast the country’s best-educated youths as messengers of state rationality and power. Despite their flawed (though reparable) ideologies, these youths inevitably profited from their closeness to the central government in Conakry. They had ready access to types of information that might never, or only very slowly, reach the interior. Critically, they were far more capable of understanding Touré’s speeches and other political updates relayed via radio in French, and even more uniquely able to understand, translate, and explain policy decisions that circulated anywhere in printed form.63 Urban-educated youths were thus asked to perform the key role of perfecting necessary communicative links between the Party and its rural militants. Although the latter were already largely embracing revolutionary principles and developing appropriate youth organizations,64 their operations were not always in synchrony with the vigorous pace and tenor of policies newly drafted by the state leadership in Conakry. The elite “messengers” before Touré were expected ideally to dispel ignorance and misunderstandings hindering productive synergies between the exemplary schemes of organization and development envisioned by national leaders and their concrete implementation by young militants dwelling in the nation’s dispersed, previously isolated rural communities. Beyond granting a relatively privileged “intellectual” assignment to young elites that would relieve them of more arduous, material tasks of nation building, Touré promised other, more attractive rewards for their immediately upcoming efforts and ordeals. The president suggested that in undertaking political-training “vacations” and messengers’ duties, the youths before him were acquiring skills that would eventually enable them to exercise political authority themselves: Youth is therefore a component actively linked to national construction. One can even say that it is the social stratum that will benefit from the sum of fi ne actions, of efforts supplied by the whole of the people, even more so because some of our accomplishments today will yield their full effects only in ten years, in fi fteen or

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twenty years, at the very time when you will have to carry out the greatest responsibilities of the leadership of the country. In order that this role waiting for you corresponds to the sum of your capacities, it is imperative that you integrate yourselves fully and without reservation with the collective and revolutionary action of the people, you must integrate with the people.65

The “Discours” combined romantic images of revolutionary commitment and cooperation with far more pragmatic moments where Touré implicitly acknowledged and responded to the practical concerns of elite students about their personal futures. Inevitably many students wanted to know what they could gain materially from agreeing to the nation-building tasks described by their leader. Therefore, beneath its central poetic drama of self-transformation and identification with rural peers and “the people,” the Discours exuded another far less idealistic story line. Here, the politicizing journey(s) and messenger work are portrayed as a profane initiatory ordeal necessary to ensure personal advancement both professionally and administratively. Touré outlined an implicit contract between urban students and the state with little pretense as to how, and to which youths, the political and economic resources at the new state’s disposal would be distributed over time. This contract required urban students to enter the interior for periodic spells if they coveted entry into desirable positions within expanding fields of national politics, economics, and development. Only through complete subordination—much like subjects in initiation rites—to the command to communicate and collaborate with more humble youths in the countryside could they hope to acquire any degree of power and wealth. Touré’s offer cunningly portended a seamless social reproduction and proliferation of state power in which those youths who best emulated behavioral codes promoted by the current leadership in turn acquired leadership positions for themselves. Subordination to state authoritative power was the only pathway to future attainment of the same degree of power. By the time Touré delivered his “Discours,” the world in which the protagonist of Cissé’s Faraloko could declare “I don’t engage in political militancy; I just pursue my studies” no longer existed in Guinea. Still, one should not discount the sincerity of the most idealistic components of the “Discours,” or any of Touré’s early observations, criticisms, or encouragements of Guinean youth. The very tirelessness with which he spoke and wrote about ideal and deviant youth in various settings over the entirety of the revolution testifies to the intensity of Touré’s imaginings of the ways young people could best exhibit, refine, and propagate the worthiest traits of the revolutionary nation. The following chapters investigate these visions in greater detail, as well as the measures taken to usher them onto the living “stage” of the nation. Examined sympathetically rather than cynically, Touré’s speech reads like

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an impassioned but perhaps doomed attempt to resolve some of the most irascible tensions plaguing the postcolonial nation-state as a viable and just framework of political and socioeconomic organization. A final way to approach the role of urban students in the “Discours” would be to consider them as state-designated pilgrims. The hypothetical student-protagonist ventures out to more or less mysterious localities where the nation is emerging through collective actions and challenges foreign to the city. Touré hoped that this figure would return from his exposure to novel settings and activities morally improved, that the knowledge acquired from rural peers would be integrated into his urbane routine as a city-dwelling student. The young pilgrim, through his endeavors in the interior, would, ideally, help fuse country and city, nation and state, both internally, by personally synthesizing complementary facets of rural and urban knowledges, and externally, by contributing to national construction tasks in the interior and, more important, initiating a genuinely productive dialogue between youthful social categories previously “disconnected.” Continuing along this interpretive track, one could even see this pilgrimage of elite youths as a projected way to overcome social rifts inevitably inherited from what Mahmood Mamdani has influentially called the colonial “bifurcated state.” Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject details the ways in which colonial administrations sharply divided African territories (and subsequent nations) into realms of urban/elite “rights” and rural/peasant “custom.”66 In a related analysis, Pheng Cheah has critically examined and challenged pessimistic framings of postcolonial nationhood as a political ideal that, contravening its promises, has tended to deepen cleavages between “state and nation, party leadership and the common masses, the indigenous urban bourgeoisie and the rural peasantry, the capital and the country.”67 In Touré’s “Discours,” rural youth constitute living mirrors of the nation before and independent of the arrival of the urban student, who, by contrast, personifies the “sterile artifice”68 of bourgeois individualist ideologies mediated through colonial education. Yet after the pilgrimage experience, this absurd figure of arrogance and ignorance returns to the city a changed person. The national project of generational unity and productivity is now operating within him, shaping his beliefs and commitments. A fi nal measure of the ardor of Touré’s yearnings for a thorough transformation of contemporary elite youths, and their genuine adoption of revolutionary forms of humility, anti-imperial collectivism, and productivity, is the wrath with which his regime treated those involved in a major protest movement in Conakry in November 1961, just months after the delivery of the “Discours.” The protests, which the regime conveniently labeled a “teachers’ strike,” confirmed the accuracy of many of Touré’s worst fears about the true

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political leanings and material aspirations of Conakry’s post-primary students. Although the regime suffered little palpable damage, the strike undoubtedly prodded the president to rethink the plausibility of the models of elite youth sociopolitical militancy he had optimistically outlined in his “Discours” and throughout L’Action. The strike deeply shook the regime’s faith in its capacity to refashion the hearts and minds of young elites. Much of this critical energy was redirected toward closer observation and intervention in the routines of the rural youth. This shift in political investments and revolutionary hope gradually transformed rural youth experiences into the paradigmatic standard by which the meanings and values of all Guinean youth sensibilities and actions would be judged.

The “Antinational Manifestations” of November 1961 Before the revolutionary regime defi ned Guinea’s greatest crisis in statestudent relations as the teachers’ strike, the state newspaper had labeled that crisis “manifestations antinationales scolaires.” The major issue, then as now, is to understand the meanings of those manifestations from the vantage of its young participants and a regime that had prided itself on its capacity to speak and act for the good, and with the support, of all Guinean youth. In purely physical terms, the manifestations wrought little damage, but the social positions of the actors involved, exclusively teachers and students, made the scuffle into a profoundly disturbing matter with important consequences for Guinean nationalist politics and pedagogical policy. Summarizing the events, the state newspaper Horoya69 recounted that, on the morning of November 24, all twenty-five hundred students attending postprimary schools in the Donka quarter of central Conakry suddenly gathered for a protest march on an adjacent residential complex housing many government ministers. According to one participating student, the march had been inspired by a professor who claimed that such a massive public act would have “profound repercussions on the international scene.”70 Other details of that morning are difficult to confirm. Claude Rivière suggests that the protest was easily contained by state forces.71 Horoya contends that ten thousand members of the Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain ( JRDA), the youth wing of the PDG, quickly quelled the disturbances. Although Molotov cocktails were apparently discovered among the students, Horoya reported no instances of bloodshed. Given the thousands of youth reportedly involved on one side or the other, a complete absence of violence is difficult to credit.72 Framing the protest as a moment of blasphemous deviation from popular nationalist sentiment executed by a deluded minority, Horoya’ s follow-up sto-

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ries worked to define and assign blame to specific actors and institutions. A strong effort was made to pinpoint and isolate the people and places at the core of the disturbances, as if they comprised a dangerous but combatable social virus lurking just beneath the skin of the Guinean body politic. Student participants reportedly said that the manifestations were explicitly designed to elicit a violent state crackdown that would undermine the popular legitimacy of the post-independence regime both at home and abroad. Horoya even accused the teachers who led the manifestations of fully intending the deaths of many youths at the hands of state forces: “Numerous students affirmed that the uprising’s organizers wished for a violent riposte from the armed forces resulting in losses of human life likely to be exploited in international affairs and to provoke in the interior indignation if not outright antigovernment revolt of students’ parents.”73 The “extraverted”74 bearings of the political imagination that inspired the manifestations, the perception that an audience outside Guinea would be quickly attuned to mishaps there, confirmed many of Touré’s already negative views of contemporary schooling dynamics. At the Third National Congress of the PDG in August 1961, Touré told attendees: Man’s knowledge should never be considered an instrument of social differentiation. . . . One must further demystify teaching, get rid of its retrograde and deforming traits, exclude from it all intellectual trickery, each irrational and subjective element, empty it of all its duplicitous values (prejudice, chauvinism, sectarianism, egoism, etc.), reintroduce in a word all of its concrete virtues that favor the development of a people’s culture and the blossoming of a nation’s personality.75

Elsewhere in the speech Touré complained of “profound deficiencies” in students’ political training and commitments. Some, he lamented, “knew nothing of the history and geography of the country. Conversely, they will respond readily to questions about the geography and history of France or elsewhere.”76 The manifestations underlined the impotency of the regime’s efforts to overhaul and truly “nationalize” formal education.77 During a special hearing at the Ministry of National Education, a student participant explained his motivations: M. le Ministre, you should know that the harmful action occurring around us goes deeper than is thought. In fact, in regard, for example, to Guinean teaching reform, some professors tell us that this reform is directed against us in the sense of having no other object than to sabotage our training by limiting it to the baccalaureate level while the ministers, they have the chance to send their children and close kin overseas to pursue the most advanced studies in order to come back and dominate us.78

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The student’s framework for assessing revolutionary educational policy bore no resemblance whatsoever to the pedagogical ideals expressed in official discourse as seen throughout the president’s L’Action. His statement reflected no interest, or even awareness, of any of the unifying aspects of the nationalist educational ideals publicly espoused by Touré. Worried only about his own educational experience and future prospects within the country, his social consciousness did not extend to his less-privileged rural counterparts in the Guinean interior. Of greatest concern was the potentially disastrous emergence of a super elite whose internationally acquired educational credentials would devalue his own local efforts, thus preventing him from attaining the type of elite professional status he desired and felt he deserved. His ultimate fear was that he might do his best to excel scholastically only to find himself and others like him “dominated” by youths whose connections allowed them to transcend the trials and limitations of Guinean education altogether, acquiring superior credentials beyond the nation. Horoya denied any legitimacy to this student’s interpretations or claims. Regrettably, instead of gathering and printing more explanations by youths themselves of students’ current political theories and yearnings, the paper directly demonized the literal and metaphorical “settings” where those responsible for the manifestations forged and spread their damaging, antirevolutionary fictions. Two weeks after the protest, Horoya began deploying overarching Manichean categories to contain and police the potentially vast array of sociopolitical and moral meanings that might be attributed to the recent indiscipline. “Today,” the paper stated, “French neo-colonialism is sustained not only by the depraved politicians of yesteryear, but by a certain type of intellectual youth posing as revolutionary and more concerned with worshiping the coveted diploma and the material privileges associated with it than with the fate of their people and the future of their country.”79 For Horoya, the instigators of the manifestations resided within the country in body alone but not in spirit. The values by which they assessed the political and pedagogical processes of post-independence were derived from a foreign place—France—and a foreign time—the colonial era. Their devotion to diplomas and attendant opportunities for privilege and gain reflected their attachment to a host of aspirations completely divorced from the sociopolitical tenets of revolutionary nationalism. The newspaper’s social diagnoses cast the manifestations as signs of a troubling dynamic link between “the exterior” and a menacing array of transgressive counterrevolutionary attitudes and behaviors circulating within the young country. This nationalist grid separating a (relatively) good inside from a sinister outside was deployed to make sense of the seemingly aberrational happenings surrounding the strike. The ideological force of this grid emerges with par-

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ticular clarity in Horoya’s description of an instance just after the manifestations, when a mother came to retrieve her daughter—apparently involved in the marches—from a local school: “External influence is evident and the state of intoxication was such that a mother was seen slapped by her own daughter when, obeying instructions from the platoons of Conakry I and II, she had come to retrieve her daughter from school premises.” 80 The story implied that only outside influences could provoke the “state of intoxication” that would induce a daughter to mistreat her own mother so irreverently. (The word choice alludes to another cause of intoxication among local youths—alcohol abuse, which was also attributed to external factors.) The scene was described for its emblematic value. It is crucial that the transgressive act of intergenerational violence receiving special mention took place at a formal educational site where the mother, heeding the call of local authorities and acting properly to save her child from further misadventures, was met with a sharp, unwarranted slap in the face. The telling of the episode draws a semantic boundary dividing the space of schooling, where a state of intoxication has come to reign, from surrounding social space, where both nationalrevolutionary and traditional moral injunctions maintain their force and guide appropriate conduct. The daughter’s flagrant act of disrespect at the very site of her egregious mis-education signaled the depths of the moral decay into which some students had been induced. Horoya implicitly cast all the schools involved in the strike as dangerous counter establishments, having mysteriously drifted to the shadowy edges of both new revolutionary and traditional social norms. Within an otherwise solidly nationalist and moral society, Conakry’s elite schools had become porous milieux where outside influences seeped into youth consciousness, gravely threatening the prospects of the transformative pedagogical and political visions the Touré regime embraced. The seriousness with which the leadership took the manifestations—despite their minimal material impact—is evident in the way it handled participant youths and the schools they were attending. Horoya informed readers: Due to the turns taken by [recent] events and the excitation of the cleverly organized students, the national leadership has ordered the closing of the seditious establishments. All students beyond those detained for inquiry will be returned to their homes. Those from the interior left Conakry Saturday by special trains debarking for Kindia and Mamou, while their comrades from coastal towns were also dispatched by truck toward the major areas in their prefectures. Children whose parents live in Conakry have been returned to their families. Students’ parents and those looking after them in Conakry were quickly asked to remain calm. The Party trusts them to bring these young people back to the proper path in order that they fully grasp the prestigious role assigned to PDG youth to consolidate national independence and the building of the new Guinea.81

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Conakry’s collèges and lycées were closed. Even students who had come all the way from the distant southeastern forest regional capital of N’Zérékoré, lying 1,200 kilometers from Conakry along treacherous roads, were returned under police supervision to their parents’ doorsteps. Conducting research in N’Zérékoré, I was able to interview Charlotte Loua, a firsthand witness to the strike and its aftermath. Charlotte had only studied in Conakry for three months before the November morning when senior students suddenly commanded her and her classmates to march out of class. Shocked at having her daily academic routine so abruptly interrupted, she received a more severe shock later on when state militia stormed the school grounds and dormitories. The trucks came. They carted some to Camp Alpha Yaya, but the last of us went to Camp Samory.82 We spent the afternoon and evening there then we were sent to the transport station. They packed us off right away. They called that “forced vacation.” I came back to the forest. Nobody returned to the school [or the dorms.] Those who left in their underwear had to manage to fi nd something to cover up. But everybody had to go home. No one could even go back to the dorm to grab their things.83

The party trusted parental authorities to bring these young people back to the proper path. Addressed to parents by a regime that was generally antagonistic toward customary forms of gerontocratic power, the phrase is highly atypical of revolutionary discourse on the whole. The rapid expulsion of the country’s best students and the derogation of their supervision to household authorities reflected a mixture of alarm, distrust, disappointment, disdain, and confusion the revolutionary leadership felt toward these youths and their educational institutions in the immediate wake of the manifestations. Entrusting student participants to parental authority, the leadership acknowledged that, from its perspective, practically any environment was more conducive to the production of proper revolutionary citizens than Conakry’s elite schools. Significantly, professors, never parents, were explicitly held responsible for the manifestations. Parents, whatever their limitations in understanding and adhering to revolutionary ideologies, were at least perceived as national, as thoroughly Guinean. Unlike teachers, parents were on the positive (in)side of the country’s socially and morally defined borders.

Conclusion Fifty years after the advent of Guinean independence, it may be tempting— for the sake of elegance, brevity, or more polemical reasons—to recount the history of Sékou Touré’s authoritarian regime as a relatively simple narrative of an imperious political formation’s seductive conquest and cruel domination of

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a once enthusiastic newly “independent” population. Viewing Guinean postcolonial history in this simple way, the pedagogical thrust of official nationalism figures as a clear index of the revolutionary regime’s quest to co-opt and coerce youth, to secure youth’s allegiance and dispel its potentially great oppositional capacities. This chapter’s critical examination of varied, youth-centered texts composed around the border of independence, however, generates a complex perspective on the “rationale” of official formulations of ideal youth citizenship and the actual transformative scope of state power in the years immediately following 1958. It is impossible, after putting together those writings, to cast post-independence visions of revolutionary youth and their relations with state power as a unified or monolithic discourse emanating from a preset, overarching plan for national transformation (or domination). On reading Touré’s early major statements on postcolonial youth within their specific, combative context, one is struck by their multiple moments of dramatic experimentation, contradiction, fragmentation, reflexivity, tentativeness, frustration, and utopianism. They are the responsive thoughts and actions of a young political artisan learning on the job, not a tyrant bent on seeing his preset blueprint of historical development embrace and overturn recalcitrant contemporary realities. The “antinational manifestations” of November 1961 vividly indicated the new regime’s inability to impose its visions of elite youths’ ideal contributions to national society. The moment when it emptied Guinea’s best schools, shunting their students back home, may be seen as a further sign of the regime’s disturbing self-awareness of its actual political limitations. If it could not even enrich and deploy the talents of the young elites of the capital city, Guinea’s seemingly most promising human assets, how could it hope to bring dramatic, positive changes to the whole population? But the late-1961 conjunction of the speeches of L’Action and the manifestations could also be read as a time of increasing state power. Although the nation-building project, with its stress on shared political commitment and a unified national “personality,” was obviously encountering significant youthsociological obstacles at that juncture, the recognition of these obstacles did nothing to cool the leadership’s commitment to reconfigure productive work and political consciousness over the entire country. The teachers’ strike, on the one hand, exposed multiple weaknesses in the new state’s hold over the sociopolitical ideologies that were mediated by elite schooling in the capital, but at the same time the response to the crisis announced the state’s zeal and decisive power to dispel major public oppositional movements within the country. The armed containment and defusing of the

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manifestations carried clear messages for youth involved in the events, and perhaps all Guinean youth. Recalling her feelings on learning the results of the entrance exams enabling her to go from N’Zérékoré to Conakry for collège, Charlotte told me: “One doesn’t start school to be a stationary object. During the proclamation of [exam] results, everyone waits, impatiently. Then someone says: ‘you, you aren’t going to study in N’Zérékoré anymore; you’re going to Conakry.’ That’s good. Your parents are very happy too!” Asked how she and her reunited classmates were punished when they resumed studies in Conakry in January 1962, Charlotte said simply: “The punishment was just sending us away. It had already been accomplished.”84

3 Ideologies of Schooling, Teachers’ Authority, and Cultural Revolution

The September 1964 issue of Guinea’s national teachers’ journal featured a poem, “The Teacher and the Guinean School,” authored by none other than President Touré. Voiced by an imaginary teacher, the poem begins: My brother, my son, my student, I’ve grasped, I’ve perceived the meaning of my work, I’ve grasped the current behind-ness [retard ] of our country, Outrun by others on the path of history: I’ve grasped that our country can be their equal Conscientious, hard-working people forge their fate on their own, I’ve grasped that I must participate in this undertaking, Undertaking of national renovation and sustained progress With all my will, with all my energies. Further outlining his patriotic calling and responsibilities, the teacher told readers: My brother, my son, my student, I’ve heard and understood your lament, Whose burden I henceforward share and shoulder So that our people reawaken to life Through the creative spirit of independence Reshaping your thoughts, your mentality, and your behavior.

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These stanzas cast the teacher as an exemplary catalytic figure, fully in synchrony with revolutionary doctrine, who both disseminates national ideals and undertakes concrete pedagogical actions that will usher them into living reality. These actions bridge the political philosophies of the state leadership and the people’s deep desire to shed previous depredation and stagnation, and spring forth into a new, dynamic epoch of collective progress. Devoting his intellectual talents to the improvement of his students and society as a whole, the teacher will tailor his own life to the needs of the nation. On reading these lines, it would seem that Touré had forgiven or forgotten teachers’ involvement in the major “strike” disturbances many of them had allegedly provoked in 1961. Just three years after that event, did Touré feel that the country’s teachers had become properly “nationalized” in spirit and action? A subsequent turn in the same poem reveals just how elusive such faith in teachers remained. Later “the teacher” confesses: I’ve grasped, I’ve grasped so well that I’m ashamed, The servility, indignity, and complicity That have long marked the teaching profession To teach my brothers, my sisters, and my children Lies, baseness, opportunism, individualism With the vile goal of satisfying the oppressor.1 On the one hand, Touré felt that teaching could and should be a noble profession. On the other, he feared it had been irreversibly tainted by its colonial origins and multiple, complex entanglements with French imperialism. The revolutionary leader’s persisting ambivalence toward the social function of teachers was a central factor driving a fascinating, massively consequential wave of nationalist pedagogical reformist thought and action. This “wave” began developing just after the teachers’ strike. It would peak in 1968 in nothing less than a launching of a new revolution within the already selfdeclared Popular Revolutionary Republic. The new chapter of Guinean national development, emerging a decade into independence with the aim of intensifying applications of various social-transformative visions centered on youth, was called La Révolution Culturelle Socialiste, or the Socialist Cultural Revolution (SCR). Critical studies of the motivations for the SCR have generally centered on Touré’s increasingly insatiable desire for total control over individual and collective actions throughout the country. Within this interpretive framework, the SCR is seen to have tragically foreclosed—until Touré’s death in 1984—the possible emergence of more liberal, pluralistic, and democratic models of na-

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tion building that would have been far more favorable to Guinea’s cultural and material development. However accurate in some respects, this prevalent vantage on the SCR suffers from two crucial flaws. First, it detracts attention from the remarkable vibrancy and creativity of youth-centered ideas and objectives across the fi rst decade of nationhood that set the stage for the new revolution. In defining 1968 as the beginning of a dark age in Guinean collective experience, such gloomladen interpretations of the SCR have steered attention away from the most interesting aspects of the political, intellectual, and pedagogical dynamics operating in the period leading up to it. Second, such a perspective veils the fact that while the militant policies at the core of the SCR did indeed curtail some possibilities for national, local, and individual development, they also forged novel forms and fields of individual and collective sociopolitical action and reflection, particularly among young people. The SCR changed Guinean lives and communities, quite often for the worse; it did not empty those lives or communities of socio-cultural complexity, or make them any less worthy objects of rigorous socio-historical investigation.2 The new radicalization of nationalist ideas and policies stemmed from the revolutionary regime’s assessments of the hesitancy, limitations, and shortcomings of its own post-independence pedagogical reforms. In the first chapter we saw the regime struggling to construct a stable iconic youthful subject around which to organize and implement distinct, dramatically anticolonial nation-building schemes. The career of post-independence educational policy up through 1968 is also a story of struggles. The regime wrestled with past and present impediments to envisioning and implementing authentically anticolonial pedagogical institutions and practices that would create profoundly new types of student experiences and sensibilities. While young people across the country were striving to learn at Guinea’s rapidly growing number of schools, the state leadership was striving to learn from observing these very youths— why they attended school, what they learned and how—in order to locate specific problems, imagine their resolution, and implement necessary changes in the formal curricula and broader social functions of schools. Three broad categories of problems became especially apparent during this period of heightened scrutiny of educational affairs. The major troublesome characteristics that seemed to inhere in schooling as an institution originating under colonial domination were (1) its foreignness in relation to local cultural traditions; (2) its capacity for creating potent unprecedented forms of social differentiation within a given youth cohort; and (3) its capacity to produce novel, extensive, often ambiguous forms of moral and political power for teachers (what I call the problem of teachers’ authority). The historical sources and per-

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sisting postcolonial consequences of these problems often overlapped and fed off one another. This meant that an attack on any one dimension of schooling’s troubling traits typically entailed an attack on one or both of the others. For example, over the course of the 1960s, teachers’ authority was to suffer deeply from deliberate revolutionary assaults on certain sociopolitical bearings of the “common teacher,” and from attacks launched more directly at the foreignness or differentiating powers of schooling. On the one hand, what the regime learned in assessing post-independence educational dynamics was often bad news. On the other, the very diagnosis of national schooling’s major “ailments” signaled the possibility of their “cure.” The problems were truly generative. Discursive and concrete responses to them generated possibilities for the regime to extend its power over youths’ experiences within and beyond the classroom, and simultaneously forge new arenas and forms of youthful political action and reflection.

The Problems with Teachers Guinean literary reflections on coming of age in colonial times help sharpen critical understanding of which aspects of French colonial schooling regimens were most distasteful and disturbing for the new revolutionary cadres who themselves had personally experienced them. Camara Laye’s autobiographical L’Enfant noir (The Dark Child ), the most famous novel to come out of Guinea and perhaps Francophone West Africa as a whole, contains intensely negative depictions of the social conduct of the local primary schoolmaster in Laye’s hometown of Kouroussa. This highly unpopular figure is eventually fired from his post by the French administration for his egregious exploitation of students’ labor for his own household use.3 More interesting in the context of this chapter, however, is the markedly different, far more detailed portrayal of a colonial-period Guinean teacher found in Fodé Lamine Touré’s memoir, Une enfance africaine (An African Childhood ). Born in 1921, F. L. Touré belonged to the same generational cohort as Guinea’s two most famous men, Camara Laye (born in 1928) and Sékou Touré (born in 1922). Although F. L. Touré will never achieve the fame of his two extraordinary peers, the broad socio-historical scope and rich experiential texture of Une enfance should warrant him an honorary place among Guinea’s most important intellectual and artistic figures.4 Composed in Conakry in the relatively “liberal” political atmosphere of the 1990s, the two-volume recollection of a poor Conakry student’s life in the 1920s and 1930s depicts forms of youthful experiences and sensibilities either absent from, or only minimally addressed in, the writings of any other Guinean writer.

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The fi nal chapters of Une enfance are particularly revelatory in their evocation of a rising generation’s contemporary sociopolitical impressions, anxieties, and hopes for the future. After completing the Certificat d’Etudes Primaires exams (CEP) in his native Conakry—an experience whose rigors are compared to an “initiation ceremony in the sacred forest”—the sixteen-year-old Fodé eagerly undertakes his first voyage across the breadth of Guinée française. Recounting the worries that had plagued him throughout the exam ordeal, Fodé expresses his increasingly clear awareness of the tremendous importance of the academic contest in which he, alongside a great many other known and unknown peers, was participating. If the competition proved intense among candidates of the same school, it would be equally so between the eight regional schools of the territory. It would be even more intense between the four natural regions. The same intensity would hold between tribes, between clans, between families, reaching even into the hearts of families between cousins, between brothers of co-wives, because in the mind of everyone, tomorrow, intellectual qualifi cations alone would determine one’s social status. Undoubtedly, it would be the intellectual elite who would reign tomorrow over the masses next to the Whites, and, who knows, after the Whites.5

Like Laye’s L’Enfant noir, Une enfance richly conveys its young narrator’s abrupt, often humbling awakenings to the geographical and cultural diversity of his “native land.” Again like Laye, Fodé’s travels take him toward a successful, progressively minded uncle from whom he has been separated for some time. Many of Fodé’s most important sociological observations unfold when he arrives at his uncle’s current post as teacher and schoolmaster in the southeastern forest town of Dyéké on the Guinéo-Liberian border. Arriving in Dyéké after a draining journey, Fodé fi nds, much to his delight, that his uncle N’Touma6 is the most cultivated, powerful, and wealthy man around. In his uncle’s house, I felt like a young prince in his palace. . . . I could use as I wished the library overflowing with books and pedagogical journals; the phonograph, the hammock on the veranda, the provisions at my fi ngertips, everything that might interest or please me. Moreover, the house’s staff seemed to have been ordered to take care of all my wishes. In the early morning, I found a dining table so full of choices that it was hard for me to believe. There was everything: rice porridge, coffee, condensed milk, jam, bread, sugar, gravy.7

Soon after settling into his new, immensely pleasurable lodgings, another young relative provides Fodé a broader view of his uncle’s local authority, tied to a range of transformative projects he has undertaken in Dyéké.

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My companion told me of the life [of my uncle] in the area. Taking very seriously his role of rural primary teacher, he was involved in all the community’s activities, helping the village chief accomplish his tasks, encouraging some, reprimanding others, and at times punishing them. He thus inspired admiration and respect in some, fear and spite in others. Hadn’t he expelled from Dyéké two Dioulas [traders] who mercilessly swindled its peaceful inhabitants? Hadn’t he gone so far as punch a spying observer who his students said had provoked the transfer of his predecessor? Didn’t he periodically and authoritatively organize days for cleaning up the village, its outskirts and water sources?8

Fodé’s uncle is a prototypical figure of French colonial “modernizing” administrative action. He defends critical aspects of the local social order but is also ready to mandate villagers’ contributions to projects he deems essential to community improvement. There is no ambiguity about his social and political superiority vis-à-vis almost all locals. He dictates and acts on behalf of the people, but he is in no way a man of the people. Before leaving Dyéké to begin his long journey back to Conakry, Fodé directly witnesses a “memorable scene” that confirms the distinctive status and dignity of his uncle. Having received complaints of N’Touma’s bearings around the village, the French military Capitaine of the N’Zérékoré region9 pays a visit to Dyéké. A public hearing is organized where residents are invited to share their opinions of current local affairs. None of the village “notables” advances any significant grievances. In fact, they paint a favorable picture of village progress. With a translator’s help, the village chief assures the French official that, excepting the absence of a serviceable road, “everything was going as one would wish in his circumscription: order and security, tax collection, public health.” The assembly is about to disperse when a lone “important man of commerce” expresses a sharply dissenting view: The truth is that we are dissatisfied with the schoolmaster. You sent him here to teach our children. Instead he conducts himself like a veritable potentate. He takes sheep from the village, so he claims, to feed the students. He imposes work on us against our will. He takes it upon himself to impose fi nes and expel businessmen; worse, he has created in his house a prison where he detains those who don’t feel like satisfying him. Here, Monsieur (N’Touma) Fodé pretends to be policeman, detective, and judge. He acts and talks as if he was the Capitaine himself. 10

The schoolmaster’s critic concludes by requesting N’Touma’s removal not just from his post but from Dyéké altogether. Given a chance to respond, N’Touma accepts his opponent’s accusations, but casts them as compliments attesting to the positive quality of his work rather than condemnations. He frames his

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multilayered interventions around Dyéké as fully appropriate, in perfect consonance with political injunctions and responsibilities incumbent upon all authority figures within the French empire. Appropriating and amplifying his accuser’s language, N’Touma states that, in Dyéké, he is the judge. He is also Governor of the colony, Governor of French West Africa, and even President of France: “I am the guarantor of this territory belonging to France. I react to everything that goes well or poorly in my duty to France.”11 The Capitaine declares vigorous approval of N’Touma’s loyalty and administrative philosophy. He ceremoniously raises the schoolmaster’s hand in his before the captivated crowd, and viciously lambastes and fi nes the man who has wrongly attacked the teacher’s character. The Dyéké crowd dissolves, all busily discussing the now concluded drama in a forest language neither Fodé, the Capitaine, nor N’Touma can understand. Fodé is sure that his uncle’s local honor has not just been salvaged but strengthened. On his way back to Conakry, he learns of his excellent exam results and admission to the École Primaire Supérieure, Guinea’s best school, with free room, board, and books. Reaching home and conferring with another uncle who functions as his father, Fodé commits himself to a career in teaching, “the noblest of all the world’s professions.” Radically unlike L’Enfant noir, Une enfance closes with its narrator beaming with confidence and optimism. “What happiness for you and me,” Fodé tells his girlfriend, “we will live like lords having everything, enjoying it all!”12 Twenty-five years after the time of the closing epiphanies and yearnings recounted in Une enfance, Sékou Touré worriedly contemplated the role of teachers in the new republic from vantages very different from those of the enthusiastic young Fodé. The mid-1930s conjuncture evoked in Une enfance, one that the president had also personally navigated, must have seemed remote in many respects, yet, in other ways, uncannily and undesirably familiar. The 1961 manifestations underscored that, very much like Fodé and other members of his generational cohort, many if not most of the country’s young aspiring intellectuals continued to see their academic efforts primarily as routes to social distinction and wealth. In the early 1960s, much to the president’s chagrin, schooling success was still perceived as a means to elevate oneself mentally and materially above the routines and struggles shaping the lives of the massive majority of young and adult compatriots. Within this educational outlook, teachers were seen as emblems and absolutely necessary guides in a quest for socioeconomic superiority. What social value did teachers have, if not to help their student pledges achieve such dreams of material comfort, prestige, and power? The teachers’ strike and its wake were a particularly complicated time for

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Touré on two political and pedagogical fronts. First, the manifestations had made it clear that gentle persuasion alone would fail to bring the nation’s most advanced students into line with officially espoused models of revolutionary devotion and action. Other forms of pressure would have to be exerted and more fundamental institutional changes enacted. Second, and perhaps more critical, the manifestations occurred at a time when schooling enrollment across the country was skyrocketing. If Guinea’s new, proliferating rural schools were to produce the types of socio-cultural bearings and professional-economic yearnings one had been observing in Conakry youth for decades, the results for Touré’s cherished, radically anticolonial visions of youth-led nation building would be catastrophic. Touré dreamed of urban elite youth cultivating increasing admiration and emulation of the earnestness, collective spirit, and work readiness of the country’s rural youths. But what if increased schooling in the interior provoked just the opposite trend, with rural youths coming to admire and emulate the characteristic self-interestedness and metropolitan yearnings of their urbanized peers? It was impossible for Touré to turn back the clock and curb the spread of educational access across the nation. His charismatic claims to introduce a new dispensation helping Guineans escape the shadows of colonial ignorance hinged significantly on a rapid, massive expansion of education. But how could the president enthusiastically advocate continuing growth in educational access while fearing its ramifications for his visions of the consolidation of a defiantly nationalist collective identity? Unable ever to completely resolve these concerns on his own, Touré asked the nation’s teachers to overcome them in their daily pedagogical work in Guinea’s diverse communities. These teachers generally failed to perform the often impossible feats Touré asked of them. He, in turn, never stopped reminding them of their faults. In 1962 Touré delivered a remarkable speech vividly reflecting his struggles with reigning educational predicaments and possibilities, particularly the role of schooling in furthering rural integration and development. Later published as a chapter of one of his better-known books, L’Afrique en Marche, “La Morale Révolutionnaire et La Fonction Enseignante” (“Revolutionary Morality and the Teaching Function”)—hereafter “La Fonction”—centered on detailed observations of the social-communicative bearings, aims, and methods of young Guinean teachers in rural localities, both in and outside the classroom. Like all of Touré’s most interesting early statements on youth cultural development, “La Fonction” is marked by contradiction, ambivalence, and passion. The president called on teachers to employ a type of dual optic and bearing in their relations with rural communities. At times, teachers should submit to the legitimacy of traditional knowledges and customary practices. At other times,

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however, the same teachers should intervene with necessary rigor to inaugurate changes within these very domains of inherited thought and feeling. The particular sociopolitical values invested in national education by the regime demanded that teachers undergo an internal, personal transformation before undertaking their work as postcolonial educators. Country and city were the opposing geographical and moral terrains in relation to which this process of self-criticism and refashioning had to occur. Given the structure of colonial domination and its profoundly uneven distribution of educational opportunities, it could be assumed at independence that those adequately qualified for teaching would themselves have come of age primarily in urban localities, and mainly in Conakry. Yet the visions of nationwide social change driving the revolutionary project required that these same urbanized individuals reorient their lives and work completely for the benefit of Guinea’s rural zones. The teacher must never lose sight of the fact that he is not an end in himself, but a means . . . The teacher is called to exercise his tasks in the village, while in most instances he will have lived, since schooling age, very often in the large cities. This being true, he will have been deeply marked by city life and made utterly unready to inhabit the rural realm. Meanwhile it is precisely in the rural realm that he will be called to exercise his function.13

Just as the dynamics of colonial domination determined that the knowledge and skills necessary for teaching could only be acquired in the city, the nationbuilding project, fueled by a virulently anticolonialist socialist vision, demanded that that knowledge and those skills be deployed in the villages of the interior. Touré noted the distinct values of certain forms of intellectual sophistication and technical advancement associated with the growth of cities. However, he challenged teachers to recognize that their fluency in urban ways granted them no intrinsic superiority over the rural subjects among whom they were called to work. Genuinely entering village society, the teacher will make sure that society will never consider him different from the ordinary man. Obviously, for that to be so, the teacher must abandon all indications of superiority; he must never display any kind of scorn; he must not only convince himself that he is not superior to the peasant, the artisan, or the herder; he must at the same time convince these others that he, secondary or primary schoolteacher, is not superior to them.14

Teachers had to demonstrate a willingness to be taught by those around them, even those who had never and would never attend school. Does the teacher calling himself Guinean and African know all the men and all the women of the village? Of course not. Does he possess all the knowledge of

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the men and women of the village? Again, of course not. There is a law of interdependency in the domain of our knowledges that will make the teacher the schoolmaster of the village, and at the same time the student of this same village.15

The right of adult villagers to criticize and instruct teachers outside school extended to their children learning from them inside the classroom. In a sequence placing Touré in an awkward politico-cultural bind, he suggested that all the material rural youths learn in school should fuse harmoniously with what they already felt to be true from their participation in local collective life. The teacher in the village will never forget that the young spirits he is to train, equipped like him with faculties of hearing, seeing, touching, translating and recording facts in their memory, must never fi nd their perceptions in contradiction with what they are taught at school. Bad luck for him if the students apprehend that school is one thing and actually unfolding life is another! 16

Touré was striving to resolve the crucial problem of schooling’s perceived foreignness to traditional African experience, morality, and social relations. But his espousal of a mimetic relationship between school and “life” could only be momentary. If, true to such a statement, teachers had to strive to make their lessons mirror the communal processes in which their students were immersed outside the classroom, then national schooling would lose its political value as an ensemble of activities capable of positively altering social consciousness, and spurring youth to more or less radical transformations of local routines. Rural schooling could not simply assist in the reproduction of standing forms of local knowledge and practice; it had to spur youthful understandings and desires for specific forms of change that would both reflect and contribute to national progress and, ideally, a total collective transcendence of colonialera ignorance, stagnation, and dehumanization. Realizing that he had perhaps overstated the degree of the school’s complementariness with actual village life, Touré dramatically shifted rhetorical registers. The president enjoined teachers to oversee interactions and activities with parents outside school, in order to assure that they did not “compromise” the “bases” of the intellectual and moral training implanted through the teachers’ lessons.17 Furthermore, teachers must not hesitate to intervene to correct, even terminate, undesirable local practices. The teacher must become a factor in the formation of spirits involved in advancing the revolution. It is a matter not only of convincing villagers of the need to modify certain practices, but of ending them. . . . Whenever a brushfire breaks out, one must seize the moment to explain its pernicious character. When it comes to divorce, marriage, circumcision, one will seize the chance to educate the people, explaining the meaning of these practices and social duties, expur-

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gating from them the degrading extraneous features that still sometimes distort them.18

Touré’s advocacy of teachers’ concrete interventions in local social dynamics, however aggressive, was also haunted by vagueness. He seemed suddenly to harbor an implicit faith that local teachers essentially shared the leadership’s critical orientation toward certain undesirable forms of more or less “traditional” practices. One can easily imagine how the president’s emphasis on rigor and “fidelity” to the “party program” and “the interest of the nation” might be interpreted by young village teachers as a mandate to take militantly “progressive” measures against all local practices discordant with their conception of properly “modern” sensibilities and comportments. Again framing teachers as agents of militant social modernization, Touré incited them to combat their own and others’ irrational or backward habits and beliefs. Signaling the prevalence of rural “mystification,” the president scrutinized the case of a hypothetical teacher: How can he turn youth’s spirit away from mystification when he himself, dominated by mystification, goes to consult village charlatans and wears charms? How can he teach rational knowledge, incite youth to grasp that the world is knowable and transformable through the will of men’s combined consciousness, if he does not offer a concrete example? He must thus personify revolutionary morality.19

Touré came close at such instances to advocating a type of teaching authority identical with the elite-modernist bearings of the powerful colonialist schoolmaster admiringly evoked in Une enfance. Like the figure of N’Touma in colonial Dyéké, the president’s ideal militant teacher brandished unique sensibilities vis-à-vis local society that qualified, even commanded him to intervene ever more aggressively in reshaping village life. Just as N’Touma’s public acts were justified through his allegiance to colonial authority, so, too, were the progressive, demystificatory intrusions of post-independence teachers justified by their allegiance to revolutionary ideology and policy. Not surprisingly, perhaps even necessarily, Touré concluded “La Fonction” with a partial retreat from the elite-modernist model just outlined. “Take a hoe to help youths create a garden,” he told teachers in his final remarks, reinvoking themes of generosity and integration that he had initially stressed. It is not the diploma that will confer your authority . . . [A]uthority isn’t bought, or given, or sold. . . . It is not a Minister’s decree, order of the President or law from the National Assembly that confers it to you; rather it is man who establishes it by his own comportment. It is located in the nature of his relations with other men,

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by his ways of doing things and speaking of them that reinforce intimate ties between man and society. That is the source of all authority.20

In the end, despite its compelling, poetic rhetorical turns, “La Fonction” was plagued by undeniable political weaknesses, primarily its failure to deliver any systematic method that might be effectively deployed by newly arrived teachers needing to establish the forms of local social trust so exalted by the president as preconditions for any genuinely progressive pedagogical action. The skillful perceptiveness and refashioning of bearing, speech, and action that allowed one new teacher to establish such coveted legitimacy in one village might not be possessed by his or her peer in the next. Moreover, diverse communities in culturally and geographically distinct regions of the country would likely judge the intentions and respectability of the new teacher by quite different, more or less “customary” standards. Thus, as Touré strove to resolve certain dilemmas in educational policy, he (characteristically) created others. A far more strenuous attempt at resolving these dilemmas would come in 1968. The pedagogical spirit of that moment’s renewal of revolution was directly shaped by increasingly concrete deliberations over the ideal material outcomes of schooling and teaching in the years immediately following “La Fonction.”

Conflicting Pedagogical Models and the Productionist Turn of the Mid-Sixties While Guinea’s president strove to “theorize” the sociopolitical character and conduct of the ideal revolutionary teacher, what was happening at more concrete levels of pedagogical policy and practice? Guinea’s main teaching journal of the mid-sixties—initially titled Revue de l’Education Nationale de la Jeunesse, des Arts, et de la Culture (Review of the National Education of Youth, Arts, and Culture), later re-titled Revue du Travailleur de l’Education Nationale (Review of the National Education Worker)—provides unique vantages on shifting forms and objectives of classroom practice in the midst of Guinea’s most dramatic decade of educational reform. Critical juxtaposition of three Revues from 1964 and 1965 reveals the core features of a dramatic conflict and shift in nationalist pedagogical schemes—a shift that would eventually impact massively upon the schooling routines of all the country’s students and teachers up through the fall of the revolutionary regime in 1984. In “La Fonction,” we saw Touré striving, at a general theoretical level, to create an ideal script for teachers’ embodiments of militancy and proper humility within a broader framework of revolutionary nation building. But, of course, the regime was not satisfied with a symbolic

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integration of teachers and schools into its visions of collective enlightenment, discipline, and progress. The regime increasingly insisted that all envisioned and implemented educational reforms yield concrete results immediately beneficial to national economic life. The January 1964 Revue conveys a sense of dominant Guinean pedagogical aims and practices before the rise of more productionist emphases. The issue begins with a story on the inauguration of new school buildings in the capital city, followed by a series of essays on pedagogical technique. The first is an exposé, “The New Math,” and its place in the national curriculum, followed by presentations on the value of audio-visual aids in the classroom. Next are articles expressly addressed to new teachers, offering strategies for lesson planning as well as model lessons for teaching fifth-grade grammar, explaining “poetic texts,” and improving vocabulary and elocution. A brief piece on child psychology and three reproduced letters to the editor conclude the issue’s central pedagogy section. The final section features a historical essay on the Dahomeyan Prince Behanzin, characterized as a resistance hero and “une grande figure Africaine.” The final page conveys a New Year’s greeting from UNESCO’s current general director addressed to “All the pupils of the world.” One also fi nds a short poem entitled simply “To Love,” and a communiqué inviting teachers and the general public to visit the National Library and informing them of its working hours. And, fi nally, there is a short note addressed to parents, reminding them: “A child does not become an adult on his own. He will be what you wish him to be. A conscientious adult equipped for life, if you make the effort to educate him, to strive to understand him. The education given to him at the school must be completed within the framework of the family.”21 In Touré’s “La Fonction,” we saw the school portrayed almost as a village within the village, with the teacher acting the role of energetic liaison creating mutually beneficial relations between school and community, revolutionary state and rural society. The early 1964 Revue, in contrast, portrayed schools as laboratories, teachers as chief technicians, and pupils as participants in, and experimental objects of, the production of standardized forms of knowledge. The Revue in question contains two photographs eloquently exhibiting prevailing visions of ideal educational process. The first, accompanying the story on the construction of new classrooms at Conakry’s École Soumah, features a young teacher before a blackboard at the front of her class. The lesson title at the top of the slate reads: “Vocabulary: The City.” The teacher uses a pointer to tap the word “intense” (in the phrase “The traffic is intense”). It is one of the adjectives and verbs underlined in a lesson designed to develop pupils’ capacity to describe urban life. The second photograph, accompanying an article

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titled “Class Preparation,” presents multiple rows of desks. At each one, two pupils sit with identical posture, their eyes focused directly on the front of the classroom. Both photographs depict school learning as a perfectly orderly and enclosed activity, sealed off from flows of quotidian action shaping the comparatively disordered “real” world on the outside. Both images of an exemplary pedagogical process share much in common with the firsthand verbal descriptions of 1930s classroom dynamics found in F. L. Touré’s memoir. The photographs, like almost the whole of the January Revue, are untroubled by concerns over the separateness or foreignness of formal education in relation to past or present local social dynamics. In fact, the issue’s verbal and visual components seem to take for granted, as a matter of common sense, that schooling should be a realm of concentrated mental activity separated from other more mundane subfields of daily life. The ideal, typical schooling regimens depicted or postulated in the early 1964 Revue were a world apart from the rural educational dynamics that Touré envisioned in texts like “La Fonction.” Most of the journal’s contributors sought to fi ne-tune pedagogical methods inherited from the colonial period. They adhered to a general script of educational progress that had been championed by French and African teachers for decades before the advent of independence. Mastery of the French language was cast as the essential preliminary springboard for subsequent studies in all matters of “classical” knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, geography, mathematics, and science. But what could this persisting way of defining the optimal purposes of schooling really contribute to the collective progress of a predominately rural, self-designated revolutionary nation? Touré and many of his allies of the mid-1960s began posing this question with increasing rigor. In regard to the types of socioeconomic transformations espoused by Guinean revolutionary partisans, the likely “dividends” of current schooling practice seemed ambiguous at best. First, this very way of framing education seemed to have helped foster the teacher-led, student-fueled manifestations of 1961. Any recurrence of such a crisis in state-youth relations was to be avoided at almost any cost. Second, and equally important, current schooling practice was drawing heavily on state economic resources without assuring any contribution, in the short or long term, to the health of the national economy. In the productionist turn of the mid-1960s, economic pressures began to impinge markedly upon revolutionary curricular planning. National education cadres were encouraged to design and implement schooling regimens that imparted popularly valued academic knowledge to increasing numbers of students while simultaneously sparking necessary transformations of agricultural processes throughout the vast interior.

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The “classical” model could stand as one paradigm, but certainly not the paradigm, for postcolonial education. The earnestness with which the revolutionary regime was striving to create alternative pedagogical frameworks and goals is expressed with great clarity in the Revues published in December 1964 and June 1965. Most immediately striking about these issues are the multiple photographs punctuating their main articles. In sharp contrast to the orderly classroom images cited above, the late-1964 and 1965 photographs feature youths performing various types of agricultural and construction work in an emphatically rural, tropical setting where there is no evident sign of any classroom or schooling structure at all. Captions tell readers that all the photographs were taken near the southeastern forest town of Macenta. The first images from the late 1964 Revue illustrate a two-page exposé titled “On the Margins of Productive Work.” A quote from Sékou Touré introduced the piece: “We attach ever more importance to practical teaching and concrete knowledges enabling a rapid normalization of our economic and social conditions; we need all the energies, all the forces at our disposal.”22 The message that emerged through the arrangement of the presidential quote and adjacent images was clear: The nation’s youths, alongside their compelling symbolic attributes, were also endowed with an objective physical potential that the state simply had to exploit if it wished to improve material conditions across the country. That the laboring youths of the photographs were actually engaged in formal curricular activity was established in a subsequent piece reporting initiatives under way at the École Normale Rurale (ENR) (Rural Teacher’s Training School) in the southeastern forest prefecture of Macenta. Written by the school’s director, the article informed readers that the ENR occupied the same site as a former primary teachers’ school. But whereas the professional destination of the former students could have been country or city, the “studentteachers” enrolled in the new school would be trained to work specifically in rural localities. Outlining the main objectives of Macenta’s ENR, the director stated: This school’s goal is to form rural teachers. Beyond their general and pedagogical training, [students] receive practical understandings of agriculture and husbandry. They are called not only to direct productive undertakings at the schools where they will be assigned later on, but also to explain and make popular among the peasant masses the agricultural knowledge and modern technique that they have learned in Macenta.23

The director anticipated that his new charges would resist the notion of serving permanently in the rural realm. Their standing conceptions of school-

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ing’s outcomes and ideal professional futures, shaped by the ideological frameworks of colonial schooling, would have to be completely overhauled through novel, rigorous forms of intellectual and political (re-)education. ENR students would have to grasp the fundamental intolerability of profound rifts between educational sites and the broader collective experiences and challenges characterizing life in Guinea’s rural communities. “How to link school to life?” the director asked. “ ‘How to form future teachers who will be able to put this revolutionary principle into practice?’ This was the great worry of the [school] directorship and the whole teaching staff. One must destroy the heavy heritage of colonialism that had caused manual labor to be divorced from intellectual labor.”24 Radically unlike Sékou Touré in the first years of independence, the ENR director showed little faith or interest in the power of words alone to change the thoughts or conduct of recalcitrant youth. His students’ resistance to the role they were called to perform could only be overcome by immediately putting them to work in the fields surrounding the school. Coursework for the first student cohort included the team-orchestrated creation of a vegetable garden and fields for corn, peanuts, and pineapple, along with a grove for palm oil production. All were required to clear, dig, and plow along with other necessary organizational and maintenance tasks. Although the director emphasized certain theoretical components of his charges’ learning, it was clear that the ENR privileged savoir-faire above all else: Aware that our rural teachers upon leaving this school will only have limited means to accomplish their task, our concern is to get them used to drawing maximally from the materials and tools that will be within their reach. To this end, they learn to make do with a minimum of tools in their garden and field, to perfect rudimentary tools, to compensate for instrument shortages by fi ne-tuning commonly available tools.25

The Macenta ENR thus projected the emergence of ideal rural teachers able to enhance agricultural production at their posts without external material or administrative assistance. These teachers would perform crucial pedagogical and productive functions for the revolutionary state without requiring allocations of limited resources—presumably beyond a salary—to execute their tasks. The pedagogy-for-production model unfolding at the Macenta ENR continued to be displayed and exalted in the following June 1965 Revue. Alongside photographs of ENR students performing diverse acts of field labor and construction, the June 1965 issue also presented a piece titled “On the Margins of Productive Work” focusing on the benefits of curricular reforms for rural Guinea, primarily the southeastern forest prefectures. The second article, “On the Margins,” was a circular recently drafted by the chief educational inspec-

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tor of Guekédou, just northwest of Macenta. Inspired by a recent regional conference, the inspector’s statements on existing and further necessary reforms stressed the specific obligations of forest schools regarding national production goals. We must have a particular orientation, unique to the forest region. I demand, therefore, that each school make haste and take advantage of the coming of the rainy season to begin to improve its fields. We must obviously not forget that it’s not a matter of producing just to produce, but of producing to educate, producing to promulgate around oneself modern methods of production, producing to advance the national economy.

Elsewhere the inspector signaled how well the particular ecological assets of the forest region aligned with new educational reform strategies and goals: “Most of our schools have the good fortune to be surrounded by magnificent terrains that are just waiting to be put to valuable use. The schools of the forest are thus favored by nature: one must celebrate and profit from this.”26 The inspector declared the opening of a new era of educational and economic developments. Teachers trained at Macenta’s ENR would go on to shape their students’ practices so that fields abutting rural schools would constitute compelling and motivating exhibitions of the massive transformative potential inhering in revolutionary planning and pedagogy. Students’ agricultural undertakings would have to stand out from nearby fields cultivated through popular traditional techniques: “It is essential that it is the school that is followed and not the school that follows our routine-bound peasant brothers. . . . I would like school fields to take the form of tourist sites where one walks around with pleasure. It’s thus a matter of [showing] production of stunning quality.”27

The Curving Road to the Centers of Revolutionary Studies The 1964–65 Revues make a jarring impression. They contain enthusiastic depictions and advocacies of two highly distinct, perhaps irreconcilable visions of the ideal components and outcomes of national schooling. In one vision, schooling’s proper autonomy as a domain of intellectual concentration and development necessarily detached from the quotidian work regimes of “the people” was paramount. In the other, this autonomy was assaulted by perspectives stressing the necessity of schools’ immediate material involvement in the agricultural labors sustaining, and in some senses constraining, contemporary rural society. One closes the 1965 issue wondering if the two visions would continue along their different philosophical, political, and developmental paths, or

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if a decisive clash would occur, resulting in a single unified vision of the ideal national school. Initially it appeared that both educational paradigms would further evolve along their separate paths, each one acknowledged and legitimized in state policy. At a 1966 national education conference, however, Touré vigorously backed the productionist framework and its rapid implementation around the country: All the nation’s scholastic establishments must become centers of technical and professional, political and technical training, where men, conscientious and capable producers, will go out steadily to devote themselves, without losing any time, to the effective solution of the thousand and one problems affecting their own social utility, their equilibrium, in short, the blossoming of their society.28

Touré’s position was obviously consistent with the rising productionist emphasis of recent pedagogical debates. In some ways he was intensifying that point. In 1966 he was attributing a new urgency to reformist plans and practices. School-attending youths should begin fulfilling the duty of materially productive citizenship immediately, not in some vaguely defined future. His statement was also novel in the explicitly trans-local and trans-regional scope of its transformative vision, making no distinction between urban and rural realms or the distinct environmental attributes of different parts of the country. But the central policy emerging from the 1966 national educational conference partially contradicted the increasingly productionist spirit driving official pedagogical discourse. Indeed, the conference tried to strike a compromise and accommodate both classical and productionist visions by creating two distinct tracks of post-primary education and two institutional paradigms. Collèges d’Enseignement Rural (CER) ( Junior Highs of Rural Teaching) would guide the great majority of young Guineans fortunate enough to complete primary school along the productionist path culminating (ideally) in their active, concrete transformation of agricultural processes in rural localities. At the same time Collèges d’Enseignement Général (CEG) would welcome select students with superior marks on the CEP exams capping off primary school. CEG youths would continue along the path of elite intellectual development laid out in the colonial period, stressing mastery of classic metropolitan forms of knowledge in highly ordered and insulated classroom settings. The educational and professional horizons of this group were obviously quite open, and far more attractive than those of CER students. At the very least, CEG graduates seemed destined for steady white-collar jobs at a distinct remove from the fields and village settings awaiting their CER counterparts.

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From certain critical vantages the 1966 split of collégiens along distinct, obviously unequal tracks was one of the revolutionary regime’s worst mistakes. Far from advancing nationalist integration of all segments of the population into a cohesive revolutionary mission promulgating a unified Guinean collective identity and “character,” the 1966 reforms seemed to reiterate and reinstate some of the worst legacies of the colonial “bifurcated state,” decisively detaching and elevating the routine experiences and life chances of young urban elites over and above the rural masses.29 Various elements of the Guinean “masses” immediately noted the reforms’ deviations from post-independence politicians’ promises of collective emancipation and progress. Their criticisms highlighted the fundamental divisiveness and stratifying, exploitative consequences of the reforms. Xavier Leunda, conducting research on Guinean rural educational reform in the early seventies, documented some of these initial responses: “Rumors reported that the children [in CERs] would be subjected to an exploitative regimen. One would deliver a second-rate ‘budget’ education, an education ‘for poor ones,’ destined to keep peasants’ children in semi-ignorance and tie them to their villages.”30 The negative connotations and consequences attributed to the first CERs were keenly remembered by many Guineans I spoke with during field research more than three decades after their creation. Most recalled, often laughing, that the new collèges were quickly known in popular speech as “Collèges d’Enfants Ratés”—schools for “failed” or “ruined” students. Popular opposition to the CERs had considerable consequences, though certainly not those intended by most opponents involved. The hostility of both young and adult Guineans toward the new collèges reflected and fueled hope that post-primary students throughout the interior would ascend to the type of classical training that had long been delivered in Conakry’s best schools. But this push for more equal schooling opportunities and life chances across the rural-urban divide spurred the revolutionary leadership to a very different resolution and implementation of educational “fairness.” Just two years after its invention of the two post-primary tracks, the regime moved to eradicate its own divisive measures. It passionately stressed the ideally integrative, productive, and unifying functions of all Guinean schools regardless of their geographical location or academic levels. This renewed zeal for unprecedented, radical pedagogical reform was the real catalyst for Touré’s declaration of the Socialist Cultural Revolution (SCR) of 1968. The short career of the elite CEG was thus quickly closed. Touré announced the new revolution on August 2, 1968, with the annual grandes vacances in full swing. Perhaps he thought it an apt moment to jolt students and teachers into an awareness of the institutional changes that would

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be awaiting them, as well as other changes they themselves would be expected to implement, when they returned to school sites in late September. In the initial speech seeking to define the SCR’s sources, stakes, and ideal effects, Touré depicted the first decade of national independence as a learning process, an illuminating initiatory adventure undergone by PDG leaders, administrators, youth, and national society as a whole: “In the course of ten years of tough practice of sovereignty, we have learned a lot, we have accumulated a lot, we have endured a lot.” Recounting national schooling travails to date, Touré praised, criticized, and promised big changes: Our teaching broke deliberately with the entire educational system of the colonial regime so as to acquire a democratic character, reestablishing in social science syllabi the historical truth that rehabilitates Guinea and Africa and granting science and technical matters their due place; in short, linking school to life. Of course, all of that, in light of what we are going to undertake right now, seems quite timid, but was scientifi cally necessary to undertake the current phase.31

In Touré’s mind, the anticolonialist spirit driving post-independence educational reforms had been genuine, but the methods deployed for implementing change often lacked the necessary planning or rigor. In August 1968 the president, like a student poring over the first chapter of a history text, examined a decade of educational policies. The initial stage appeared essentially as a well-intended, but deeply flawed, drama of trial and error. The subsequent chapter of postcolonial Guinean educational history, Touré determined, must not read like the first. Instead, it should be colored by greater scientific control over the core components and outcomes of pedagogical dynamics at all levels. The increased emphasis on the socialist character of planning and development at the 1968 juncture was intended precisely to underscore the superior rational, scientific spirit of the new wave of reforms in contrast to the more spontaneous, often faltering reforms of the past. Compared to the reform scenarios of the 1964–65 Revues, Touré’s plans for “cultural revolutionary” schooling displayed a more totalizing and systemic thrust. Speaking like a visionary political engineer,32 he framed the nation as an encompassing, highly integrated structure, with education as the pivotal mechanism generating the technical knowledges and social consciousness necessary to further energize and consolidate that structure. When we talk of teaching, of conceptualization and realization, we mean not just natural sciences with their method of dominating nature, but also the social sciences with their applications for Revolution in social relations. And this is why the CER 33 constitute, above all, seeds for total Revolution, cultural, political, and economic, which is all a single whole. The structural network with which they

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will cover the nation will enfold in its threads the practical and economic dynamics whose rational development will blossom into socialist realities.34

In speeches like “La Fonction” earlier in the decade, Touré had been preoccupied with new village schools and teachers as emblematic stages and protagonists in socio-cultural dramas marked by diverse, conflicting mentalities, critical dialogues, and gradual individual and communal refashionings. By decade’s end, he was striving to see Guinea’s educational processes from a more clinically detached vantage in which each school figured as a communicative conduit in a comprehensive master plan for national reorientation, renovation, and reinvigoration. In line with the radical rhetoric of complete political and pedagogical overhaul, all formal educational institutions were renamed Centres d’Etudes Révolutionnaires (Centers of Revolutionary Studies), or CER. A new vocabulary was also established for educational levels, henceforth to be known as cycles one through four, corresponding to primary school, collège, lycée, and the university. Because it was the collège-level reform that had recently stirred such extensive popular resentment, the president naturally gave disproportionate attention to matters regarding collège, or la deuxième cycle, in his major August declaration. The CEG/CER division had been abolished, but what would be the content and aims of the newly reunified “cycle”? Touré stated that youths studying at this level, “aged 13–14 to 16–17 years,” must “begin practical and other initiation to economic and political responsibility in the creation of socialist structures.” Although primary school curricula were sometimes the subject of postcolonial debate, there was reticence when it came to the types of labor demands that could be placed on 6–12 year olds, even in the ferment of a cultural revolution. There was no such hesitation, however, regarding postprimary teens. These youths not only could be expected to undergo intensive “practical initiation” toward “political and economic responsibility,” but they would in fact have to do so to fulfill their duty to quicken the socioeconomic pace of the always unfolding nationalist-revolutionary project. Given the particularly high stakes of collégiens’ effective contribution to the new chapter of national development, guidelines channeling their time and energy could not be left to local administrative discretion. Touré charted new temporal guidelines that would now channel these youths’ curricular activity. All the centers of revolutionary studies purvey the same general education, at the same level as that currently given through general teaching at collèges, and that constitute the common base conferring to all students, in regard to scientific knowledge, the polyvalence and poly-aptitude permitting them to go as far

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as they want and can in the domain of knowledge [savoir] and practical knowledge [savoir-faire]. This common base occupies 40 percent of [course] time. . . . In all CER, 60 percent of [course] time is consecrated to professional teaching and productive work.35

Touré’s references to “general teaching” and the promise that students could advance as far as they wanted in their learning could be read as conciliatory gestures to opponents of the first (1966) version of the CER and the split of collégiens along “practical” and “classical” tracks. But these opponents could hardly fi nd solace in the way the momentary split was undone. In 1968 Touré was already seeing the CEG/CER division as symptomatic of the ambivalent tentativeness marking the first decade of national educational reforms. Seeking decisive separation from such ambivalence at the self-proclaimed cultural revolutionary turn in the nation’s history, Touré staunchly espoused a unified postprimary model, enfolding all schools in all localities. This encompassing model granted practical-productive savoir-faire more time and importance than the metropolitan forms of savoir that had been championed since the opening of the very first schools of Guinée française at the beginning of the century. As we will see below, the educational reforms ushered in with the SCR have been much maligned by Guinean intellectuals since Touré’s death in 1984. Before considering the fate of the 1968 reforms, however, it is important to note their genuinely revolutionary nature. Throughout the colonial era and the fi rst decade of independence almost all Guineans felt, for good reason, that the types of formal education available in Conakry were distinct and superior to those offered elsewhere in the country. Schools in the interior were seen to suffer from the comparatively modest intellectual credentials of their new teachers, the rustic conditions in which their pupils studied, and the almost total illiteracy of their surrounding rural populations. Conakry schools figured as the standard against which all other schools were measured; the provincial “eccentricities” of rural schools were framed as negative derivations from the ideal. Elaborating and expanding upon reconceptualizations and reconfigurations of national schooling originally launched in the remote southeastern forest region earlier in the decade, the CER paradigm of 1968 sought nothing less than a fundamental overturning of the interpretive frameworks that had dominated popular and elite judgments of ideal teaching and pedagogical objectives. For the first time in Guinean history, rural schools became the norm against which other schools would be evaluated. They were the institutions optimally suited to exemplify and disseminate the modern agricultural mindset and techniques now decisively cast as ideal outcomes of national education. Bearing little, if any, resemblance to long-standing French-built schools in the

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capital, and often humbly equipped in terms of teaching personnel and materials, rural schools were no longer in the margins of the story line of Guinean educational development. Their teachers and students would henceforth be arch protagonists in that story, at the front and center of the broader stage of the newly retuned and reinvigorated nation-building project. The attempted dramatic reorganization of schooling practices and contemporary youths’ and adults’ understandings of the social meanings and values of formal education did not end with the “enshrinement” of the new four-tiered CER in August 1968. The revolutionary regime continued to implement new reforms, striving always to consolidate the differences of cultural-revolutionary schooling from colonial-era pedagogies. Three post-1968 reshuffl ings of teachers’ and students’ routine experiences are particularly memorable, both in terms of the cultural politics driving them and the widespread oppositional sentiment they created. First was the promotion of the increased use of national languages for classroom instruction in all disciplines, math and science included, at primary as well as post-primary levels.36 Second was the creation of student-led “administrative councils” at all schools that granted select students organizational responsibilities equal if not superior to those of their teachers.37 Third was the state-promulgated recruitment of students for annual “militant theater” competitions, resulting in a practical emptying of classrooms for considerable periods, and signaling to the public that the role youths played in theater was ultimately more prized by the revolutionary leadership than their work in classrooms or agricultural domains.38

Conclusion In July 1970 a story from the state newspaper Horoya-Hebdo announced the triumph of cultural-revolutionary educational reforms in the remote forest town of Dyéké. The story addressed the very locality where, just over three decades earlier, the heroic teacher of F. L. Touré’s Une enfance africaine wielded an impressive array of authoritarian powers. In the memoir, the teacher dictates the activities of school-attending youths and much of the community in general. Conversely, the Horoya story presented local collégiens as the real authorities and catalysts of reform. These youths were portrayed as working passionately for the fulfillment of ambitious agricultural goals that they themselves had set, alongside other projects benefiting the community and nation. When the presence of teachers at the local Centre d’Etudes Révolutionnaires was acknowledged, they figure merely as supplemental rather than central actors. Students were decidedly the “owners of the field,” the cover-

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age recounted, working hard “with their teachers, machete in hand, hoe over shoulder, some plowing, some clearing. Enthusiasm is overwhelming in this part of the countryside where it is scarcely possible to differentiate teachers from students.”39 The Horoya depictions of students’ and teachers’ new “cultural-revolutionary” roles around Dyéké told the state leadership exactly what it wanted to hear. It assured them that schooling’s fundamental sociopolitical flaws had been overcome, at least in one forest community. In Dyéké, schooling had become a major engine of local agricultural production, at the forefront rather than the margins of the community’s collective labor and development. Local students worked as cohesive teams dedicated to the locality rather than as individuals battling one another for prized diplomas promising advanced studies and white-collar employment in the city. Finally, teachers’ capacities had become completely aligned with the will and work of the students and the community. Any claims to intellectual superiority over commoners or students they may have brandished had been replaced by a proper humility and desire to share directly in the tasks of community production and development. Opponents of the revolutionary regime would rightfully assert that the story about Dyéké’s CER, like myriad others abundantly scattered through official discourse from 1968 to 1984, were artifacts of purest fiction, closer to political fantasy than quotidian reality. For a great many Guineans, especially educators,40 even the “poetic” image of a teacher reduced to equality with students, working in ways and at a pace dictated by students, was nothing short of blasphemous. The state-sponsored assault on former pedagogical hierarchies and modalities was a wanton, vindictive act, arising from Touré’s tyrannical delusions, malevolence, and anti-intellectualism. However one wishes to defi ne or judge the motivations for the radical educational changes scripted and undertaken in the late 1960s, they were, undeniably, visions with powerful effects, dramatically reshaping local realities, though never in the exact image the official leadership liked to project.41 Still more remarkable, considering the tireless worries and efforts deployed toward its reconfiguration, is that schooling was arguably neither the most intriguing nor consequential arena of Guinean pedagogical experimentation and intervention under revolutionary rule. The ceaseless anticolonial fervor and transformative zeal of the regime was at least equally pronounced in its avid organization, surveillance, and celebration of youth-driven “militant theater.”

4 The Rise of Militant Theater

For Guinean adults, the term théâtre instantly recalls a range of performance genres—chiefly dramatic plays, ballets, and choral works1—that were performed by youths at local and regional arts competitions throughout the country from 1959 to 1984. The victors of these competitions proceeded to Conakry to participate in an elaborate, massively attended and publicized biannual twoweek cultural festival known as La Quinzaine artistique nationale. This regular circuit of events impinged upon most Guineans’ lives in various ways, often causing fundamental changes in social position and political outlook. Although involvement in théâtre as performer, trainer, or spectator often yielded entertainment and pleasure, the state’s ardent interest in the aesthetic and political potentials of its genres turned theater into a deeply serious domain of multilayered debate, controversy, and conflict. Of all the efforts of the revolutionary state to reshape the experiences and sensibilities of its youth, none was as disruptive or damaging as what it aptly liked to call “militant theater.” Like the radical 1968 school reforms, theater was cast as a political and pedagogical imperative the reach of which had to be potent and comprehensive. By the end of the first decade of independence, each of Guinea’s two thousand comités—the country’s smallest administrative unit consisting of a village or urban neighborhood—was required to present at least one new play, one ballet, and one choral work at local competitions every year. During the weeks leading up to these competitions, substantial numbers of schooled and unschooled youth willingly or forcibly dropped their studies or agricultural work altogether—in the face of staunch parental outcry—to perfect

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their acting, dancing, or singing under the surveillance of young and adult trainers. For many young Guineans, their experiences during these quasiliminal periods of feverish rehearsal and competition were deeply transformative moments, significantly altering their understandings and imaginings of the workings of state power and their possible futures within the revolutionary nation. The Guinean literary artist, critic, and historian Jean-Marie Touré characterized the state’s 1959 inauguration of artistic competitions under the official rubric of “militant theater” as the initial moment in the spinning of a “vast spider web.” Seemingly benign in its original formulation, the “theater web” eventually enabled the revolutionary regime to ensnare the performance traditions and artistic energies of the entire nation, drawing these unquantifiable resources into the realm of politics and advancing the state’s quest to dominate all domains of collective life.2 Although Touré understated the multiple gaps and weaknesses of this “web,” his metaphor is nonetheless compelling and apt. Glorifying, supporting, and monitoring theater allowed the state to enfold many elements of traditional ethnic and popular cultures and deploy their communicative powers to its own rhetorical and affective ends. The most spellbinding of the country’s diverse performance traditions were exhibited on stage for national and international audiences to admire. Such fi nely orchestrated exhibitions of authentic cultural forms, seemingly unscathed by French colonial influence, ideally embodied and underscored the integrity, vigor, and splendor of the revolutionary nation-building project. The revolutionaries’ attempts to intertwine aesthetic charms and political objectives met with considerable success across time and place. It is undoubtedly true that since the 1950s a great many international observers have become “fans” or “friends” of Guinea primarily through witnessing the brilliance of traveling Guinean dance and music troupes serving as more or less self-conscious cultural ambassadors of their pays natal.3 Most postcolonial regimes have been acutely aware of the importance of recognizing, combating, and promoting the collective underpinnings, meanings, and influences of both traditional and more modern “indigenous” cultural forms.4 But this general fact begs the question of why some regimes at some junctures become almost compulsively preoccupied with past and present cultural patrimonies and dynamics, whereas neighboring regimes and former and subsequent leaderships within the same nation-state devote minimal time and resources to such matters. No Third World regime has taken the importance of promoting indigenous performance arts more seriously than Guinea did over the 1960s and 1970s.5

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Theater’s Charms at Independence and After Sékou Aimait Trop le Théâtre “Sékou loved theater too much.” I heard this phrase uttered again and again by Guineans even fifteen years and more after their revolutionary leader’s death, as they recalled the elaborateness of the revolutionary theatrical complex with varying degrees of anger, astonishment, and laughter. Touré was absolutely enchanted by the semiotic, rhetorical, and affective potentialities of a youth-driven militant theater. In sharp contrast to what went on in Guinean schools—even after all domains of formal education had been radically revamped by the postcolonial state—Touré felt that the best theatrical works convincingly exhibited both local youths’ repudiation of the moral and cultural legacies of French colonialism and their drive to reawaken and publicize the most remarkable aspects and contemporary evolutions of African cultural patrimony. Such youthful artistic efforts simultaneously underlined and glorified the sustained anticolonialism and moral integrity of the Guinean countryside.

Theater over Schooling? At the first national conference of Guinean educators convened after Touré’s death in May 1984, theater was ruthlessly attacked as one of the most destructive components of revolutionary cultural politics.6 The suddenly passionately counterrevolutionary group of teachers and administrators on hand asked: How could state cadres at any level have postured as representatives of a modern(izing) nation-state committed to rational socioeconomic development, while simultaneously stressing the profound importance of youths’ massive participation in theater? How could such figures have even pretended to overlook the fact that efforts deployed in theater, radically unlike the time youths spent in schooling, played no palpable role in the country’s modernization or development? Without becoming play actors themselves, how could revolutionary cadres earnestly justify or defend the hyperbolic significance attributed to youth theater by the Touré regime? For its staunchest critics, the irretrievable loss of the time and energy that Guinean youths and adults had committed to militant theater over the years was nothing short of tragic. From their vantage, schooling and theater—at least in their “revolutionary” forms—stood in a necessarily antagonistic relationship. Both pedagogical domains struggled over youths’ fi nite time and energy, but the official revolutionary discourse never explicitly stated that youths’ engagements in theatrical endeavors were more valuable for nation building than formal schooling endeavors. The revolutionary leadership and cadres around

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the country strove to frame the relative values and interrelations of schooling and theater in other than antagonistic terms. Because Touré persistently sensed that many aspects of national schooling were hindering necessary transformations of Guinean individuals and communities, he was quite willing to cut into the schools’ domination of students’ time, regardless of teachers’ and parents’ protests, and to allocate that time to theater. Officials even attempted to cast the two domains as complementary subfields within a broader “global and multiform” curricular whole that also encouraged participation in sports and the scout-like Pioneer Movement.7 Despite efforts to stress the general complementariness of schooling and theater, official commentaries and press coverage of youthful pursuits in the latter were typically marked by degrees of enthusiasm missing in contemporary depictions of formal educational sites and processes. As we saw in the previous chapter, the regime viewed the development of a properly national(ist) educational system as an arduous, uphill struggle, a project whose success was always threatened by residual (neo)colonial teaching practices and ideologies. A remarkable digression in Touré’s 1962 essay, “The Teaching Function and Revolutionary Morality,” provides useful insight into how and why theater began to vie with schooling as a focal arena of political and pedagogical commitment. In the middle of a text marked by contradictory views of the relationships that should obtain between teachers, students, and parents in rural communities throughout the country, Touré momentarily paused to report on the glowing success of the recent quinzaine artistique held in Conakry. Juxtaposing the current workings and meanings of schooling and theater as pedagogical domains, the president remarked: The Guinean school has developed substantially; we know it, but our practice is to understate our [positive] qualities, to not make much fuss about them, to mobilize instead our energies toward our shortcomings, our gaps and our insuffi ciencies. Instances of immense progress achieved every day give us encouraging confi rmation; the just-completed quinzaine artistique is no minor case in point. Who could affirm, without [the coming of ] the Parti Démocratique de Guinée and the Guinean Revolution, that lycée and collège professors would mount the stage with peasant men and women or with their young students to perform at their side? And who could have imagined that professors, within the framework of a youth movement, would be directed by peasants and workers and craftsmen’s apprentices? Who could have imagined it before the Guinean Revolution? Nobody. That is a major accomplishment; these professors expressed no sense of superiority, no disdain; they expressed on the contrary their state of total insertion within the life of the revolutionary youth of Guinea.8

Touré’s comments underscored a considerable lag between levels of transformative momentum achieved in the domain of schooling—haunted, despite

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notable reformist efforts, by various “shortcomings,” “gaps,” and “insufficiencies”—and the signposts of positive change already far more convincingly displayed in the domain of theater. In their coordination and public staging of well-wrought artistic projects, troupes performing at the quinzaine demonstrated their players’ and communities’ scorn for delusive socio-cultural hierarchies that had taken root in Guinea through colonialist glorifications of French education. The spirit of egalitarianism and teamwork exhibited by the troupes, most visible in the teachers’ willingness to acknowledge the limitations of their cultural knowledge and learn from younger and unschooled coperformers, convinced the president of the palpable reality of revolutionary change. Such observations were obviously a source of great pleasure and pride for Touré. He took considerable credit for the cultural and communicative processes emerging in and around militant theater. In fact, the relationship he sketched between his regime’s political efforts and what he had seen on stage is like the relationship between artists and their work. The competition’s appealing aesthetic and sociopolitical features never could have existed without the robust anticolonial vision and will of his governing regime. Although the various performance ensembles warranted praise, Touré believed that these successes were possible primarily as a result of his party’s work in creating the very conditions for the exciting and emancipating social and artistic energies that propelled the recent quinzaine.

Further Charms From the early years to the end of his dictatorship, Touré cherished theater as a political and pedagogical field with a vibrancy that validated, with special poignancy, his regime’s capacity to reshape and mobilize the cultural and historical sensibilities of the Guinean people, chiefly its youth. As signaled by the observations above, competitive stage performances were praised by the regime for their witnessing of Guineans’ desires to subvert social (mis-) categorizations and elitist cultural distinctions that were part and parcel of French colonial domination. Dramatic plays treating the advent and permutations of colonialism commonly highlighted the nobility of anti-French resistance movements, chiefly the struggles of the Malinké warrior Almany Samori Touré.9 These works were generally tragic, depicting the heroism, but also the defeat, of noble combatants cast as forebears of Guinean revolutionary militancy.10 Dramatic works on postcolonial life typically highlighted the Guineans’ capacity to unlearn and disavow myriad prejudices and conduct reflecting the penetration of French cultural influence into African society. The

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most popular plays examining contemporary affairs were intensely satirical, targeting and scorning the behaviors of the African bourgeoisie, particularly their mimicry of metropolitan styles, tastes, and bodily and linguistic conduct. These plays ended with the victory and validation of figures embodying proper revolutionary humility and unselfishness.11 Another crucial facet of theater’s charms for official revolutionary thought stemmed from its figurative and literal youthfulness. In modern institutional and administrative terms, theater was young and relatively “fresh” in a way that schooling was not. We have seen that youth harbored particularly positive symbolic meanings at the moment of independence because it suggested a future that could be profoundly different from the past. Theater held more youthful sociopolitical connotations than schooling because of its relatively limited incorporation into colonial educational or cultural policy. Theater was absent from the aggressive vision of development scripted by the French governor Roland Pré in the early 1950s.12 Theater was certainly part of Guinean urban-elite experience in the late colonial period. Yet, theater’s encroachments into social dynamics in the interior were minimal. Theater was also youthful in a more literal sense. Guinea’s contribution to a series on national cultural policies sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) states that “young people form the group that is most readily disposed and most suited to artistic activities. They have the soundest psychological make-up and are the best performers of the artistic programme of the socialist cultural revolution . . . Art has become a weapon in the hands of young people.” Youth figured in such statements as primary producers and beneficiaries of theatrical work, drawing knowledge and power from their own social-artistic endeavors at the same time as they disseminated “new values” to “the people” through the formal and thematic quality of fi nely executed performances.13 One could contend that theater’s youthfulness did not distinguish it from schooling, which, after all, also brought young people’s mentalities and actions to the fore. But from a very early stage in the revolution youth were assigned degrees of managerial authority over theatrical pursuits far exceeding the authority students wielded in schooling, even after the radical reforms of 1968. In 1959 Touré created the official youth wing of the PDG, La Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain ( JRDA). Among the first tasks delegated to JRDA representatives was the inauguration and oversight of militant theater competitions throughout the country. Select JRDA militants embraced and executed this responsibility with remarkable, often ruthless zeal. They quickly transformed theater into an almost unavoidable—sometimes entertaining and

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pleasurable, often resented and feared—fact of life for both school-attending youth and unschooled peers, alongside many parents whose control over sons, and even more so daughters, was complicated or simply destroyed. The first two charms of theater for revolutionary officials—its demonstration of Guineans’ capacities of resistance and conviction, and its youthfulness— seem to place little emphasis on theater’s specific formal characteristics vis-àvis other artistic and communicative genres. One is tempted to ask: Why the passionate embrace of theater? Why not something else, such as, for example, illustrated pamphlets mass-distributed to schoolchildren or serial dramas transmitted over radio? One could imagine that such narrative forms might also produce compelling representations of Guinean past and present, and disseminate new models of ideal revolutionary morality and the cultural militancy of youth as clearly and effectively as theater. Touré, however, held strong views about the unique concrete suitability of theater as a vehicle for expressing revolutionary themes and ideals. For Touré in the early 1960s, and for revolutionary discourse generally, theater was embraced for its very special intellectual and emotional powers, and for its unsurpassed communicative efficacy. “For a revolutionary movement,” Touré contended, theater has considerable importance, because its didactic qualities are quite superior to literary production. First, theater, in Africa, has a larger audience than literature. In effect, a book or a poem are interpreted by the reader according to his instructional level, his knowledge, his education, the extent of his political formation, his personal intellectual capacities. There is a fi lter between the thought of a writer and his texts. This fi lter resides in the intellect of readers that functions differently for each one. Conversely, theater acts not only upon the intellect, but also upon sensation; by the physical presence of the actors, the materiality of the decors, the comportment of characters on stage, it delivers an expression more complete than that of the literary work. The margin of interpretation left to the spectator and, consequently, the possibilities of error in interpretation are infi nitely less for the spectator than for the reader or the listener. It is for this reason that we consider theater an important element of revolutionary mobilization, education, and formation.14

Touré’s synopsis of theater is particularly striking in two respects. First is his emphatic distinction between literature and theater. In many societies these have been seen as mutually informing realms of creative endeavor, but Touré is quick to stress that each is distinct and autonomous. For the president, the most notable and regrettable quality of literature was its capacity to engender potentially infinite (mis-)readings, alternative meanings as diverse as the educations and sensibilities of the readers who engaged it. An omnipresent “filter”

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inhered in literary works precluding the possibility of an uninflected transmission of ideas from writer to reader. The types of meanings forged through a spectator’s experience of a theatrical production were wholly different. Radically unlike the reader, the spectator was fully enveloped, senses as well as mind, in the complex communicative power of the performance. He or she was completely captivated—one is tempted to say “captured”—by the messages conveyed through the physical presence and conduct of the performers, and the supplementary components of the mise en scène. The unstable, interpretive filtering intrinsic to literary experience was elided in theatrical experience, and misinterpretations were, necessarily, “infi nitely fewer.” The second crucial aspect of Touré’s espousal of theater over literature, and also over radio, was less explicitly articulated. It is crucial that theater was never cast as a traditional or organic element of Guinean socio-cultural life, and its perceived political superiority over literature did not derive just from nostalgia for precolonial cultural “purity.” Closer to the spirit of Touré’s words, and revolutionary discourse generally, is that theater was embraced for its modernity—the suitability of its genres for expressing the novelty of both nationalist political projects launched in the capital and newly awakened forms of socio-historical reflection, critique, and rehabilitation occurring throughout the interior in the wake of independence. Critics who deride revolutionaryera theater for its recurrent valorizations of African precolonial cultural patrimonies, casting it as an escapist project to cloud the misery of the postcolonial present, forget that revolutionary productions staged vigorous assaults on wide-ranging customary and ritual practices. No Guinean ethnic or religious group was immune from the frequently antitraditional critical edge of militant theater. These stage assaults were framed as efforts at “demystification.” A play or ballet bearing witness to the values of demystification was likely to win praise from revolutionary officials.15 Touré did not credit literature with any modern or modernizing characteristics that would elevate it above theater on a scale of comparative artistic or broader socio-cultural values. Theater was cast as a proper revolutionary communication technology, superior to literature or other print culture as well as radio. Contemporary film production was seen as an intriguing rival form, but not one surpassing theater’s affective or political charms. A reporter for the national newspaper Horoya-Hebdo, celebrating Guinean performers’ recent successes at the 1969 African cultural festival in Algiers, stated: “We would like to energize our art and our culture even more so that they broach and penetrate more deeply the social realities and politics of the Guinean people. The-

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ater uniquely presents all of its faculties [and] just like cinema unites music, language, and image.”16

Rhetorics of Colonial and Revolutionary Plays and Ballets Dramatic plays and ballets were the most important genres of Guinean militant theater. Despite the integration of plays and ballet within the same artistic and institutional framework, the evolution of the formal and thematic components of these genres, and their shifting political valences over time, deserve distinct analyses. Such descriptions and interpretations further our grasp of the historical factors behind militant theater’s meteoric rise at the postindependence juncture. Investigating the developments and reconfigurations of the two genres across several decades helps us understand their rich meanings for revolutionary elites, as well as for performers and audiences less invested in official nationalism.

Guinean Dramatic Plays, 1937–1950 The key cultural institution in the genesis of “Guinean”17 stage drama was the elite École Normale William Ponty in Senegal. Ponty was the summit of secondary education possibilities for Guinean youth—in fact, for all African youth residing in Afrique Occidentale Française. Only youths deemed supremely promising by French imperial criteria were able to study there.18 The traceable tradition of Guinean playwriting and acting begins with a short play by Guinean pontins 19 titled Meeting of Capitaine Péroz and Samory, performed on school premises in 1936. The work presented Almany Samory Touré as “a tyrant who imposed terror over local populations, but who, intimidated by the reprimands and threats of Capitaine Péroz renounced war in order to ally himself with the civilizing work of France.”20 In Guinea’s first documented play, therefore, the figure later treated as the nation’s greatest resistance hero and martyr—a man endlessly celebrated in revolutionary cultural productions—bends in cowardly fashion before the politico-military might of France. Jean-Marie Touré points out that the youths involved in the work’s production were obliged for multiple reasons to take due note of their audience’s colonialist commitments. With the coming of Guinean independence, young Guinean actors would exalt rather than elide the magnitude of Samori’s anticolonial resistance. These actors, however, just like their elite colonial predecessors, also composed and performed with similar rhetorical ends at heart: the gratification of authorities in the audience who wielded decisive power over their budding personal futures. Elite educated youth inaugurated formally staged plays on Guinean soil as

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well. The major themes of the earliest locally performed works have been reconstituted through oral-historical research. Of the initial comic sketches preformed by students at Conakry’s École Primaire Supérieure in 1939, we know that “The Fetishist and Karamakho All Akhbar put on stage, to ridicule them, the mystification of charlatans and marabouts that pretended to cure illnesses with sudden incantations and infusions drawn from medicinal plants.” Later The Black Market highlighted those who “during the war of 1939–1945, profiting from local shortages . . . trafficked in essential goods, using coded words.” The Drunk presented the “ravaging” effects of alcoholism on “social, cultural, and economic levels.”21 Guinean drama took a turn in 1948 in conjunction with the creation of the country’s first Maison des Jeunes.22 In a decree defi ning the overall purposes of the new Conakry institution and the activities it should house, Governor Pré stated that each soirée dansante (evening of dance) held at the building should be preceded by a stage play.23 Pré’s statement indicated that local plays should assume more elaborate formal and thematic dimensions. The Maison’s juxtaposition of plays with soirées dansantes signaled that dramatic works should henceforth enhance the cultural and educational value of a night devoted to leisure. Theater should complement the atmosphere of elite cultural events and also infuse them with greater intellectual character, and certainly with some political significance as well. The most elaborate and intriguing play performed in the early years of the Conakry Maison was indeed deeply political: Fodé Lamine Touré’s 1950 The Nomination of a Canton Chief. Based on an episode its author witnessed in a village of Kindia prefecture, the play depicted vicious rivalries that emerged around the anticipated death of an aged and ailing local chief. Contenders to accession appearing on stage included the dying chief’s brothers, cousins, and sons, as well as a host of “marabouts, diviners, witchdoctors, and other charlatans” consulted by the primary rivals in their efforts to influence the outcome of the handover of power. To end the fracas and strife over power, a local French administrator fi nally interceded. He gathered the local population and asked them to name a man who had always distinguished himself “by his honesty and the quantity and quality of his agricultural yield.” Reflecting on these criteria, villagers decided unanimously on the well-known figure of a particularly upright, assiduous local farmer. This man—“a peasant . . . returning from the fields, his hoe over his shoulder”—was immediately inaugurated as their new chief.24 The social themes and didactic nature of the 1939–50 plays J. M. Touré studied were remarkably similar to the plays that would be staged in revolutionary times. Countering fetishism by revealing the absurdity of elders’

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claims to magic powers—as in Le Fetishist and Karamako all Akhbar—would be an objective widely sought in later militant theatrical works, particularly those explicitly espousing demystification. The polemical aims of The Black Market and The Drunk were also highly consonant with revolutionary social ideologies that steadily targeted illicit commerce, greed, selfishness, alcoholism, and indulgence, not just as individual frailties and trespasses but as serious moral infractions betraying the nation’s ongoing struggle for socio-cultural rehabilitation and integrity. Like the works staged in preceding years, The Nomination of a Canton Chief contained many emphases foreshadowing postcolonial theater. F. L. Touré’s play was proto-revolutionary in its mockery of men possessed by an exaggerated hunger for power and influence—figures who, through their recourse to “marabouts, diviners, witchdoctors, and other charlatans” demonstrated their complete mystification. One could also see that the final election, by popular mandate, of a modest peasant as the new political authority meshed with elements of revolutionary social ideology. As described by locals, the peasant nominee embodied character traits central to revolutionary defi nitions of ideal rural citizenship—honest, hardworking, effective farmers, too busy with important matters of production to concern themselves with petty internecine squabbles. In other respects, however, The Nomination was deeply at odds with Guinean nationalist politics, which were, in fact, beginning to gather substantial steam at the moment of the play’s initial staging.25 Most obvious, although the work vividly mocked the behavior of would-be chiefs, it did not attack the institution of chieftaincy itself. One might even say that it strove to elevate the institution through its portrayal of the selection of “the right man for the job”— with the assistance, of course, of French administrative supervision. At the same time, Sékou Touré’s Rassemblement Démocratique Africain was gaining notoriety and popularity through increasingly vehement and successful rootand-branch attacks on the very notion of “the customary chief.”26 There is, however, a broader and deeper sense in which The Nomination, along with the minor plays around it, were emphatically colonial(ist), antithetical to the political and cultural objectives pursued in post-independence theater. The Africans represented in the locally performed colonial-era works did not create any meaningful changes in social, cultural, or political processes. As dramatic figures, they personified problems and shortcomings in Guinean society, but they never embodied consequential transformative power, the capacity to directly improve their local environments. African personae exhibited the need for reform or intervention, but the taking of decisive measures to resolve serious problems and conflicts remained the prerogative of colonial

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administrative authorities. The French administration’s unique hold on transformative power was conveyed in implicit and explicit ways. Although “the people” select their new chief in The Nomination, only the decisive intervention of the regional representative of colonial power dispelled pervasive ambiguities and established proper conditions for a just transition of (indirect) power.27 Dramas staged in colonial Conakry thus projected a kind of off-stage metaprotagonist, which was none other than the colonial regime in all its administrative components. It alone was credited with the vision and means necessary to effectively combat, remodel, or eradicate the negative social tendencies that African actors vividly personified onstage—tendencies repeated in hypothetically countless ways in urban and rural settings both near and far from elite cultural sites such as Conakry’s Maison des Jeunes. Before turning to a fuller examination of postcolonial drama, another colonial-era production bears mentioning. The historical fact of colonial rule certainly did not predetermine the political contents of all contemporary plays written by Guineans. Indeed, just a year after the staging, noted above, of The Meeting of Capitaine Péroz and Samory at l’École William Ponty in Senegal, Guinean graduates of the same institution delivered a completely different dramatic rendering of the same event to audiences at a colonial exhibition. Again through oral-historical accounts, J. M. Touré has pieced together the script’s main topics and turns: Here, briefly, is the play’s substance: Capitaine Péroz was dispatched toward Samory in order to establish a treaty of amity between him and France. To convince him to sign it, Péroz sketched out for Samory the advantages of such a treaty. Samory hardens and condemns the undertaking of conquering African countries, especially by France, encouraged by his sofas 28 adamantly opposed to any treaty of amity with France. In the end, the attempt to negotiate the pact ends in argument and Péroz’s mission abruptly departs.29

At the Guinean graduates’ presentation in Paris in 1937, the tenacious images of Samory and his adjuncts were strikingly different from the irresoluteness ascribed to Samory by fellow pontins just a year earlier. The radically divergent portraits of the resistance figure bear eloquent witness to the diversity of political micro-environments existing in the colonial Francophone world. Comparing stage versions of Samory is critical, as it shows that certain Guinean elite youths were becoming acutely aware of the political potency and mutability of performance art two decades before independence. That awareness would only grow. The most pivotal Guinean explorer of the formal and thematic plasticity of theatrical genres was another Ponty graduate, Fodéba Kéita, born in the northeastern savanna town of Siguiri in 1921. Over time, however,

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his projects veered away from stage plays and toward ballet as the most compelling form for conveying Africa’s past and present cultural vibrancy. Kéita’s career and its impacts on postcolonial ballet as the most compelling “militant” performance genre are addressed below. First I turn to the further evolution of stage drama after independence.

El Hadj Millions and the Dramatic Powers of Postcolonial Youth In official revolutionary representations of the colonial period, youth were recurrently cast as caught in a weave of social constraints that prevented positive transformations of their local circumstances. Thus one reads Sékou Touré telling early postcolonial youths that, prior to independence, there was “a different youth . . . because it was not placed either objectively or subjectively in conditions resembling those you know today. This youth of your fathers struggled through a thousand and one contradictions that resulted from colonization.”30 The desires of colonial-era youths for change were doomed in advance. Indeed, Touré implied that these youths did not really “struggle,” in so far as that term signals effective resistance to an opposing force. In reality, they floundered like fish in a bucket, unable to create conditions that would enable their own effective cultural and political actions. Even at moments when colonial-era youths felt they were actively involved in meaningful collective movements, the potentially positive value of their engagements was undermined by ethnic barriers imposed by the colonial administration. In his opening address to the Second Congress of the JRDA in 1960, Touré sketched a narrative on how ethnocentric constraints warped the evolution of youths’ consciousness and political activity. Let’s take an example! Four youths31 born in the same town, with mothers belonging to the same family, but with fathers of different ethnicities, were obliged to join different associations. Even though these four youths began schooling the same day, and had negotiated the same educational path up through the École primaire supérieure diploma; even though the students advanced further in the same exam cycle, were hired in the same administrative unit and employed in the same workshop or office; even though they lodged due to their sense of brotherhood and friendship in the same apartment, the irrational situation existing in Guinea led each one, against all of his options, to militate in an ethnic group different from that of the other three.32

The most striking aspect of Touré’s sketch is the fundamental inaction he assigns to the emblematic youths at the precise moment that they ought to act otherwise. He artfully underscores the anticlimactic character of the point

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where the leading young men, rather than taking historically novel measures to free themselves from the colonial political and administrative structures, instead unself-consciously reenact the already prescribed roles in which those very structures cast them. Their choices of political alignment carry no potential for dramatic change. The dramatic circumstances that transform the young men from gifted but thoroughly subordinated colonial subjects into effective nationalist militants does not arrive—indeed, cannot arrive—without the ascent to power of Sékou Touré and the PDG. In postcolonial time, the creation of the JRDA ideally assured that Guinean youth would never relapse into the political passivity or misguided ethnocentrism that tainted the consciousness of colonial youth. In the revolutionary historiography of modern youths’ mentalities, the rise of the PDG created conditions that made certain types of dramatic change in individual and collective conduct possible which, in colonial times, were impossible, even unimaginable. Theater, particularly stage drama, played an especially crucial role here: it crystallized transformative ideals and confirmed the reality of the state’s power to ignite changes in youths’ consciousness as a whole, as well as the capacity of young individuals to undertake concrete actions favoring their local community’s moral and material development. A vivid example was El Hadj Millions, performed by a troupe from Labé prefecture at the national festival in 1970.33 Coming just a year after Guinean artists’ noteworthy achievements at the first Pan-African Arts Festival in Algiers in 1969,34 and several months before the immense political instability and persecution created by a Portuguese attack later in the year,35 the festival of March 1970 could be seen as an apex in the revolutionary regime’s confidence in both the aesthetic and political values of militant theater. The exceptionally extensive official press coverage of the event bears witness to the reigning enthusiasm. In a speech opening the festival, Sékou Touré focused his attention on dramatic plays. Praising plays as the sole form capable of integrating and redeploying the communicative resources of all the other competition genres, the president stressed that their full political impact hinged on their “exposure” of “social contradictions” and a “central problem,” followed by an “illumination” of “a sequence of choices and decisions made in the direction of the Revolution.”36 In sharp contrast to Touré’s commentaries on the behavior of colonialera youth and the colonialist plays already examined, El Hadj Millions highlighted young Guineans’ capacity to take direct control of socio-cultural, political, and economic processes. The play’s hero was Oumarou, whose father, El Hadj, figures as “a notorious, greedy, miserly trafficker.” Horoya-Hebdo’s

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daily coverage of the festival indicates that the play began with El Hadj’s return from Mecca. Seeking to turn his holy pilgrimage into profit, the old man returns from Saudi Arabia loaded with foreign merchandise and currency, both proscribed by Guinean law. Members of the local youth militia quickly note his illegal sales and money changing, and confiscate all the smuggled goods El Hadj had intended to sell.37 Learning later that his own son, Oumarou, has recently joined the militia in question, El Hadj insults him and bans him from the family house.38 Oumarou only increases his vigilance as a militia member, deploying more of his time to combat illicit, exploitative commerce. I cite the Horoya account of the play’s climactic sequences at some length, as its own dramatic qualities allow one to grasp the most important details of the play and assess some of the reasons for its official praise: Oumarou the militiaman arrives in the course of an operation of vigilance to reveal and capture three other reputed traffickers. The young Oumarou is congratulated at a public meeting, all the youth talking about him and wanting to follow his example. But a terrible internal struggle erupts within him. He knows that there remains one racketeer to arrest, but that this figure is his own father. He wavers between duty toward his nation and the love he has for his father. Like a Cornelian hero, he chooses to serve his country and confides [the truth] to his best friend who during a town council publicizes the whole affair. Omarou is not happy about events, not because of his love for his father but because he has been outdone in the town’s eyes by his friend. He wishes he would have made the denunciation on his own. But nothing is lost for he serves as a witness and confirms his accusations [against his father] with firm proof. El Hadj Millions, who briefly tries to shirk away from social judgment before the council, acknowledges the wrongdoings imputed to him in his son’s testimony. In an indescribable turnabout he acquires the militant faith and pours forth benedictions upon his son, son of an immaculate rectitude, savior of family honor. At the council, the chance is granted El Hadj Millions to enlist in the philosophy of the Party, and to learn to live unselfishly in the service of men. He learns that his money is only a means and not an end in itself.39

Radically unlike the colonialist plays discussed above, El Hadj Millions created a space for its pivotal young subject to make a choice with vitally important stakes—for himself, his father, his fellow militiamen and friends, the community, and even the nation. Whereas the dramatic structures of the colonial plays locked Africans into sociopolitical inertia or ridiculous misdeeds, the revolutionary play ideally provoked poignant internal tensions in the Guinean

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protagonist(s) and decisive actions that would surmount the very bases of such tensions. In rescuing his father from his deeply antinational greed and exploitative machinations, the young Omarou of El Hadj Millions embodied the new forms of youth reflection and capacity that were espoused by the revolutionary state, boldly illustrating the massive distance separating the lives of postcolonial youth peer groups from previous ones before independence. Given their capacity to depict exactly what the revolutionary leadership wanted to see regarding contemporary transformations within youth sociology and national society as a whole, it is unsurprising that Touré believed that plays were the most sophisticated and reputable of the militant performance genres staged at events like the 1970 festival. For most Guineans on hand, however, it was virtually always the performance of ballets representing all the nation’s localities that almost always stole the militant theater “show.” Many Guineans have told me of their keen admiration of the physical prowess and discipline exhibited by ballet troupes in competitions held throughout the revolutionary years. They appreciated that, by observing dance troupes, they could discover the diversity of Guinea’s ethnic performance traditions without the kind of intrusive citations from official political discourse that typically abounded in contemporary plays. For reasons discussed in later chapters, ballet also stands out for negative reasons in individual and collective memories of militant theater. It was the genre that demanded the most physical energy from performers that were often subjected to brutal rehearsal regimens by trainers seeking to earn party recognition for the quality of “their” troupe’s work. Such rehearsals were also sites of frequent, ruthless sexual harassment of forcibly recruited girls and young women. The ambivalent responses that it continues to provoke among diversely situated Guineans makes examination of competitive ballet’s historical emergence and trajectory essential to any broader discussion of revolutionary theater.40

The Late-Colonial Ballet of Fodéba Kéita Fodéba Kéita’s legacy has stirred heated debate among observers of the rise and ramifications of Guinean cultural nationalism. In his widely read essay, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon celebrated Kéita’s late-colonial artistic work for its evocations of the historical and moral factors driving the ascent of militant anticolonialism and official popular-revolutionary politics in Guinea. The influential American scholar Christopher Miller, an ardent critic of Guinea’s revolutionary regime, more

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recently developed a counter-interpretation of Kéita’s art seeking to divorce it from any association with the ruthlessly Manichean logic and tactics of Sékou Touré’s party-state.41 My aims in revisiting Kéita’s career are less polemical. I seek to understand the nature of the intended and unintended roles Kéita played in ballet’s entry onto the main stage of Guinean performance arts and cultural politics. As with dramatic plays, the traceable nationalist significance of Guinean ballet began on foreign soil. Kéita appeared on the April 1957 cover of the illustrated monthly Bingo, the major international review of Francophone African cultural affairs published in Dakar. His face was front and center, surrounded by smaller snapshots of young performers acting various roles in his Ballets-Africains. The issue’s feature article cast Kéita as a “traveling ambassador of African culture” and “the great figure in contemporary African theater.”42 Bingo’s relatively nonpartisan reporting allows us to piece together some of the most interesting twists and turns of Keita’s career before it was caught up in the tumult of Guinean revolutionary politics. The initial successful troupe formed by Kéita in 1949 bore the name “Théâtre Africain.” The black students with diverse occupations in Paris came into agreement under the direction of Fodéba Kéita to create from folkloric elements a spectacle granting nothing to cheap exoticism and presenting an incontestable assurance of authenticity. All originally from Black Africa, Senegalese, Congolese, Guineans, Sudanese,43 they had one point in common: the ability to speak French and the recent departure from their native land.44

The emphasis on authenticity as a driving aesthetic and political ideal in the formation of Théâtre Africain is noteworthy. The term was to have an extremely vibrant career in Guinean revolutionary commentary on cultural production as a kind of ideal, normative standard against which the success of particular works, especially ballets, could be measured. Though its meaning was never fully fi xed even in Sékou Touré’s voluminous appraisals of national performance arts, clearly the range of positive meanings inhering in revolutionary constructions of “authenticity” both meshed with and diverged from those driving Kéita’s late-colonial meditations. Bingo suggests that Théâtre Africain members embraced authenticity as the antithesis of “cheap exoticism.” Kéita’s personal promulgation of authenticity was, however, far more complex. For him it was not a conservative tenet invoked to defend African social-artistic values from the assaults of a more or less imperious Euro-modernity, but rather a representational ideal that challenged contemporary African artists to explore and elucidate the formal quali-

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ties of an existing African modernity. Referring particularly to contemporary African dance, Kéita stressed the following “objectives” of “authenticity.” How many times have we heard employed, wrongly and mistakenly, the word authentic, in relation to folkloric performances? In truth! Authentic in comparison to what? To a more or less false idea one has forged of the sensational primitiveness of Africa? No! An authentic folkloric performance is one that faithfully represents the most characteristic aspects of the life that it wants to relive on stage. For us, authenticity is a synonym of reality. To the degree that folklore is an ensemble of traditions, poems, songs, dances, and popular legends of a country, it cannot be anything other than the reflection of the life of this country. And if this life evolves, there is no reason that the folklore which is its living expression does not evolve as well. This is why the modern folklore of contemporary Africa is just as authentic as that of ancient Africa, both being the real expression of the life of our country at two different periods in its history. The current orientation of a folkloric group like ours must be to inform the entire world of the cultural values of these two Africas: the traditional pre-colonial Africa of our ancestors, and the Africa of today, that, little by little, borrows from Western civilization.45

In the early 1950s music and dance largely displaced spoken dialogue as the dominant media in Kéita’s unfurling of these “two Africas.” After a successful year touring in France and Francophone Switzerland, and a one-hour performance on French national television “against a magnificent African village décor,” Kéita’s group was defi nitively launched.46 Its first tour through German-speaking Switzerland convinced Keita that reliance on (French) spoken interaction on stage would severely limit the breadth of the group’s aesthetic impact and fi nancial success. In the end, heavier emphasis on music and dance increased the popularity of Théâtre Africain within as well as outside France and Francophone Europe. By 1952, Kéita was arranging three-month bookings for his troupe at top Parisian venues. March 10, 1954, marked an early apex in Kéita’s career. After an extended intensive tour throughout Europe, and two months of rehearsals in Paris, a reconfigured group, now named Ballet de Kéita Fodéba, played the Théâtre des Champs Elysées before an audience that included the French president René Coty and “a parterre of ministers and high dignitaries.” Local press accounts of the event’s massive success confirmed Kéita’s status as a rising star on the metropolitan cultural scene. “One would be wrong not to grant boundless praise to Kéita Fodéba,” reported Le Figaro.47 Kéita’s conquest of Parisian audiences and press prompted the High Commissioner of French West Africa to invite him and his group to tour the region in 1955. Kéita “took advantage of the trip to reestablish contact with the origins of his art, recruit new artists and prepare in the uniquely meaningful set-

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ting (recueillement) of Siguiri, his pays natal, the next spectacle.”48 The moves Kéita made while in the territories of Afrique Occidental Française (AOF) during the winter of 1955–56 were some of the most consequential of his remarkable career. He rejuvenated his overall project. Twenty of the thirty members of the newly named Ballets-Africains with which Kéita returned to Paris in 1956 had never left Africa. The bulk of the dancers and musicians, particularly the women, were far younger than the original participants of Théâtre Africain launched just seven years earlier.49 Noteworthy differences emerged in the social composition of Kéita’s artistic ventures over time. Whereas the members of the original group were cosmopolitan elites fluent in French and highly cognizant of dominant metropolitan representations of Africa, Kéita’s final colonial-era artistic group was younger, less educated, and less tutored in metropolitan sensibilities. Authenticity remained central to Kéita throughout his career, but the BalletsAfricains project testifies to a change in his view of how to optimally stage “African-ness.” The relative youthfulness and provincialism of the artists of Ballets-Africains indicated the strength of Kéita’s desire not just to exhibit the distinguishing characteristics of African cultures but to stress their concrete contemporary vigor and the living brilliance of African cultural differences. The acute seriousness with which Kéita took the new project was apparent in the control he exercised over members’ behavior. Whereas the relations between Kéita and members of the original Théâtre Africain seem to have been fairly egalitarian, Kéita sternly monitored and censured the quotidian routines of Ballets-Africains youths. No discussions or debates were permitted once Kéita issued a command. The smallest tardiness at practices on performance [nights] is rigorously sanctioned by a fi ne or even termination of contract. Drunkenness, gambling, improper comportments provoked an immediate return home . . . This monastic discipline . . . is imposed on everyone in light of the troupe’s mission that Kéita defi nes as a community that must show itself worthy of ambassadorship of African Culture.50

Revolutionary Elaborations upon Kéita’s African Ballet How much did Fodéba Kéita’s individual experiences, visions, scripts, stage designs, and choreographies shape the rise and trajectory of ballet as a major, if not the major performance genre back in Guinea? The question is a haunting one. Its significance extends well beyond the formal study of Guinean cultural history. Over the course of the 1960s ballet became an extremely serious

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affair throughout the country. Ballet, besides becoming a pivotal domain of official nationalist cultural politics, also became central to many Guineans’ understanding of how revolutionary social ideologies worked, the scope and limitations of contemporary state power, and the vicissitudes of citizenship in a new nation where definitions and projections of African “culture” had become gravely important and unavoidable concerns for both party elites and the provincial “masses.” The depth of Kéita’s personal involvements and responsibilities for the uniquely fraught character of Guinean revolutionary cultural politics was considerable. Leaving Paris for Conakry, he plunged into national politics and wielded substantial power in an array of high-ranking posts including that of Minister of the Interior.51 Ballet’s ascent to prominence coincided with Kéita’s return to his homeland. In the decade before independence, neither “theater” nor ballet figured markedly in local political discourse or debates between French authorities and more or less vigorously oppositional Guinean elites. J. M. Touré’s research on colonial Guinean theater contains no references to ballet, nor even to plays performed after the 1950 Nomination of a Canton Chief. Although contributions to the 1956 youth-centered newspaper La Voix des Jeunes repeatedly asserted the importance of Maisons des Jeunes for youth development in Conakry and the provinces, they exhibited no interest in stage drama or ballet as activities that should be promoted in the new institutions. A study of La Voix indeed suggests that at that point Guinean elites felt that sports activities were far more important to young people’s psychosocial growth than any concerted involvement in performance arts.52 Kéita’s distinctive conceptual and technical abilities were crucial factors in ballet’s meteoric rise in post-independence Guinea. Sékou Touré and other new PDG power holders were duly impressed by the overseas successes of Ballets-Africains, and the troupe’s unforgettable exhibitions of African traditional and modern cultural forms before the riveted eyes of varied European audiences. There was surely also nationalist pride in the troupe’s Guinean roots, both in terms of its director and largely Guinean composition. This pride differed from what may have been inspired by another Guinean work that had also impressed many Europeans: Camara Laye’s autobiographical novel, L’Enfant Noir.53 Whereas credit for Laye’s text belonged uniquely to him, in his special power to evoke a provincial child’s coming of age with exceptional poignancy, the brilliance of Ballets-Africains depended upon, and radiated through, a team of impeccably trained, disciplined, and talented young performers. Whereas Laye’s book sketched insurmountable tensions shaping one youth’s moral and intellectual development and possible life trajectories,

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Ballets-Africains showcased the remarkable aesthetic impact that could be generated through African youths’ integrated contributions to a collectively forged social-artistic whole.54 Kéita’s personal artistic vision and metropolitan triumphs of the 1950s certainly influenced ballet’s spectacular career in postcolonial Guinea. But other ideological forces within nationalist politics also powerfully shaped and reshaped the forms and themes of ballet performances from the first to the fi nal years of the revolution. Some of ballet’s transmutations on Guinean stages had very little to do with Kéita or the international fame of Ballets-Africains. Recalling Touré’s fervent enthusiasm over the pedagogical value of dramatic plays like El Hadj Millions, and their capacity for disseminating ideal revolutionary thought and action, one wonders why his regime ever felt the need to promote or exalt ballet. The superior entertainment value that almost all Guinean spectators attributed to ballet performances might have made them seem undesirable rivals of contemporary stage dramas, possibly diverting audiences’ attention from the core political messages of militant theater. At the same time, however, the audience’s delight with ballet probably nourished Touré’s positive appraisals of dance. But for ballet to rise to the official, exalted revolutionary status that it finally did, it had to become useful in well-defined political terms and, arguably, able to outperform dramatic plays for certain communicative functions essential to revolutionary transformations of national society. In Touré’s opening speech at a 1973 government conference on national arts and culture, he declared: Theatrical plays have treated resistance to colonial penetration, struggle during the colonial regime and fi nally the joy of living after liberation from colonization and the advent of an era of liberty, equality, and responsibility at the level of the people and the individual. As for the plays whose themes have been drawn from current realities of our intra-social struggles, they have simultaneously attacked ignorance, debauchery, alcoholism, depersonalization, trafficking, embezzlement and parasitism in order to put an end to all social transgressions constituting an obstacle to the advancement of the new man.55

What distinctive sociopolitical function could ballet serve in relation to this broad range of descriptive and rhetorical ends already effectively pursued by dramatic plays? The answer is that ballets were seen to be optimally suited to combat mystification, a particular form of ignorance that revolutionary discourse constantly associated with fetishism. The state almost always linked fetishism to the continuing existence of pathological, more or less barbaric forms of intergenerational oppression. Fetishism was a collection of practices, different in form but similar in intention from place to place, whereby elder men, using ritual or sacred objects, manipulated traditional communal fears

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of supernatural forces to intimidate and subjugate local women and youths. Fetishism was fed by a vast pool of misguided age-old beliefs linked to the perceived magical force of locally sacred objects and practices demanding the complete reverence of all members of the community. The beliefs, objects, and practices were the cornerstones of entrenched forms of gerontocratic patriarchy that still powerfully influenced individual thinking and social relations in many rural communities, shrouding them in mystification. Demystification, as revolutionary ideology and policy, was aimed at the symbolic and material neutralization or destruction of all actors and factors that nurtured fetishism and mystification. The demystification program, consistent with broader visions of revolutionary change, promised to emancipate and enlighten women and youth. State opposition to fetishism and mystification was linked to the official promulgation of ballet, especially in the forest region, seen as the ultimate bastion of fetishism.56 The sources, stakes, and ramifications of these local dynamics are explored in later chapters. To more broadly introduce militant ballet’s drive against mystification, I turn to an intriguing sketch of a ballet originating in Boké prefecture. During the same festival in which El Hadj Millions was winning critical praise, Boké prefecture staged a ballet that was also acclaimed.57 Official descriptions of the formal qualities and political values of the two works differed in notable ways. After an initial sequence of collective dance by Boké performers described as a “joyous melee,” a ritual procession slowly occupied the stage. The state reporter invited readers to join him in his perceptions of the stunning overall qualities and deeper meanings of the sequences that followed. One must listen and pay attention because the parade of old masks begins. It is made up of taboo and venerated objects. No one however [on stage] wants to look at them under threat of mysterious death. Are we [in the audience] going to flee before the traditional values incarnated precisely in these objects, these masks? Of course not. The Revolution is here to empty us of our old preconceptions and to throw us into research of the positive elements contained in our vestigial social traditions. Yesterday’s frightening masks whose appearance alone forced us to run away, because their meanings escaped us, are now approached so that we can finally fully engage their content and grasp their quintessence. It is the same joyous dance of the beginning that crowns the efforts achieving demystification.58

The ballet depiction grants little attention to its narrative elements. Unlike the plot of El Hadj Millions, which elicits detailed critical scrutiny, the ballet, at least in the reporter’s eyes, unfolds very simply with a beginning, middle, and (happy) ending. The laudable qualities of the Boké ballet rest not so much in what it recounts as what it so effectively exhibits: the formerly feared masks pos-

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sess no real, indwelling sociopolitical force. Their daunting force resided instead in the powers that local subordinate subjects irrationally projected onto them. In the clear light of the present, such masks can be examined fully and fearlessly as what they always actually were: impressive, locally crafted objets d’art that gave objective form and social-reproductive force to profoundly flawed and oppressive systems of unenlightened beliefs. The untitled Boké production exemplified a broader thematic pattern in “militant ballet.” Within this subgenre, masks and other traditional objects once seen as magical icons were presented as profane artifacts of previous, more or less admirable or repugnant forms of social-artistic creativity and control. Performances like Boké’s, alongside dozens presented by forest prefectures beginning in the early sixties, enacted demystification through their display of ritual objects to a more or less uninitiated general public. They also advocated state-sponsored demystification as morally just, as it eradicated deeply felt archaic fears, as well as aesthetically enlightening, even beautiful, in its disclosures of radically unique, authentic, and largely unknown elements of traditional Guinean cultural patrimony. This dynamic of politically driven revelation delighted both revolutionary elites and significant portions of non-elites around the country, including individuals who disapproved strongly of most other aspects of revolutionary economic and cultural policy.

Conclusion From independence through the early 1980s, revolutionary elites and considerable portions of the Guinean “masses” saw local, regional, and national theatrical competitions as a kind of “vast spider web” entangling different subjects in broadly similar forms of physical and creative endeavors cast as national(ist) culture. The ways in which officials and subordinates perceived the sources, stakes, and ramifications of this web’s emergence and elaborations, however, varied widely across time and locality. The actual social processes whereby the plays and ballets of militant theater became such vital elements in revolutionary politics and popular experience were more complex than the producers of official discourse would care to admit. Much of this complexity arose from the substantial role played by locally “elected” JRDA militants who arranged, monitored, and enforced theatrical endeavors in localities throughout the country. Profound links joined the JRDA, militant theater, and the broader social-transformative objectives of the revolutionary state.59 The lead editorial in official state coverage of the closing events of the 1970 national festival warmly lauded the eleventh anniversary of the JRDA, depicting the festival as a moment of triumph for the youth wing of the party-state.

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The event as a whole formed an eloquent message validating the JRDA’s organizational progress and positive impact upon the sociology of Guinean youth. While other youths slumber in the repugnant alienation of exploitative regimes, the JRDA is more than ever the youth that the people of Africa need; a conscientious youth, a youth ready to destroy all the reactionaries, the fogies . . . How far we are from that period where delinquent youth rotted in clubs of debauchery and alcohol! How far we are from that period when young intellectuals . . . scorned the works and moral virtues of the people struggling against foreign domination for its own sons!60

The tone and content of this celebratory review were directly influenced by the formal features and social themes addressed in the dozens of plays and ballets that had been performed over the two-week festival. Works like El Hadj Millions enacted the full arrival of a new militant Guinean youth in succinct didactic scenarios that made it easy for the official press to affirm the efficacy of revolutionary sociopolitical measures. Myriad JRDA-orchestrated performances across the Touré regime allowed PDG leaders to believe—at least for certain deeply gratifying spells—that their dreams of radically reshaping youthful mentalities and effectively mobilizing youths against neocolonial temptations and delusions had become a reality. Not all assessments of theater’s impingements upon the lives of local youths were so enthusiastic, however. Horoya coverage of a presidential tour through the forest region in 1961 sheds light on emergent forms of authority that were being claimed and wielded by certain “revolutionary” youths, and on the questionable uses to which these newly acquired powers were sometimes put. Complaints about the behavior of self-designated JRDA youths pervaded Touré’s meetings with forest communities. In a surprisingly open commentary on these troubles instigated by youths, a Horoya reporter recounted: [JRDA] comportment worries the parents of young girls more and more. Further, one must note that this problem is not particular to the interior Regions; in Conakry, too, it is a hot topic. In truth, far from following indicated guidelines, Party youth seem to be adapting an orientation contrary to the harmonious evolution of Guinean society. Numerous cases of a decline in morals in the heart of the JRDA are in evidence everywhere. [While on tour in the forest] one even heard, to the surprise of the entire delegation, the father of a family vigorously denounce theatrical activity. Invited to further articulate his thoughts, he responded: “When the young girls leave the house in the evening to go to rehearsals, they do not come back until the next morning; they are tired, they go to bed and cannot help with any work.”61

At times even Sékou Touré felt obliged to chastise JRDA organizers and other young performers for their transformation of theatrical endeavor into “an end in itself.” Many youths—including perhaps those denounced by that irri-

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tated father—developed elaborate, highly secretive rehearsal regimens in the hope of outperforming neighboring troupes and winning prizes at competition time, without regard for the “official” aims of these competitions: the forging of a cohesive national(ist) identity and shared revolutionary commitments across all of the nation’s localities.62 Touré, like Horoya, refrained from mentioning a point that many, if not most, post-adolescent Guineans already knew: that many young and adult men were seizing and manipulating “rehearsal regimens” and competition journeys to pursue sexual relationships with girls and young women that would have never been possible without the pretenses and veiling provided by militant theater.63 Theater had a particularly dramatic, volatile career in the country’s remote southeastern forest region. Theater’s officially sanctioned transgressiveness— particularly ballet’s demystificatory disclosures of traditional ritual objects and practices—and the unofficial transgressions performed by JRDA members and adults responsible for local theater organization were exceptionally prevalent and consequential in the forest. Long after the demise of elaborate quinzaines with the death of Sékou Touré, the distinctive forms of knowledge, exhibition, and conflict ushered forth by militant theater continued to shape forestier assessments of the revolution’s impingements upon communities, families, and individual lives and souls.

Part 2 Ventures and Misadventures in the Revolutionary Forest

5 Construing and Constructing the Nation’s Margins: Troubles with the Forest and Forestiers

One of the most characteristic features of Guinean revolutionary cultural discourses and policies was the persistent view that rural ways were morally and politically superior to urban ways. While never crediting total perfection to rural communities and lives (and thus relinquishing any right to intervene in local affairs), the revolutionary regime generally ascribed positive qualities to the moral and political sentiments and yearnings of rural subjects. Rural areas had in no way eluded the damaging designs of colonial power and policies, yet French rule had failed to transform rural mentalities to anywhere near the extent that it had infiltrated and reconfigured the mind-sets of Guineans who had adopted urban communities, especially Conakry, as their home. Although the urban population was a demographic minority, its prevailing concepts of ideal individual and collective futures, drawn primarily from Eurocentric colonial schooling, massively threatened the development of a distinctive Guinean nation that might live up to its rebellious anticolonial origins and revolutionary claims. French colonial practices had established material and ideological conditions that could easily permit Guinea’s urban elites to usurp and reproduce reigning modes of governance favoring their own objectives and interests, all the while neglecting or exploiting the undereducated and politically voiceless rural people.1 The injustice of such a possible neocolonial dispensation could not be overstated; rural subjects personified authentic African cultural patrimonies and social mores, and their very existence and energetic defiance of co-

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lonialist designs had spurred the Guinean nationalist struggle and had given it moral legitimacy and considerable poetic allure.2 The attribution of virulently anticolonial spirit and interests to rural subjects, particularly rural youths, was essential to the internal coherence of revolutionary assessments of contemporary social affairs and projections of an ideal nationalist future. The symbolic and rhetorical importance of such attributions was so great that their many failures to match realities around the country were typically ignored. As texts like Sékou Touré’s L’Action amply demonstrate, the revolutionary regime quickly relied on reifications of urban-rural differences to organize and clarify its own thinking about the evils of the colonial past and the most rapid and efficient way to build a radically distinct future. Altogether ignored in the decidedly pro-rural, anti-urban discourse were the unevenness of colonialism’s impacts upon different spaces and societies within the interior, and the continued socio-cultural tensions that long predated colonialism and the very idea of Guinea as a political entity. Yet, the new state’s compulsive division of the nation along urban-rural lines could not always withstand the pressures of social conflicts and contradictions surrounding that split. Raymond Williams’s studies of pronounced historical shifts in British depictions of urban and rural milieux provide an illuminating counterpoint for analogous emotional and expressive processes occurring in twentieth-century Guinea. “On the country,” Williams writes, “has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as place of noise, worldliness, and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, and limitation.”3 Locally produced French administrative texts of the early 1950s already exhibited this full range of positive and negative appraisals of urban and rural life. A few years later Guinean elite social commentaries like those found in La Voix des Jeunes expressed considerable sympathy for the plights of increasing numbers of young migrants to Conakry, resulting in portrayals of rural life marked by a harshness unseen in contemporary French colonial writing. In La Voix, the interior figured as a zone where neglect and increasingly bleak conditions explained why so many youths were fleeing to the coastal capital, willingly withstanding urban squalor rather than return home. For the Conakry-based contributors to La Voix, the Guinean countryside had indeed become “a place of backwardness, ignorance, and limitation.”4 Revolutionary discourse after 1958 attacked the implicit pro-urbanism of La Voix, arguing that the socioeconomic atmosphere of Conakry was little short of lethal for the sociopolitical development of youth and that all the best

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opportunities for individual and collective learning, transformation, and fulfillment lay within the rural zones of the country’s newly invigorated interior. The valorization of the prototypical rural village in many of Sékou Touré’s speeches matched or exceeded the enthusiasm of the most lyrical artists studied by Raymond Williams. For Touré, the exemplary rural community was far more than a place for the urbanized student, teacher, or functionary to decompress and bask in an environment of “peace, innocence, and simple virtue.” Immersion or re-immersion in such a place positively deepened the individual’s appreciation of the sophistication and resiliency of local forms of knowledge, labor, and cultural expression. This deepening appreciation of the strengths of indigenous human resources would confirm the young elite’s conviction of the moral justness and boundless potentials of nation building along defiantly anticolonial lines. Given Touré’s immense commitment to defending rural sensibilities and practices, one might guess that the social attributes of the most remote southeastern portion of the country, popularly known as the forest, lying at the greatest distance from Conakry, would be at the very least incorporated, if not deliberately exalted, in presidential praise of the interior. If the multilayered decadence of the coastal capital, so thoroughly blighted by French influence, marked one (negative) extreme of national life, then one might conversely expect the Kissi-, Loma-, Kpelle-, and Kono-speaking villages of distant forest prefectures to be framed as exemplary antithetical spaces nurturing relatively “pure” African communities.5 Instead, however, the forest and its peoples were cast not only as backward obstacles to national development but as sinister, menacing threats to the integrity of the nation-state and its notions of proper citizenship. Whereas rural areas continued to be symbolically favored over the city throughout the revolution, the forest assumed an acutely unstable character as an ambiguous territorial fragment simultaneously within and beyond the country, sometimes meshing with official nationalist valorizations of rural traditions and contemporary sociopolitical affairs, but just as often blatantly disrupting such ideal representations. The forest’s status as a singularly troubling part of the country emerged vividly just a year into Guinean independence. While the emergent postcolonial state was eagerly congratulating itself on giving renewed freedom, harmony, and hope to rural communities battered by six decades of colonial machinations and brutality, the forest region literally burned with confl ict. In 1959 a group of Loma Catholics, declaring their commitment to revolution and progress, held a series of rallies throughout Macenta prefecture calling on local youths to join them in a self-designated “demystification campaign” that would open new horizons for all forestiers, and particularly young people who con-

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tinued to suffer from the tyrannical authority wielded by Poro/Sande initiation cults throughout the region. The campaign’s most intense period lasted three years, encompassing Kissi, Loma, Kpelle, and Kono villages in all the forest prefectures. A village’s demystification typically involved public humiliations of elders and fetishists, and the unveiling, desecration, and open incineration of locally sacred masks. By 1961 thousands of material artifacts central to the region’s cultural and religious heritages had been destroyed. Why was the forest’s integration into national politics and society so brutally iconoclastic? How did the warlike circumstances of the forest’s “entry” into the nation—and the nation’s “entry” into the forest—affect forestiers’ understandings of their political and cultural status, allegiances, and roles within the new nation-state? Did the demystification campaign effectively bring forest youths into the body of the nation? Or did it only assure their political estrangement so that the forest would remain a strange, haunting, and menacing annex to the revolutionary (and postrevolutionary) republic? These are some of the main questions this chapter explores.

Reporting the Demystification Campaign Two key perspectives can be brought to bear on the spectacular stateendorsed iconoclastic violence that swept through the forest region beginning in 1959 under the official rubric of a “demystification campaign.” One viewpoint highlights the broad historical factors, and the other the immediate transformative intentions of the revolutionary leadership. Both views are valuable for understanding the causes and complicated ramifications of demystification ideologies and actions. The campaign may be seen as an intensification of a transformative process that had been under way in southeastern Guinea long before the emergence of nationalist political agitation and the dominance of the PDG. From this perspective, demystification is a fi nal step in the gradual demise of traditional mechanisms of gerontocratic authority in the region that had reigned for centuries before colonial penetration. Colonial and revolutionary state officials, alongside missionaries and scholars, saw fear and intimidation rather than sincere collective spiritual belief as pivotal factors in the persistence of local elders’ seemingly despotic power. The elders’ organization and supervision of Poro/Sande initiation camps, through which all youths had to pass to acquire adult status, combined with their unique access to opaque forms of power and knowledge commonly cast as “fetishism,” were deemed central to their fundamental governance of forest affairs.

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Outsiders opposed to traditional gerontocracy and initiation regimes, however, drew hope from changes occurring within the forest over the early decades of the twentieth century. New desires for modern knowledge and social advancement fostered by colonial-state and mission schooling, along with other (often unintentional) contemporary modifications of traditional social reproduction and political economy, had destabilized many of the moral and material foundations of the elders’ formerly uncontested powers over local communities. As early as 1945, M. H. Lelong, a French priest who was to lead a massive conversion of N’Zérékoré Kpelle to Catholicism in the early 1950s, argued that systematic state intervention could easily dispel the powers of traditional fetishism in forest localities. More than a decade before Guinea’s independence, Lelong argued that substantial numbers of forestiers were, in fact, already yearning, for social or spiritual reasons, for something like a demystification campaign. The credibility of magical rights is weakening in the spirit of blacks. They retain fear of reprisals that the exploiters of public credulity would employ if their mystification was denounced, but men have shed their illusions regarding the real cause of evil spells. Europeans who would confront this hideous system, uniquely intended to permit domination by the few, would not run a single risk, except possibly from the government, and the region would be at ease.6

Descriptions of forestiers’ immediate responses to the demystificatory actions of PDG militants suggest that the French priest’s estimations of the weakening and imminent collapse of local mystification were overstated. The French anthropologist Claude Rivière has shown that the post-independence demystification campaign provoked emotional panic akin to that of a seismic shock in many forest communities.7 Although colonial-era transformations certainly helped pave the way for the campaign as an imaginable and justifiable political venture, the post-independence demystification campaign drew upon and triggered historically novel feelings, thoughts, and actions. The campaign was a radically new kind of political confrontation for the militant nationalists who authorized and enacted it, the conservative elders who were its primary targets, and the far greater number of local citizens who lived somewhere in between these two sociopolitical extremes. The campaign had its roots among PDG militants living in the Loma town of Macenta. This base was logical in several respects. Loma-speaking communities around Macenta were renowned for the depth of their fetishist beliefs and practices. Their traditional Poro initiation rites—termed tatouage by colonial and revolutionary officials—were the longest of any ethnic group in

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Guinea, lasting seven years. Printed accounts of the campaign’s opening phase are rare. Like many other aspects of early postcolonial history, the best available source is Rivière’s Mutations sociales en Guinée. In his chapter, “Fetishism and Demystification,” Rivière credits a single individual, Armand Kolignan Guilavogui, the highest-ranking administrator in the Macenta village of Bossoffou, for inaugurating the campaign: “the zeal of a PDG neophyte, child of the country and Catholic, delivered a supreme blow to retrograde traditions. . . . Guilavogui did not believe in fetishism anymore. He attacked it with personal ardor and methods.” Rivière shares a local partisan’s dramatic narrative of initial events and repercussions. The fi rst custom targeted was tatouage. As the democratic spirit reigned everywhere and had to justify all acts, it was decided in the course of a regional P.D.G. general assembly to place the suppression or conservation of tatouage before a vote. The majority was for suppression, having taken into account diverse arguments and values. One of the most important was the following: a young illiterate peasant made it understood to all that he regretted having gone to tatouage (which lasted up to six or seven years) rather than going to school. He had been separated from a childhood comrade to go to tatouage while his comrade entered schooling. The current social achievements of his comrade, far superior to his own, made it clear to all that he, tattooed peasant, had followed the wrong path. After the general assembly vote, Kolignan held a carte blanche to accomplish his demystification task. There was no violence. The terrain had been psychologically prepared. Armand Kolignan started by winning over youth to the new ideas and, from one propaganda meeting to another, youth poured forth all through the region in the name of the R.D.A.8 and progress; [they proclaimed] the idea that fetishism, harmful to society, must disappear. Kolignan began collecting masks and fetishes. One of his first profanations was to unveil to women the great secret of the Afwi.9 One showed them the musical instruments serving as the voice of the supreme mask, and explanations completed the revelation. Afwi known by women, the task was done. The shock was hard for the older generations who however attempted to conform with the R.D.A. When one had changed one’s convictions, it had to be proven by giving over one’s fetishes. Thus one saw reenacted the gesture that only converts to Protestantism had performed to that point: the personal throwing of their fetishes and masques into the flames. Some did it laughing to soften their pain. . . . At Bossofou, a hut was filled with filthy, moldy masques and fetishes. According to Armand, they smelled so bad that one had one day to light a big fire to burn them all.10

The brief narrative is remarkable for its emphasis on the dramaturgical character of the campaign’s “opening acts.” Like the designer of a revolutionary play, Guilavogui deftly used Macenta’s PDG assembly to stage a political drama with progressive political meanings and (ideally) irreversible effects.

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The humble illiterate peasant who shared the regrettable turn in his own life toward tatouage rather than schooling, thus condemning traditional conceptions and regimens of Loma youth development, emerged as a reluctant protagonist of a script that swayed the assembly in favor of a militant suppression of Poro. His declaration that, owing to the persisting influence of tatouage, his life had become other than what he would have wished, articulated a clear social message. Contemporary forestier youth could simply not afford the time usurped by traditional initiation regimens. Given the emergence of formal schooling as a far superior express lane to “social achievement,” tatouage was no longer an enabling path but rather a formidable roadblock to young people’s optimal development. Traditional initiation requirements ensnared and restricted young people’s pursuit of an ideal personal and collective future. Militant action was required to clear the way for all local youths to channel their time and energy in the productive directions of modern learning. Schooling and forest initiation were thus framed as starkly antithetical and antagonistic pedagogical domains—the former generating progress and freedom, the latter sustaining gerontocratic custom and stagnation.11 The personal account cited by Rivière suggests that the assembly’s vote to suppress tatouage, inspired by the young peasant’s comparative biographical reflections, was translated rapidly, almost automatically, into extensive iconoclastic action throughout Macenta prefecture. Local youths are cast as predisposed toward demystification, in staunch agreement with the modernizing, pro-schooling messages articulated by their rural peers before the assembly, and eager to collaborate in the iconoclastic strategies drawn up by Kolignan. A great many seemed to have embraced the idea that systematic assaults on fetishism were essential to local youths’ access to growing social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities emerging with the new postcolonial dispensation. Direct involvement in assaults on “fetishism” was an essential obligation of young forestiers aspiring to climb to positions of responsibility and respect within the broader revolutionary nation-building project. The events obviously generated severe rifts in local intergenerational relations. If, as the eyewitness account suggests, there was, in fact, no direct physical violence toward reluctant adults, the threat of violence from the ardent militants must have been steadily present. Intimidation rather than authentic conversion evidently motivated many adults to abandon their sacred objects as they laughed to veil their anguish. It was obvious to Rivière that such dramatic scenes blatantly failed to distance many adults from their erstwhile beliefs.12 A story soon circulated in Macenta that Kolignan, the local engineer of demystification, later received his due punishment when “Afwi periodically sang in his stomach.” Many interpreted the militant’s later forced transfer to Up-

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per Guinea as a result of fetishist vengeance.13 Covertly expressed resentment, however, did nothing to curtail local and distant revolutionaries’ enthusiasm and optimism over the success of the Macenta actions. Satisfaction with the ideological impact of the events was so great that local and national PDG representatives agreed to partially concede to traditional custom and allow highly abridged forestier initiation camps to continue, as long as they coincided with and did not exceed the three-month annual vacation period allotted to teachers and students.14 This relative complacency was not to last. The progressive tenor governing the campaign’s first phase soon turned into one of moral outrage. In its second and most consequential phase, demystification became a mode of executing immediate justice rather than preparing the grounds for longer-term social reform. Soon after the agreement regarding stringently “reformed initiation,” a major scandal erupted that cast forest fetishism in a new, sinister, criminal light. Disagreement between neighboring Macenta villages regarding the proper opening of a traditionally co-organized boys’ initiation camp led to an internal schism. Failing to agree on essential details, each village prepared to stage its own proper initiations. Only one village, however, possessed a consecrated Gpadoi mask that was fundamental to the aesthetic and moral dimensions of local Poro rites. The other village was able to secure a Gpadoi mask from another village to the south, perhaps in Liberia.15 However, a human sacrifice was believed necessary to activate the mask’s efficacy in its new home. According to Rivière, The body of the woman-victim, having been bled, was thrown into a river in the middle of the forest. Sometime after the initiation, terrified fisherwomen found the cadaver. Rumors immediately spread around the area. The gendarmerie did not waste any time establishing the crime’s circumstances, and the anger of the P.D.G. burst pitilessly (even more strongly given that the victim was linked by kinship to a functionary) with an impact of oil thrown on the fi re of the demystification campaign. Fifty arrests followed. The fetishist, very old, recounted the story. During the police search that followed, seized fetishes and masks fi lled trunks that were carried to Macenta town. It goes without saying that at that point, those harboring nostalgia for the custom of tatouage, even in its most innocent practice, lost any chance of defending this tradition and fetishism as a whole. The [recently] accorded reprieve was terminated. In N’Zérékoré like Macenta, one confiscated fetishes and masks; one stripped in public, in front of women, the Laniboi, the dancers on stilts representing a secondary visible category of [the secluded] Afwi.16

The meaning of fetishism underwent a significant semantic shift in the second phase of the demystification campaign. Initially portrayed as an archaic

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ensemble of manipulative customs inhibiting the development of local youth and regional sociopolitical progress, fetishism was suddenly recast as morally intolerable criminal rites posing an immediate threat to innocent Guinean citizens. This new connotation was accompanied by a change in the state’s manner of confronting local custom. Shedding its initial (however intimidating) reformist character as a hegemonic project seeking to persuade forestier communities of the cruelly misguided and misguiding character of many traditional beliefs and practices, demystification transmuted into an overtly systematic and comprehensive crackdown on fetishists themselves. The quest for law and order through aggressive seizures of actors and objects central to fetishismas-crime displaced the more prominent emphasis on social progress and enlightenment marking the opening phase of the campaign. The campaign’s turn toward an elaborate state-orchestrated police action had important repercussions for relations between the revolutionary leadership and forestier youth that were to echo long after the campaign ended in 1961. The campaign originated through the actions of Loma militants who took it upon themselves to reform local traditions so that local communities—particularly their youths—could contribute to and benefit from nation building. In that opening phase, forestiers were the principal organizers and direct participants in strategic iconoclastic action. Their initiatives strongly suggested that forestier social progress, though always linked to broader national changes, would not have to hinge on decisions made by non-forestier officials working either in Conakry or within the forest. The very launching of the campaign confirmed that forest communities faced unique, inherent obstacles to revolutionary development, but it also indicated that existing progressive elements within the region were ready and capable of removing these obstacles, primarily fetishism, through demystification. This division of radical political labor shifted remarkably in the second phase of the campaign. Fetishism and demystification came to be framed as emphatically national concerns whose management could not be left to local cadres and militants. With the human sacrifice scandal, the highest-ranking officials worried that the “persuasive” measures undertaken by Kolignan and local allies might not generate definitive results for many years—that such archaic practices and the rumors and fears they provoked would continue until more aggressive, systematic moves fully sanctioned by central state authorities were deployed. The arrests throughout Macenta and N’Zérékoré, and the expanded public profanations of traditionally sacred objects in both prefectures, attested powerfully to the extent of the state’s hopes for a root-and-branch eradication of fetishism and Poro. Demystification assumed the guise of a lawand-order project designed to bring wild and wayward forest communities into

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line with the normative social and legal structures that ought to govern all localities of any modern nation-state. Every sub-prefecture received the order to unveil to everyone the supposed secrets of initiates and to condemn magicians’ and fetishists’ abuses of power. Interdictions were imposed on certain initiation rites: extended reclusion, hazings . . . and on the celebration of the major religious festivals of the tribe. . . . Gendarmerie and police were ordered to force the compliance of stubborn objectors. The resounding trials and general reprobation of human sacrifices galvanized the bulk of public opinion against fetishism.17

In its third and final phase, demystification shifted once more, from a coordinated set of state/police crackdowns and public trials to a broader pedagogical project relying on state media, particularly radio, and state-monitored militant theater. The demystification campaign became an information program, with an end point, for reasons examined in this chapter and the next, that is difficult to defi ne. The campaign as a bounded, specifiable sequence of statealigned militant actions officially ended in 1961. However, demystification as a nationalist ideological theme and goal flourished throughout the entire revolution, continually influencing outsiders’ notions of forest difference, as well as forestiers’ perceptions of their unique, deeply complicated cultural “belongings” and potential roles in the development of the Guinean nation-state. The remainder of the chapter places the campaign within a broader, multilayered framework by considering social ideologies, anxieties, and transformative desires pivotal to understanding how and why demystifying the forest became a compelling dream for great numbers of elite and non-elite Guineans. This broader interpretive scope helps us understand patterns and particularities in individual forestiers’ assessments of the campaign’s causes and ramifications. What was it like for young forestiers, in particular, to grow up and seek social success within a nation-state that had so summarily condemned the cultural and religious distinctness of their parents and native communities?

The Forest as Fragment: Dominant Representations of Forestier Marginality The seeming spontaneous brutality of the demystification campaign unleashed throughout southeastern Guinean from 1959 to 1961 must be seen against a backdrop of long-standing anxieties and antagonisms toward the special nature of the forest. To grasp the complex nature of tensions between nation and forest, one must weigh the interlinking sentiments, apprehensions, and more or less mythical representations that created the conditions for the

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campaign to be waged as legitimate political action. Here I examine two ideological dynamics that inspired and sustained dominant (pre-)conceptions of forestier marginality in colonial and post-independence Guinea. The first focuses on geographical and ecological factors, and the second on related notions of modernity, development, and fetishism.

Geography and Ecology The early twenty-first-century traveler to Guinea finds its southeastern prefectures far better integrated into national transportation and communication structures than he would have half a century ago. Under ideal conditions, one can drive the twelve hundred kilometers separating N’Zérékoré and Conakry in eighteen hours or less; during the revolutionary era, the same journey often took several days. With the recent arrival of cellular phones, telecommunications have improved greatly, and the larger forest towns even have Internet access. This improved objective integration, however, has done little to counter dominant conceptions of the remoteness and alien nature of forest communities compared to the Guinean nation. Guinean politicians and intellectuals have played major roles in underscoring the region’s marginality. In a postrevolutionary book skillfully analyzing his country’s capacity to ward off the kinds of civil wars that have plagued neighboring Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other sub-Saharan states, the Guinean sociologist Amadou Barry emphasizes what he and others have seen as the tenuous character of forestier belonging and integration within colonial and postcolonial Guinea: “Guinée-Forestière seems, compared to other regions, like an outer limit of the world, a marginal zone jammed between Sierra Leone and Liberia: to readopt the terms of (French historian Jean) Suret-Canale, it constitutes the backcountry of Sierra Leone and Liberia.”18 Barry’s by no means idiosyncratic view casting the forest’s geographical remoteness as a kind of threatening political opacity reflects biases in his own postcolonial education as well as the deeply complicated border security predicaments that Guinea faced as his book went to press.19 What Barry calls “an outer limit of the world” and Suret-Canale “the backcountry” of the neighboring nations to Guinea’s south is also the area called “home” by a few of Guinea’s minority ethnic groups—most important among them the Kissi, Loma, Kpelle, and Kono—known collectively as forestiers. For most outsiders, the forest’s ecological attributes have also seemed to irrefutably distinguish or exclude it from the rest of the territory-becomenation. Recalling his first exposure in 1937 to the “deep forest” shrouding the road from Macenta to N’Zérékoré, Conakry native Fodé Lamine Touré, later to become a revolutionary government official, recounts:

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The truck ventured into a forest so dense and imposing that we were taken with fright, at least those of us who were discovering it for the first time. Trees soaring to vertiginous heights, their foliage intermingling so thickly that one forgets the sun’s existence. And then the water: the water that trickles its way down, seeps from trees, the water that stagnates in the undergrowth in pools wherein rots whatever falls: branches, leaves, logs, fruits, beasts and other products of the forest. . . . No life and no sound. A silence presaging the existence of spirits, real masters of these places. An enigmatic silence troubled only by the humming of the motor that turns, that whines, that rattles, and will not stop groaning and climbing I know not what mountain that does not stop rising.20

In their study of colonial and postcolonial misreadings of society and ecology in Kissidougou—the northwestern entryway into la région forestière— James Fairhead and Melissa Leach cite the deep impact of cultural stereotypes and political ideologies on outsiders’ observations of nature in southeastern Guinea. Evoking constant shadow, chaotic overflow of foliage and rainwater, precipitous topography, and even its otherworldly “governance,” F. L. Touré’s portrayal of the forest environment keenly reflects broader patterns in sociopolitical relations between outsiders and forestiers before, during, and after his own colonial education. Moving forward in time from the memoirist’s reminiscences, Fairhead and Leach note that, Ethnic environmental stereotypes were reinforced and acquired greater importance . . . during the First Republic, when the [revolutionary] regime encouraged villages to move out of the “mystified obscurity” of their forest highlands into the “open”; into the “clarity” and “modernity” of the roadside savannah world. Many Maninka self-representations draw on ideals of social clarity, of openness and simplicity in language and expression, and contrast their clear “savannah language” with the secrecy of the forest culture and languages they find difficult to learn.21

Sékou Touré was himself Malinké22 and, like almost all others Guineans, was a dedicated Muslim. For a vast majority of Muslims in Guinea, including the revolutionary leader, Islam and the mosques symbolizing its spread were indices of a spiritual order optimally suited to the nurturing and regulation of a properly modern, collective social order.23 Towering trees and a greenness so dense that it bordered on blackness made the forest exotic, even overwhelming, in the eyes of Malinké and many other Guinean Muslims. The scant number of mosques or other signs of Muslim identities and institutions heightened perceptions of the forest’s disturbingly ambiguous social as well as ecological “nature.”24 In F. L. Touré’s Une enfance africaine, the alien character of human traits within the forest, even in relatively urban areas, is almost as pronounced

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as that of the encompassing flora. Having managed to negotiate and make sense of a wide range of new perceptions and encounters in his initial voyage from Conakry across the Foutah Djallon and the Malinké savannah, the young narrator is nonetheless surprised by the degrees of otherness quite literally embodied in forestiers. Dismounting a truck that had brought him from Kankan into the predominately Loma-speaking forest town of Macenta, the young narrator is immediately challenged by his cross-cultural perceptions: “Here I am strolling the town and observing the people and things of this other planet. The women, bare-chested for the most part, had stomachs and faces smothered with kaolin: a rite or a cure?”25

Modernity, Development, and Fetishism Observations of the forest’s geographical marginality and ecological features have deeply informed Guineans’ perceptions of forestiers’ socio-cultural eccentricities. At times, as in F. L. Touré’s first impressions of Macenta’s Loma-speaking residents, these perceptions were expressed as unmediated, spontaneously recorded data, in a communicative register that the Indian historian Ranajit Guha has called “primary historical discourse.” Most often, however, as demonstrated by the local research of Fairhead and Leach, and many other statements in F. L. Touré’s memoir, such seemingly raw perceptions of local forestier practices were quickly encompassed within critical commentaries assuming the authoritative knowledge of the sources and the more or less threatening consequences of forestier difference. Thus secondary historical discourses seeking to more thoroughly document, explain, and ideally manage forest and forestier otherness emerged.26 Yet, for all the obvious anxieties and antagonisms that Sékou Touré and other high-ranking revolutionaries felt toward the forest (which will become more obvious in later discussions), no document exists in which the revolutionary state openly proclaimed that the forest (or forestiers) posed formidable problems for the integrity and unified development of the new nation-state. Rather, troubles with the forest were noted only tangentially in official discourse. The region and its indigenous communities were cast not as a particular national problem but as perplexing yet surmountable oddities and obstacles to the universally accepted standards and aspirations for modernization and development that inspire people and governments everywhere. Ivan Karp’s interrogation of the unstated “anthropological paradigm” embedded in post–World War II formulations of development is useful in approaching official and unofficial renderings of forestier difference, and the rationale for demystification.

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Ideas about differences in culture, capacity, morality, and personhood are guided by “an anthropological paradigm” apparent more in asides and assumptions than in writing and planning . . . Development discourse . . . cannot explicitly exclude or marginalize the very agents whom it addresses and strives to transform. Instead it defi nes the subjects of development as exceptions whose very exceptional nature is the problem that development theory seeks to understand and development practices seek to transform. Development discourse creates both the material to be transformed and defi nes the process of transformation.27

Current and emerging ideas of forestier differences posed dilemmas but also opportunities for the revolutionary regime. The dilemma was how to frame these differences in ways that legitimized state authority and intervention in the region while avoiding any suggestion of outright enmity or irreparable rifts between forest communities and Guinea’s predominately Muslim core. Touré’s perceptions of the ways to handle the region were surely influenced by the fact that forestier voters had vigorously supported Guinea’s 1958 separation from the French Communauté. Compared to the case of the Fouta Djallon, whose citizens voted unevenly on the pivotal referendum,28 or elite elements within Conakry who helped make the teachers’ strike possible, there was little reason to suspect that significant numbers of forestiers would espouse a counterrevolutionary revolt, despite the undesirably strong presence of the Catholic Church in the region.29 Forestier difference had to be addressed primarily as a development problem rather than as a source of overt political confl ict. Casting the region as somehow distinctively underdeveloped, however, also posed difficulties. There was little to suggest that life in the forest was of lower quality than elsewhere in the interior. Indeed, there were good reasons to argue the opposite. Agricultural production and school enrollment were comparatively high in the region, especially compared to Touré’s own Malinké homeland.30 Still, strong explanations were needed that would anchor the troubling nature of forestier difference as a critical issue for national unity while justifying state action to counteract and diminish this difference. The state’s resolution of this complicated problem was rather crude. Drawing on existing popular prejudices, the regime authorized a view of the forest as the zone where fetishist beliefs and practices continued with a force unimaginable in other parts of Guinea. Forestier youth were particularly characterized as pitiable victims, whose lives were plagued by the menacing power of fetishism and fetishists. They needed the revolutionary state to help rid themselves and the nation at large of the problem. In 1962 Touré gave a speech to the Ministry of Youth, Arts, and Culture clearly enunciating the regime’s ideology of forestier difference in the wake of the demystification campaign. Addressing recent developments in militant

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theater and outlining principles that should guide JRDA youths in their design of revolutionary plays, Touré stressed the undeniable fact and political significance of socio-cultural variations within the country: If we have demanded that your plays be performed in national languages, it is because they are directed toward our people, to those who surround you and of which you are a part. You do not perform for an elite, you play for your young and old comrades, men and women, your village comrades, your regional comrades. . . . If you perform for the populations of your regions, you will surely achieve the goal assigned to you: the mobilization, the education of the people. Now, if each region has its particular problems, there are also national problems that each region must resolve according to its own realities. Let’s take the formation of cooperatives for example. The cooperative poses problems which are different for the populations of the region of N’Zérékoré and for those of the region of Pita.31 It is the same for women’s liberation, and for the struggle against illiteracy. Here, it is fetishism that intrudes, there aftereffects of a kind of feudalism; elsewhere it is other social and economic contradictions that come into play. On a theme of national scope, each troupe must be able to attack that which negatively impacts the evolution of its region, show the transformations to be undertaken, and popularize the best methods of action. We have encountered some excellent plays, one in particular consecrated to fetishism and charlatanism. It was undeniably, at the regional level, one of the best plays, if not the best. Unfortunately it did not have a national reach. Now, the final competition is performed at the national level which means that the play to which the prize is awarded has to be able to be performed in whichever region of Guinea without losing anything of its essential qualities.32

The passage points up a hierarchy of the region’s socioeconomic flaws, with the forest occupying the lowest tier. Nothing negative is said about upper (Malinké) or coastal (Soussou) Guinea, inferring that although these regions struggle with inevitable problems (as a result of colonialism), the problems are readily surmountable with the advent of the nation-state and the revolutionary administration. The Foutah’s troubles with feudalism were not nearly as grave as those plaguing the forest. Feudalism carries decisively negative connotations in Touré’s speech, but it also conveys the presence of an elaborate, well-defi ned traditional social order altogether absent in the invocation of fetishism. Touré also suggests that the Foutah suffers from the aftermath, not the ongoing dominance, of its distinctive sociopolitical flaw. In sharp contrast to the Foutah, which had partially transcended its sociopolitical woes, the forest continued to stagger from the impact of fetishism on current local affairs. Although the Foutah was well on the way to becoming fully integrated within the revolutionary body politic,33 the forest, lamentably, continued to linger at its edges. It is clear from the symbolic and geographical

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associations of Touré’s speech that the “excellent” recent plays on fetishism come from N’Zérékoré or a neighboring forest prefecture. The message Touré sent to forestier youth designing and performing dramatic works was a frustrating one. In fulfilling their political responsibility to stage works combating the central obstacle to their communities’ social progress, they foreclosed their chances of winning more prestigious and rewarding recognition at national competitions. Exemplary political and cultural militancy within the forest did not necessarily correlate with standards of ideal citizenship guiding other Guinean youths. Touré seems to have hoped that forestiers coming of age immediately after independence would willingly sacrifice the potential notoriety and benefits of contending for national awards in order to undertake the provincial communicative work necessary to enable future forestiers to become more “typical” and “fuller” Guinean citizens than they themselves could aspire to be while still living within the shadow of fetishism. As we will see below, the long-standing opaque dynamism of Poro initiation cults loomed ominously in revolutionary insinuations and accusations of egregious levels of fetishism in the forest prefectures. But the dominant nationalist linking of the forest and fetishism had other historical bases. Revolutionary discourse commonly cast fetishism as the very opposite of modernity, and “fetishists,” wherever they may operate, as the nemesis of any locality’s desire or realistic hope for achieving collective progress. A growing body of scholarship in recent decades—derived from observations of modern cultural practices in the Upper Guinean forest encompassing southeastern Guinea and much of Liberia and Sierra Leone—has demonstrated the outright falsity of the revolutionaries’ and other elites’ claims that Poro fetishism lies beyond the pale of modernity. Rather, complex modern sociopolitical dynamics have helped sustain, and in some cases been sustained by, beliefs and practices fundamental to Poro.34 In fact, the staunch opposition of modernity to forest fetishism in Guinea owes much of its origins and ongoing ideological force to colonialist accounts and critiques of African cultural ignorance and backwardness. Various revolutionaries’ assertions of forest fetishism, and the relation of different regions and religions to a possible anticolonial modernity, must be examined within the framework of a broader, often highly contradictory struggle with the history of colonial power. Early postcolonial assaults on forest fetishism—undertaken by forestiers as well as nationalist outsiders—need to be studied in relation to previous colonial configurations of fetishism as a metonym for African sociopolitical backwardness, exemplifying the essential primitiveness of the predominately rural African masses. Colonial theater was a primary communicative site for vividly depicting the widespread, deeply rooted, pathological attributes of Afri-

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can fetishism in Guinea. As discussed in chapter 4, the fi rst dramatic sketches performed in 1939 by Conakry’s top students emphasized the very themes of fetishism, charlatanism, and mystification that would be central targets of militant nationalist ideology and action two decades later. Subsequent official histories of national cultural production never mentioned the urban-elite origins of Guinean theater in colonial schools, much less that pre-independence plays generally—often explicitly—legitimized colonial rule by staging perceived African backwardness reflected most vividly in the customary beliefs and practices of “fetishism.” Two plays, The Fetishist and Karamokho All Akbhar, were “put on stage, in order to ridicule [fetishism], the mystification of charlatans and marabouts who pretended to cure illnesses instantaneously through magical incantations and infusions [concocted] from medicinal plants.”35 Outside their effort to entertain, these plays were undoubtedly intended to show French and Guinean audiences how unprepared Africans were to direct local communities toward the moral and material progress championed in France’s “civilizing mission.” PDG assaults on fetishism displaced colonialist assertions of a fundamental extensive African primitivism onto a bounded non-Muslim portion of national society dwelling in the forest region. Yet, and especially throughout the early years of independence, the revolutionary regime was already taking credit for confronting and overturning the negative cultural stereotypes central to colonial explanations of Africa’s underdevelopment. If an ultimate goal of revolutionary cultural politics was to subvert classifications fueling colonialist ideologies and policies, then why did the revolutionary regime continue to deploy the colonialist modernity/fetishism opposition in addressing specificities of the forest? Postcolonial assertions of forestier backwardness are doubly striking given the general celebration of the rural in revolutionary discourse. One might guess, given its remoteness from Conakry and unique ecological vigor, that the forest would be seen as a “country of the country” in colonial and revolutionary thought. Yet, this seemingly irrefutable “rurality” made the forest particularly suspect rather than praiseworthy in the sociological thought of the postcolonial regime. In works such as Sékou Touré’s L’Action, colonialist accusations of pervasive African primitiveness were rejected and rurality valorized, except in portrayals of the forest region, where former colonialist images of Africans’ customary deficiencies were retained. The forest became a singular fragment of the nation, where semi-colonial, rather than anticolonial, administrative judgment prevailed. Guinean revolutionaries and nationalists strove to reject many forms of knowledge exemplifying colonial “rationality,” particularly those through which

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French colonial administrators had defined themselves as enlightening or civilizing “rural populations.” However, the tenor of nationalist thought changed when confronting the forest. This region’s indigenous ethnic groups, plagued by fetishism, indeed were in need of enlightenment, which the PDG called “demystification.” Addressing the patterned narrative of nationalism in the former colonial world, Partha Chatterjee wrote that “even when it adopts modes of thought characteristic of rational knowledge in the post-Enlightenment age, it cannot adopt them in their entirety, for then it would not constitute itself as a nationalist discourse.”36 In the Guinean case, Chatterjee’s formulation might be revised to say: “even when it [nationalism] rejects [such modes of post-Enlightenment thought] . . . it cannot reject them entirely, for then it would not constitute itself as a modernist discourse.”37 Revolutionary discourse accommodated, even celebrated, differences between (African) country and (metropolitan) city but refused to accommodate the particular kinds of differences it observed or projected onto the forest. The region’s most pronounced points of distinction were deemed altogether incompatible with revolutionary visions of a modern nationalist society. Though the regime seldom discussed it directly, Poro initiation rituals, sheltered throughout the forest, posed an intolerable political affront to the new state. Poro’s survival and secrecy seemed to block, in staunchest fashion, any possible fruition of that state’s most cherished dream: a radical transformation of youth consciousness and the emergence of a politically and culturally militant nationalist youth in all corners of the nation. Nationalist representations of forestier marginality framed the forest as a space where the revolutionary state found obstacles to its vision of fully aligning communal and national experiences and aspirations, its hopes for forging social values and political devotion across the breadth of the nation, and its plan for a new nation-state embracing both African tradition and modernity as non-contradictory bases for cultivating increasingly rational, productive citizens and progressive communities. In framing the forest as a fragment of the nation—a kind of semi-autonomous region of problems confronting revolutionary nation building—the ruling regime created new openings for militant state intervention in the area. Representations of forestier difference centered on criticisms of fetishism that the revolutionary state could use to extend, validate, and intensify its power to transform various locally dominant social ideologies and practices. Yet the sheer violence of the demystification campaign forces one to delve more deeply into the nature of nationalist perceptions of forestier difference. Was the forest perceived only as an arena of problematic, more or less resolvable, cultural deviations from nationalist development ideals? Or, rather, was

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it perceived to harbor far more serious and potent threats to the very coherence and viability of emergent state authority and administrative structures? Ivan Karp has argued that development discourses throughout the post–World War II world have defi ned the individuals and communities where they have worked “as inert material to be transformed from outside.”38 Guinean demystification, although certainly influenced by Euro-imperialist notions of development, was certainly far more than an instance or exercise in “developmentalism.”39 Modifying the key terms of Karp’s formulation, one can say that the demystification campaign, in fact, defined its forestier social targets “as opaque, dynamic material to be combated from the outside.” From the vantage of the revolutionary leadership, forestier communities presented far more than a residual barrier to dreams of an ideal modern national society; they were an active and intimidating opposition—a force rendered exceptionally troubling by the intensely mysterious mechanisms through which it operated. Official discourse strove to contain, defi ne, and judge the alien nature of the forest by classifying it time and again as a zone where intimidating gerontocracies and exploitative fetishisms reigned supreme in a constellation of power that stunted the potential personal development of local youths and women. The demystification campaign sought moral legitimacy as an emancipating crusade waged on behalf of a rising youth cohort that ought not to have to endure prolonged Poro initiation and other customary forms of oppression. Militants sought to explain in simple terms the stakes involved in confronting forestier customs by outlining two possible life-trajectories awaiting post-independence youth coming of age in the region. In one biographical pathway, the boy or young man would pass through tatouage and assume his position within a mysterious but fundamentally stagnant system of social reproduction opposed to his own and his fellow villagers’ well-being. Alternatively, the same subject, eluding tatouage, would attend school and reach an educational level enabling fluency in forms of modern knowledge that would prove immediately beneficial to his own and others’ intellectual and material advancement. Rivière’s account of the campaign remains useful for its memorable depictions of the youth-centered progressive logic that inspired it, at least from the official vantage of PDG militants within the forest and higher-ranking authorities in Conakry. It enables understanding and partial sympathy with revolutionaries’ descriptions of gerontocratic authority and initiation rituals as mechanisms that prevented local youths from recognizing the material and moral rewards of associating themselves with the progressive ideas and institutions championed by the postcolonial state. Yet, existing literature on the campaign and its driving social ideologies suffers from some profound limitations.

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Like many others, Rivière, to a significant degree, allowed himself to perceive the nature and stakes of the campaign via themes and frameworks supplied by revolutionary discourse, without seeking alternative perspectives outside the boundaries of partisan declarations. Whether they considered themselves for or against demystification, certainly few forestiers saw the campaign’s motives and ramifications in the same way that they were seen by national and international outsiders. Few forestiers perceive Poro/Sande initiation cults as elements of a generalized archaic and despotic fetishism, as state officials and young militants (at least publicly) did. But there have always been other justifiable ways of looking at Poro that cast its cultural and sociopolitical values in a fundamentally different light. Although some academic researchers have agreed with the Guinean revolutionary stance that its initiation regimens are oppressive forms of social policing and reproduction,40 other researchers have concluded the opposite. Notable scholars of West Africa, including Warren D’Azevedo, Kenneth Little, and Paul Richards, have celebrated the workings of Poro’s uniquely resilient modalities of cultural pedagogy and citizen formation in a realm that has been subject to exceptionally violent political and economic predation for several centuries.41 The next section presents three forestiers’ reflections on the sources, stakes, and ramifications of the post-independence demystification campaign, as well as some thoughts on the social values and historical background of Poro in Guinea’s forest prefectures.

Conclusion: Echoes of the Campaign Conducting interviews and circulating questionnaires among forestiers and non-forestiers in various localities from 1997 to 2001, I was struck by how rarely demystification was referred to as a campaign or any other type of special program. Most Guineans construed demystification as an official state ideology highlighting, criticizing, and attacking pernicious aspects of traditional social practices. Demystification was perceived as generally significant for revolutionary social commentary and cultural production, and particularly meaningful as a shorthand term for the ambiguous and unstable relationships between norms of the forest ethnicities and the socio-cultural norms governing the rest of Guinea. Revisiting the events of the campaign seems an awkward and unpleasant task for most forestiers old enough to remember its focal dramas. Such reconstructive labor necessarily generates memories of state-sponsored violence that included profanations of sacral objects and deliberate humiliations of revered individuals, all performed along with accusations that forestiers are backward.

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During my fieldwork for this book, I met few individuals with whom I could develop sufficient rapport to discuss in detail the immediate and lingering feelings triggered by the campaign. However, three forestiers—all functionaries at different levels of N’Zérékoré’s prefectural education administration— did agree to discuss and record their views on the demystification campaign. The first is Pépé Haba, born in 1951 and raised in a Kpelle village north of N’Zérékoré; the second is Benoit Gorovogui, born in 1950 and raised in a Loma village in Macenta; and the third is Alphonse Béavogui, who was born in Macenta in 1940 but spent most of his adolescence in N’Zérékoré and was thus deeply familiar with both Loma and Kpelle languages and customs. Their perspectives on demystification are ordered according to the depth of their involvement in revolutionary politics. Among them, Pépé was by far the most active PDG militant, assuming important roles in various local domains of revolutionary pedagogies and youth development in the 1970s. Benoit was by far the most reticent and evasive regarding the political roles he was asked to perform at various points during his revolutionary teaching career in Macenta and Upper Guinea. Alphonse’s political experience—he was already eighteen and ready to begin teaching at independence—was more varied and contradictory than that of the other two younger men. His account of demystification’s meanings is by far the most complex.42 Though the differences between the reports of these men are more pronounced than the agreements, each of the inter viewees emphasized one crucial fact: although few forestiers openly discuss the concrete actions and shock of the post-independence campaign, the nature of specific campaign events strongly shaped later perceptions of the meaning of demystification as official ideology.

Pépé on the Campaign Old people didn’t like it, and the youth—some of them rushed into the dew because these were messages difficult to accept. I am saying that initiation was a cultural fact [of life]. Ancestors, grandparents lived like that. When one fi ne day someone comes out of the blue and makes you look at what had been hidden? That is not easy to take. It was a shock. It was not foreseeable. If demystification hadn’t occurred, the forest would have remained an enclosed bog. That was going to slow its [social] blossoming [épanouissement].43 The national unity sought by leaders wouldn’t have been obtained. One must recognize that the Guinean nation was only truly constituted after independence. Measures of this kind were needed to break down barriers between ethnic groups so that young people would take each other by the hand, so that they would work together, go out together, return together. If not there would have been a great struggle between youths of Upper Guinea and those of the forest and the lower coast, the Foutah, and so on. There would have been no interpenetration of populations. That was a decision of major historical import.44

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Pépé’s perspectives are, in many respects, exactly what would be expected from a person who strongly embraced revolutionary ideology during his youth and early professional career. For him, the campaign figured as the dramatic moment determining precisely what the effects of the true consolidation of the Guinean nation would be for forestier communities, and forestier youth in particular. By sundering various barriers that had cordoned off the forest from the rest of the country, the campaign ushered in a novel period of social-ethnic integration and collaboration bearing immense potential benefits for youths, especially young forestiers who had been most isolated and ensnared by provincial gerontocratic customs.

Benoit on the Campaign The phenomenon of demystification marked forestier society profoundly, to such an extent that it found itself completely injured in its own self-image, in its own sentiments. That’s the reality. [Demystification] marked it to such a degree that it had a sense of fear, of stupor vis-à-vis the [authorities in] power—a sense of shame. But this wasn’t expressed, because the pressures of the epoch prevented one from expressing oneself; one couldn’t say what one was thinking. Otherwise, it was really an injury for the self-image of the forest; therefore, it slowed the evolutional cycle of the society. Maybe if one had done that [campaign] with appropriate methods, one would have seen that what one correctly named forêt sacrée, what one called mystery, should have been a means of development for this society, serving the development of the society. . . . It was possible to modernize [while] retaining certain [traditional] aspects. I observe what happens in CÔte d’Ivoire for example—the rites, the customs, the mores are conserved. I see that up until now, the customary chiefs are respected. I think that if it was like that, it would have been good for the development process here. If there had not had been this [external] deceleration of the normal evolution of forestier society, this braking action that came, with fracas moreover, to disrupt a system in full evolution—I think we would not be [in the condition] where we are now.45

Benoit’s comments share Pépé’s emphasis on the external sources of the campaign, a project arising outside the will or control of forest communities. But whereas Pépé cast the revolutionary intrusion as a well-designed, salutary shock treatment with highly positive effects, Benoit saw it as a wounding, rather ruthless and reckless assault. Pépé attributed profound internal stagnation to mid-century forest society. In sharp contrast, Benoit saw nothing archaic or fi xed in forest social processes on the eve of demystification. “What one correctly named forêt sacrée, what one called mystery” were not reflections of a static collective consciousness anchored in the past but rather were active forces within a broader dynamic of contemporary social order and prog-

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ress. These mid-century sensibilities, shaped but in no way dominated by Poro, were amenable to syntheses of old and new models and institutions of individual and communal development. In Pépé’s eyes, demystification removed obstacles previously blocking the entry of forest youths and communities into emerging fields of accelerated social movement, productivity, and opportunity. Benoit, however, saw demystification as applying, rather than releasing the brakes on possibilities for the internal transformation of forest society. The prior social vigor of the forest was, in fact, stilled when demystification crashed in to transform former autonomy and pride into shame and confusion before the power of the revolutionary state.

Alphonse on the Campaign The campaign wasn’t welcomed by the population. Why? Because it was done in violent fashion. The demystification campaign was important and salutary, because in truth people used demystification to do evil to others that they didn’t like. But there was a positive side. What was it? People could treat illnesses through remedies that they had. Me, I fall sick, I suffer from an illness. I go and explain it to a healer who has plenty of gris-gris (charms). He tells me: “Yes, I can cure you, but you must give me that.” It may be a rooster, cola nuts, money, pagnes,46 even clothes. I don’t see the fabrication of the medicines, but he tells me: “Come drink this” or “you must rub your body with this” or “you need to completely wash your body with this.” Thus it’s a mystification that I do not witness but which serves all the same to treat and heal me. Just as due to contempt one may poison me. There is always this mystification. Now I am going to fi nd another [healer] that is stronger. I say: “You have to cure me.” He cures me but always through recourse to mystification. The demystification campaign would have brought good if it hadn’t been so violent. This practice of initiation in the forêt sacrée is a waste. Now people acquire awareness that it’s a waste. Little by little one tries to distance oneself from initiation practices, tatouage, and this practice of excision too. With the passage of time, people detach themselves [from these practices]. Me, I warmly welcomed demystification, but the methods were premature and violent. And I know that if demystification had not interceded, people would have continued to seek out what they needed. With the passage of time they would have taken account of the negative side. And they would have severed themselves very gradually from the path of mystification. If demystification hadn’t interceded, Africans, Guineans would have become aware that it consisted of outmoded practices—harmful, damaging practices. Thus, they themselves, the rising generation of youths would have banned this practice. Demystification was a matter of revealing masks that people had hidden, but they didn’t manage to take away the barks, the roots, and the leaves that people recognize in the bush and that are capable of bringing harm. People conserved their products for their treatments. They gave away what they had with them: “Here are some horns, some carved masks; I’ve given everything.” But [the mili-

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tants] didn’t take what was in their skulls—knowledge and formulas which the people continued to use. Now perhaps one sees that this affair isn’t demystified. One sees that there are products that can function to protect man against bullets. That’s a mystification with its advantages. One believes demystification has been achieved, but since the aggressions—the rebel aggressions and incursions [from Liberia and Sierra Leone]—people have begun to have recourse to all that they possessed before. It’s thus the case that today there are men who have sought treatments to make themselves invulnerable, who have gone to vaccinate and wash themselves, rendering themselves invulnerable to machetes and all incisive objects. Thus, one would have discovered the negative side within mystification, and little by little, little by little, one would have left it. Of the positive side, one would have conserved it and sought to improve it.47

Alphonse’s narrative combined aspects of Pépé’s positive and Benoit’s negative assessments of the campaign. He personally welcomed demystification, but lamented the impetuously violent measures it deployed. Because he had come of age in a pre-demystified forest, and had already arrived at early adulthood when the tumultuous events occurred, Alphonse’s account sheds distinctive light on fundamental misunderstandings and errors that negatively impacted both the campaign’s execution and its broader consequences for different forestiers. Alphonse portrays “mystification” (what revolutionaries chose to call “fetishism”) not as a cohesive ideological structure consolidating gerontocratic power (as revolutionaries would have it) but as a relatively fluid field of individual and collective knowledges, techniques, worries, decisions, negotiations, and actions. Mystification is not an overarching mechanism for intimidation or control. It is more properly seen as an existential condition arising from the objective, insurmountable fact that crucial forms of knowledge and technical skills involving magic and medicines originating in the forest are unevenly distributed within any community. “Mystification” is Alphonse’s keyword for depicting this social reality and at the same time signaling the horizons of possible actions it creates for those who do enjoy access to these coveted, highly valuable resources (the healers) and those who do not (common citizens). The tactics of PDG militants in the midst of the campaign were deeply misguided, not only in their violence but in their underlying sociological and “scientific” premises. In highlighting and assaulting mystical artifacts as primary symbols upholding fetishist supremacy in the forest, the overzealous militants neglected the critical space that existed between such symbols and the wealth of knowledge that survived in individuals’ memories. Revolutionaries scoured and ransacked villages during their operations, but they failed to “remove what people had in their skulls.” Alphonse thus powerfully reiterated the major point made by Benoit. The mysteries influencing forestier social con-

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sciousness were not specific, tangible objects that one could simply seize and neutralize. Rather, the mysteries involved an ensemble of spiritual, interpersonal, and environmental relationships always in dynamic process and drawing much of their vitality from forces within the forest, well outside the village, and thus altogether outside the vision of colonial or postcolonial administrative regimes. Yet, for all his condemnation of the dramatic actions at the core of the campaign, Alphonse stated that he personally welcomed demystification. He embraced the modern(izing) spirit that militants claimed they were representing. Their actions helped Alphonse and a great many other regional young elites to evade the many years of heavily secluded initiation required by Loma, Kpelle, Kissi, and Kono custom. Alphonse would have strongly sympathized with the lamentations of Rivière’s emblematic young peasant who saw his educational chances ruined by his submission to traditional initiation.48 But even as the demystification campaign favored some of Alphonse’s immediate educational and professional pursuits as a young man, it also signaled the official consolidation of discriminatory cultural classifications that would come to harm regional development and future opportunities for forestier elites like him. After more than four decades of firsthand experience with postcolonial political misadventures in various forest localities, Alphonse, in 2001, continued to regret the brutality of the revolutionary regime’s first major offensive in the forest. The progress of forest communities toward modernity hinged not on drastic interventions but on gradual, facilitating acts within the forest to help unschooled forestiers clearly perceive the pitfalls of mystification. At sixty-one, Alphonse felt strongly that elite youths like himself, raised within forest communities, were uniquely equipped to guide villagers at a proper pace toward modern yet authentically African sociopolitical orientations of precisely the type championed in revolutionary discourse. The campaign not only stigmatized the forest and humiliated its peoples; it denied forestier youth the primary role they should have had in the campaign, and the praise and rewards they might have gained from leading their local pays natal out of semi-obscurity. In a final, remarkable shift of perspective and tone, Alphonse concluded his campaign comments on an ironic note. In the new, insecure climate triggered by fighting and incursions along Guinea’s borders with Sierra Leone and Liberia, mystification reemerged from the shadows of the forest to flourish once again. By the turn of the millennium, forestiers had, as Alphonse predicted, learned to eschew the negative elements of traditional mystification while conserving and resuscitating its “positive side.” In their unique access to “anti-bullet” treatments derived from knowledge sustained by local healers in the face of revolutionary incursions, early-twenty-first-century forestiers

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emerged, ironically, as the least vulnerable members of Guinean society in a context of standing and imminent wars across national borders.49 For the first time since independence, the social and epistemological apartness attributed to the forest—couched officially as archaic fetishism—figured as a defi nitive asset for local populations. If Guinea’s dominant ethnic groups were once defi ned as better equipped for nation building than forestiers, it was forestiers who were best equipped to confront the vicissitudes of a potential disintegration of the homeland that had always discriminated against them.

6 Forestier Itineraries across Revolutionary Pedagogical Domains

Broadly speaking, independence improved forestier youths’ access to formal schooling and various forms of educational certification. The number of primary and secondary schools and overall enrollment rates around the country skyrocketed from the late 1950s through the early 1960s.1 In 1965 Guinea opened its first national university in Conakry. Yet, the paths of postcolonial youths toward newly available academic objectives were almost always fraught with disruptions and disappointments, often owing to unforeseeable shifts in state-endorsed educational schemes and their local implementations. The field of educational opportunities confronting a Guinean born in a given place in the 1940s was quite different from that faced by another born in the same place in either the 1930s or 1950s. A youth born in the 1960s negotiated still other predicaments. This general instability in educational affairs was amplified in the forest because of the region’s tension-laden position within dominant visions of national identity and development. In this chapter I present narratives that describe the educational itineraries of four forestiers across four relatively distinct political and pedagogical periods. Events and critical commentaries within the personal narratives highlight significant changes and points of continuity across different chapters of regional history. The first chapter is a late-colonial stage (1950–58) marked by exceptional sociopolitical ambiguity; the second is an immediate post-independence period (1958–62) marked by the new state’s quest to “free” all Guinean schools from colonial or Church administrative and ideo-

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logical power; the third is a more radically interventionist period of curricular reforms (1962–68) aiming to harness student activities to the immediate symbolic and material needs of the nation; and the last is a cultural revolutionary period (1968–84) marked by even more ambitious authoritarian formulations and enforcements of schools’ contributions to national economic (mainly agricultural) and cultural (mainly theatrical) production. The study of individual forestier itineraries across late-colonial and revolutionary spaces and time periods advances knowledge of the specificity of forestier experiences within postcolonial Guinea, as well as the powers of the revolutionary state to shape the social consciousness and life trajectories of youths at the geographic and symbolic edges of the nation. The focal narratives bring out the complexity and sophistication of forestier responses to revolutionary interventions in the educational process, but their experiential and interpretive turns generally reject what Lila Abu-Lughod has critically termed “the romance of resistance.”2 The narrators presented strive, sometimes successfully, to fend off the negative effects of different state projects, yet their attempted progress toward specific educational goals invariably entangles them in confl icts and contradictions emanating from revolutionary ideology and policy. This acknowledged sense of entanglement does not, however, prevent them from voicing deeply insightful criticisms of state-youth and nation-forest relations.

Pedagogical Maps and Itineraries in Comparative Perspective In her noteworthy study of “The Invention of Social Categories through Place,” Stacy Leigh Pigg demonstrated the central role of schooling in recruiting diversely situated Nepalese youth to the official state ideology of bika-s—a term that translates and condenses dominant transnational conceptions of “modernity” and “development.”3 Pigg’s analysis casts bika-s as a statemodernist discursive map that charts the passage of ideal-typical Nepalese subjects and communities along ascending paths of modernity/development. In a more ethnographic vein, the study also examines how bika-s shaped the experiences through which rural subjects grasped the reigning conditions of underdevelopment and their possible transcendence. The official ideology of bika-s, Pigg shows, sharply reduced the range of interpretive and expressive resources that Nepalese subjects can use to portray and debate socioeconomic variations within their country and the shape of ideal local and national futures. Within the hegemony of bika-s, Nepalese social space is divided mechanically into city and village:

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Bika-s becomes the idiom through which the relationship between local communities and other places is expressed. There are places of much bika-s, little bika-s, and no bika-s. Bika-s is quantifiable in this way because in common usage it denotes things: new breeds of goats and chickens, water pipes, electricity, videos, schools, commercial fertilizer, roads, airplanes, health posts, and medicines. Bika-s comes to local arenas from elsewhere. This inverse relation between rural areas and bika-s . . . turns bika-s and village into compass points according to which socially located people orient themselves.4

Negative depictions of rural areas in nation-building ideologies in Nepal and many other Third World settings since the 1950s contrast sharply with the largely positive images of rural experience and sentiment that drove Guinean revolutionary nationalism. Consonant with some of Raymond Williams’s central insights in The Country and the City, Pigg finds that Nepalese school textbooks of the early 1980s directly invoked tensions between the past (embodied in the village) and the future (embodied in the city). Although the aim of the texts was to sensitize diversely situated youth to the need for integrating modern forms of knowledge and development techniques into contemporary rural social practices, their end effect was more often to inspire youths to try to escape village life altogether.5 Instead of productively mediating between the ideals of a modernized future and the contemporary struggles of village life, the site and process of schooling came to be grasped as a kind of express lane to metropolitan possibilities dissociated from the physical labors and other hardships of rural life. The power of pedagogical documents in cultivating this social orientation was immense. All students in Nepal, whether they live in a village or a town, read the same school books. The social representations we fi nd in school books are authoritative not only to the extent that schools, in concert with other official sources, succeed in inculcating certain ideas, but also because the language of the schools is itself authoritative. To speak of Nepal in the way the school books do, to make reference to the ideas put forth in these books, is to mark oneself as bika-si and to align oneself with the institutions and ideals of bika-s. . . . Education is both a symbol of bika-si status and the route through which people can hope to move from farming in the village to an office job in a bika-si space.6

The dominant development and pedagogical scenarios discussed by Pigg— scenarios not at all unique to Nepal7—are significant here because they are provocative counterexamples to educational ideologies and policies that reigned in revolutionary Guinea. The juxtaposition of two such distinct national confrontations with underdevelopment spawns intriguing questions. Did the Guinean revolutionary regime, in spite all its obvious differences from its Nepalese

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counterpart, also craft and endorse an overarching development “map” intended to spur and guide its people’s yearnings for modernity? If there was such a map, what was the role of state education in disseminating and legitimizing its “directions” among youth studying in the nation’s widely varying urban and rural communities? Finally, how did the presence, absence, or cloudiness of this map affect forestier youths’ experiences across, and reflections on, the meaning and impact of different revolutionary pedagogical ventures? One could argue that Guinean revolutionary leaders indeed delineated a kind of national development map with key features that were almost diametrically opposed to that of contemporary Nepal. Within bika-s, rural spaces figure as signs of internal deficiency vis-à-vis a modern “outside.” Conversely, in Guinean revolutionary discourse, similar spaces typically represented positive emblems of anticolonial moral integrity, where invasive machinations of imperial power had been heroically combated. Guinean development ideology—if it could be isolated as a distinct strand of rhetoric and representations within revolutionary discourse—had a deeply qualitative bent, in contrast to the Nepalese emphasis on material markers of progress such as new breeds of goats and chickens, water pipes, electricity, and so forth. It is remarkable, upon examining Pigg’s work and Guinean political discourses since the death of Sékou Touré, just how sparingly the term “development” was invoked during the revolutionary period. When mentioned, it was more typically associated with moral and cultural rather than material struggles, as exemplified, for instance, by this statement by Touré in L’Action: “It is necessary to further demystify teaching, relieve it of all its retrograde and deforming characteristics . . . in a word to reinvest it with virtues that favor the development of the culture of a people and the blossoming of the personality of a nation.”8 Many critics of the Touré regime would contend that Guinean revolutionaries never defined or established a coherent philosophy of development, and that the country’s communities stood very much in need of the kind of highly structured modernist charting attempted in Nepal. But that critique overlooks Touré’s keenly felt ambivalence toward core value judgments and goals of modernity/modernization that seemed inextricably entangled with histories of European expansion and cultural imperialism. Arif Dirlik’s work on Mao Zedong helps further our understanding of ideas and sentiments that hindered the crystallization of a neatly ordered development program in Guinea. Of Mao(ism), Dirlik writes: Nationalist ideology was at once modernist and antimodernist. It sought to transform China by creating a new politics, but it could do so successfully only by forging a national identity out of a premodern historical legacy that seemed to confl ict with the demands of modernity and modernization. In either case, however, the

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goal was not a return or escape into a premodern past, but the creation of an alternative future for which the nation could serve as a vehicle. . . . Chinese struggles with modernity, which appear in the modernizationist perspective of historians as the very manifestation of a Chinese inability to liberate themselves from the burden of the past, appear in this perspective as the very contradictions of a Chinese modernism caught up between modernity as hegemonic actuality and liberating project.

Dirlik could be depicting Guinean just as well as Chinese revolutionary thought when he writes of the latter’s framings of the past at once a source of identity and burden on the present; the individual at once as citizen of a modern nation and threat to national liberation . . . the countryside at once as a source of pristine national identity against the degeneracy of cosmopolitan urban centers and a drag on development; the nation at once as agent of cosmopolitan universalism and a defense against hegemony that closes out the world in perpetuation of native parochialism.9

Rather than accusing them of lacking robust development ideas, it would be closer to the truth to say that Touré and other administrative elites were tormented by a plethora of cross-cutting development visions. As in China, the fraught orientations of Guinean revolutionaries toward modernity fostered a welter of often contradictory and counterproductive formulations of national development over time. Their ambivalence led to recurrent reshufflings of a host of economic and cultural priorities. It is not surprising that Guinea, like China, felt compelled to launch a “cultural revolution” within a historical period and territory already labeled “revolutionary.” The forced revolutionswithin-revolutions exhibited the anguish of revolutionary elites teeming with countervailing ideas of a perfect Third World society and national citizenry.10 Pigg borrows Michel de Certeau’s notion of itinerary to trace the power of bikas to structure the physical movements and ideological orientations of diversely situated youth.11 It will come as little surprise that the Guinean forestier itineraries presented in the next section are far more suspenseful than those related by Pigg for the reason that revolutionary development ideologies were ambiguous and unstable, and the forestiers themselves inhabited highly eccentric geographical and cultural positions. The forestier stories, pivoting around a remarkable variety of uncertainties and vicissitudes, fulfill all the requirements of the historiographic narrative “thriller” analyzed by Ranajit Guha.12 Joachim Lamah, the last of the narrators presented below, likens his revolutionary-era student experiences to those of a traveler walking through a forest, troubled by limited visibility and constantly jarred by looming obstacles. His attribution of shifting, menacing opacity to revolutionary politics and pedagogies—qualities that the state ascribed to social practices and mind-sets throughout the forest

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region—signals just how complicated and contentious postcolonial educational and development dramas in southeastern Guinea have been.

Four Focal Itineraries The personal histories summarized here were recounted by four men during recorded and unrecorded interviews conducted in N’Zérékoré and Conakry from 1999 to 2001. Alphonse Béavogui, introduced in chapter 5, was born in 1940 in the Loma village of Bammala,13 in Macenta prefecture. Benoit Gorovogui, also cited in chapter 5, was born in 1950 in the Loma village of Daro, also in Macenta. Joachim Lamah was born in 1957 in the large Kpelle village of Samoe, just twelve kilometers from N’Zérékoré town. Finally, Cécé Loua was born in 1960 in the Kpelle village of Gampara, ten kilometers from Samoe and twenty from N’Zérékoré. In order to capture and stress the changing dynamics of forestier experiences of Guinean schooling across time and place, I have arranged the presentation and analysis of the narratives according to the historical stages they address, rather than presenting them as continuous, “self-contained” biographies. The goal is to emphasize the specific qualities of firsthand experiences and their narration, and at the same time unpack what they teach us about the workings and misfirings of state power across locality and time. Given the polemics about the legitimacy, malevolence, or simple futility of Guinean revolutionary pedagogical action, an emphasis on individual autobiographies has been remarkably rare. Yet, engaging such unofficial narratives is essential to increasing our understanding of political subjectivities and the careers of specific political ventures in the forest, or anywhere else in the country.14

Alphonse’s Early Years of “Ambiguous Adventure” (1950–1958) At my request Alphonse Béavogui, like the other forestier narrators in this chapter, began his life history with an account of his entry into formal schooling. Too old at the age of ten to be admitted to a state school, Alphonse left his native Loma village of Bammala to begin studying at a Catholic mission in neighboring Binikala. He probably would never have started school at all but for the insistence of his father, a former soldier in the French colonial army. Though the latter had never himself been a student, his brief observations of European life during World War II had convinced him that his only son must have a formal education, regardless of how useful his presence at home might be.15 Alphonse lodged at school during his three years (1950–53) at the Binikala mission. The austere conditions experienced there left him longing for the

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relative comforts of home and the arrival of Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations. Most of the boys sharing his conditions chose to quit school altogether. Alphonse yearned to follow suit, but his father forbade it, even after one of Alphonse’s legs was paralyzed for three months by a snake bite received collecting wood for the school kitchen. Despite his physical suffering, Alphonse generally excelled at Binikala, impressing priests and teachers with his talents and study habits and distinguishing himself on exams each year. He passed easily into fourth grade in 1953. As the local mission had only three grades, Alphonse was transferred at this point to the large village of Samoe just outside the regional capital N’Zérékoré. The hundred-kilometer southeastward journey to Samoe took three days by foot and truck. Alphonse’s daily routines and living conditions around school continued much the same during his fi nal three years of primary schooling (1953–56), but extracurricular life in Samoe presented new challenges, opportunities, and pleasures. For the first time he was surrounded by people who spoke little if any Loma. He was obliged to learn his third language, Kpelle, in order to forge connections and friendships with local peers and their families. These ties nurtured his material and emotional well-being. The local football field and weekend visits to classmates’ families afforded pleasures and much sought feelings of belonging. The distance from home, given the difficulties of transportation, seemed enormous. In June 1956 Alphonse sat the exams for the pivotal Certificat d’Études Primaires Elementaires (CEPE) in N’Zérékoré, along with hundreds of other anxious youth. He passed with high marks. Having turned sixteen, however, he was too old to obtain a state scholarship and admission to the collège in N’Zérékoré, the next logical step in his ideal academic progress. Two routes remained through which Alphonse could continue his education. He could accept a scholarship at the state school of agriculture in the Foutah town of Mamou, some eight hundred kilometers west of N’Zérékoré. Or he could pursue a scholarship to a Catholic teachers’ training collège in Toussiana, Haute Volta (now Burkina Faso), where selected Malian, Burkinabé, and Guinean youths acquired academic knowledge and pedagogical skills necessary to work as educators in mission schools throughout French West Africa. Supported by his father, Alphonse took the required entrance exams and was invited, along with three other forestiers, to begin classes at Toussiana in 1956. Of this exciting turn of events, Alphonse remembered: Alongside uneasiness there was joy . . . I had a thirst to know the region, to discover the world. I was going to pass through CÔte d’Ivoire, and then continue to Burkina. It would be good to see all of that, boarding the train in Bouaké (CÔte

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d’Ivoire). On the other hand, to pass through Macenta, Guekédou, Kissi, to arrive at Mamou? It wasn’t as appealing. I was very happy to be going to Burkina.16

While initially shocked by the comparative austerity of Sahelian conditions—the lack of forest and rainfall, sharp variations in temperature, and the absence of rice, bananas, and most of his favorite foods—Alphonse appreciated the diverse, comparatively cosmopolitan academic and social possibilities life at Toussiana afforded. He often waxed nostalgic about the challenges and chances for intellectual and physical growth—including plenty of football, team handball, and cross-country running—he encountered during his four years of “foreign study” (1956–60) culminating in teacher’s certification. Even before leaving the forest for the first time at sixteen, AK already possessed a keen eye and appreciation for environmental and cultural diversity, and an ardent desire to travel and gain more and more experience of the world. Study and social interaction at Toussiana only furthered these inclinations and yearnings. Sadly, circumstances outside his will dictated that Toussiana would be Alphonse’s sole direct experience of life outside Guinea. The traveling experiences of his children would be more limited still. Alphonse became acutely aware of confl icts between the demands of his pays natal and the allure of the world beyond in the summer between his second and third years of collège. Returning home for the annual long vacation, and having become fully comfortable exchanging ideas with non-Guineans representing a broad spectrum of socio-cultural backgrounds, he was shocked into recognizing how powerfully his ethnic and territorial identities might yet shape his life trajectory. Alphonse recalled no major transformations within Guinean politics in the years before his first departure in 1956. Only in 1957 and 1958 did violent clashes between followers of the Rassamblement Démocratique Africain (led by Sékou Touré) and the opposing Bloc Africain de Guinée force neutral forestiers to either become partisan or to craft strategies to elude the escalating political confl ict.17 While Alphonse, much like the returning young elite protagonist of Emile Cissé’s 1958 novel Faraloko, remained aloof from nationalist politics, increasing RDA militancy in the forest unexpectedly came to his aid just months before independence.18 (This same current of political pressure would eventually spur the demystification campaign of 1959–62, as well as the nationalization of all Catholic schools in 1961, both of which were judged negatively by Alphonse and a majority of forestiers.) Of the dramatic events marking his 1958 “vacation,” Alphonse recalled: I had a misadventure. The youth of my village were at the initiation camp. One day the elders administering camp said: “Alphonse resembles a little white man.

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He appears in his khaki shorts and his school outfit. He’s in the village. He isn’t tattooed. He isn’t initiated.” That day I accompanied a friend to his village on foot around 5 pm. Returning to my village I heard that the mask was out, but I didn’t have time to run. He came at me with a long baton. He hit me hard, and I returned the blow. That provoked a big scandal. Because when one violates that law, there is nothing left to do. One grabbed you; one took you to the forêt sacrée; and one forcefully initiated you. Most local people said: “The law is there; one must respect it.” But it was 1958 when the party was striving to struggle against tatouage and the forêt sacrée. Should one abduct a student coming home from abroad? The party would ask: “Where is this student? He was going to fi nish his studies soon.” Should one leave him be? “But he violated the law; he must undergo the punishment.” The people wrestled with this dilemma. My father was the holder of the great mask of the village, and had been in the army. Another day the sacred initiation mask came out from the bush again. Women closed all the doors. The mask came before my father’s hut. He said: “Give us the non-initiated. He broke the law.” My father thought about my studies. He also reflected on the pact he had made as an initiate of the forêt sacrée. What was he to do? He said: “I understand and I am going to consider the matter.” Since he had the village mask, the initiation mask returned to the bush. The whole family grouped around me. They asked me what I thought about the situation. I said: “Father, let me go. If they want to make a martyr of me, I will go to the forêt sacrée with them, but I won’t stay. I will do everything I can to flee and return to fi nish my studies.” My father knew that if they took me into the bush they would subject me to all conceivable agonies. He said: “I’m going to try to sort things out.” The elders set a date when five masks from surrounding villages would come to mine. This day, thank god, I had a lot of teachers and brothers who had been in the army show up. They came for the judgment. A white priest was even supposed to come. Before the day of judgment my father hid me in another village so that people wouldn’t poison or cast evil spells on me. I stayed there almost a month. Judgment time came. For five days, my family prepared food and offerings for all the masks from the neighboring villages. Sacks of rice were cooked; also meat and oil were provided. My family spent everything it had. Finally they decided the judgment. All of the main fetishists who had come said: “The RDA is in the midst of combating us. If we open the door in taking away a student, we risk being pursued and all of our secrets unveiled. If we leave him alone, we will have disobeyed the pact that we all have signed.” Ultimately, they chose the first option. Father had to pay a heavy fi ne. The masks went back to their villages. That was September 1958. At the end of the month I left to go back to Burkina. Over the course of that academic year, all the fetishists got together and poisoned my father, on March 1, 1959. I learned of his death in Burkina. He had been poisoned by his peers, by his fetishist colleagues because he hadn’t delivered an uninitiated to the forêt sacrée. Therefore I can say that my father died for my sake, because I didn’t want to place myself in the hands of those jealous people.19

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The Years of Nationalization (1958–1962)— Alphonse’s (Mis)Adventures Continue In July 1960, after another two years at Toussiana completing collège training, Alphonse returned to live and work for the first time in an independent Guinea. Aged twenty, he was ready to repay his debt to the church through teaching in its forest schools, planning at the same time to carve out a respectable social position in his pays natal. The same political forces that assisted Alphonse’s evasion of the traditional strictures of the forêt sacrée were to profoundly disrupt his early professional experience. In October 1960 Alphonse began teaching at Binikala, in the very same school where he had launched his own educational career a decade before. As he taught his first classes, the revolutionary state was engaging in a two-pronged attack on the nation’s Catholic schools, the bulk of which were located in the forest. The state began its offensive by offering better teaching salaries than the Church. Then, in a movement starting on the forest’s western edge before sweeping through Macenta, N’Zérékoré, and Yomou, the government nationalized all church schools situated outside mission walls, claiming the very ground on which the schools operated for the state. Alphonse’s travels during his first year of professional work thus took him steadily deeper into the forest, further and further from Conakry. After just a week teaching second graders in Binikala, Alphonse was transferred to a school in the town of Sérédou to replace a colleague who had opted for a state teaching job. Alphonse traveled light with only “a little mattress, a bucket, a trunk holding my books and documents, a portable stove, and a rifle.” He enjoyed two months in Sérédou, “a little spot where the climate is good, in the midst of the forest—a peaceful life.” He taught fifth grade and deployed extracurricular talents cultivated at Toussiana—particularly banjo playing and superior football skills—to win the affection of students, colleagues, and others within the local community. Just before Christmas 1960, however, local authorities announced the nationalization of the school, which lay outside mission walls. Alphonse proceeded to a familiar location at the mission school at Samoe, where he had completed primary school just over four years earlier. Although sad to leave Sérédou, the return to Samoe promised renewal of old friendships. The stay there, however, ended abruptly after just one month. Church education administrators sent Alphonse to Yomou to replace yet another colleague who had opted for a state job. A remote town of which he had heard very little, Yomou held no attractions: “Yomou, Yomou! If things kept on going like this, I would be tempted to do like the others. But I accepted the situation. I said: ‘Let’s go.’ ”20

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If Alphonse had foreseen that the Yomou school would also be nationalized the following month—February 1961—perhaps he would have stayed in Samoe or returned to Sérédou to teach for the state. Instead he found himself in an out of the way place where he had few friends, yoked to what was now defi ned as a state position that he could not quit without risk of terminating his teaching possibilities anywhere in Guinea. Even more troubling was that an entire social, spiritual, and institutional framework that had long structured Alphonse’s vision of an ideal, optimally productive and satisfying future within the forest had been dispelled by the revolutionary state’s nationalist-secularist assaults: The objective that I sketched out in Burkina was to become a very good teacher, a Christian teacher. Those trained at Toussiana were meant to go home and teach for the Catholic mission. We came back to Guinea to do that. But they said that now it’s all revolutionary teaching, a revolutionary teaching that seemed strange to us and completely disrupted our plans. What was the good of our training abroad?21

Revolutionary texts like Touré’s L’Action claimed that colonial and early postcolonial schools housed and conveyed ideas and social inclinations that were essentially foreign, unnatural, and radically inauthentic. Schooling practices had typically distorted or simply ignored the widespread material hardships of colonial oppression in the Guinean interior, and rural communities’ yearnings for a new socioeconomic and cultural dispensation. Reflecting upon his student and early teaching years, Alphonse portrayed contemporary educational affairs quite differently. For him, it was only in relation to the imperious impositions of revolutionary power that the Guinean classroom (within or outside mission walls) could be framed as a denaturing, “de-nationing” space. Like many other revolutionary interventions in the forest, the assault on mission schools was a product of overblown anticolonial zealotry rather than measured reflection and action for the well-being of the people. In the summer of 1962 Alphonse, along with all the other members of the Guinean teaching corps, was called to Conakry for a six-week training seminar. The seminar’s official aim was to improve teachers’ classroom and administrative skills, but Alphonse had little doubt that it had been organized in response to the prior year’s “teachers’ strike.”22 Though that strike had little if any direct support from the interior, and minimal immediate ramifications for schooling routines outside Conakry, the subsequent summer vacation evidently struck the revolutionary leadership as an auspicious moment to gather all teachers in order to survey and correct any deviations in their pedagogical or political orientations. At twenty-two Alphonse could rightfully consider himself a kind of cos-

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mopolitan intellectual. Yet he also recognized his marginal, subordinate status within his homeland. Having traversed much of CÔte d’Ivoire, Burkina, and Mali during his student years, he had still never ventured beyond the forest within Guinea. His own nation’s capital was more remote and unknown to him than several other urban centers of French West Africa. In mid-July Alphonse traveled by road from Yomou to Kankan, and then he boarded the train to Conakry. He lived, along with all other non-Conakry teachers, within the same Donka educational complex where the inflammatory strike had ignited eight months before. Teachers from the interior lived like collégiens and lycéens. Like Conakry’s elite post-primary students, the teachers were treated as subordinates in need of state-directed formation and discipline. Alphonse’s criticisms of the seminar’s premises, modalities, and outcomes were varied and abundant. To bring together all the teachers of Guinea to train them? One must say it was a mess. There were three, maybe four thousand teachers. How to organize and channel all of them? They lodged us in dormitories. There were several pedagogical professors who came to give us different courses. There were some who taught general training, academic training, pedagogical training. They taught us study programs and scholarly legislation—how to be a school director, how to keep and order the school’s documents. After that we were trained in the teaching of specific disciplines. Each one had its own method. We stayed there in the heavy rain of Conakry, the food sometimes poorly prepared. There were some who fell sick. Everyone tried to get by in his own way. Forty-five days went by like that. Would I say that these courses were serious? Me, I think that if they had organized it prefecture by prefecture maybe it would have been better. The content of the training in itself wasn’t worth anything. The seminar was held to bring us into line.23

Alphonse stated that student-teachers heard very little overt ideological rhetoric during their training. The desired “order” within the teaching corps was meant to be achieved more through the state’s show of organizational, even coercive force, than through a well-ordered transmission of pedagogical and political ideas. Alphonse stressed how deeply plagued by disorder the seminar was. His commentary suggests that those responsible for nationalizing Guinean education were themselves, as of 1962, uncertain as to how the core tenets of revolutionary sociopolitical theory ought to be translated into nationwide, concrete classroom practices. From the standpoint of state power, the ultimate positive effect of the summer session was, simply, the teachers’ recognition of their subservience to central administrative authority. Even teachers working in the remotest edges of the country, like Alphonse, should not entertain any delusions of professional autonomy in their classroom practices. Forty-five

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days and nights spent in austere conditions under Conakry’s voluminous rains alerted provincial teachers that they were very much subject to the will and dictates of the new revolutionary state. Even though the session lacked a wellarticulated overarching vision, it effectively underscored that ultimate administrative and pedagogical power was on the side of the revolutionary regime. In the same early postcolonial period, when President Touré was challenging Conakry’s collégiens and lycéens to spend their vacations in rural localities forging productive relations with the unschooled “people,” he called predominately rural teachers into the capital for a very different type of “enlightenment.” Both teachers and students were pressured to undergo experiences centered on displacement, de-familiarization, and personal humility before “the revolution.” Such experiments might best be grasped as political initiation ordeals.24 Most of what Alphonse observed in Conakry sapped any potential optimism he may have felt about the budding revolution. The teaching seminar’s myriad shortcomings conveyed just how little the PDG cared about sustaining the enthusiasm of the very social actors upon whom the success of its youth-centered “revolutionary” projects depended. Now that Touré’s party had ascended to unquestioned dominance, its leaders could treat people callously whenever and wherever they chose. Perhaps even more telling for Alphonse were the symbolic meanings he culled from social and material conditions in Conakry. During extended walking excursions through the city, Alphonse made keen observations of the place that, as the capital, stood as an illuminating figure of the current stage and prospects of revolutionary nation building. I was very curious to know what Conakry was all about. I had heard many things. But when I discovered Conakry, what I saw was a dirty, dirty city. There were rotting things and stagnant water everywhere. As I had seen Bamako, I thought I would fi nd a town as pretty, even more pretty. I was expecting to fi nd beautiful houses, impressive buildings, but one found archaic houses with big rocks placed on roofs ready to slide off. Almost the whole town was like that. The native inhabitants and others who had been around Conakry awhile didn’t give a damn about anything. They carried themselves offhandedly, like connoisseurs and braggarts. There were young Soussous who thought very highly of themselves. We sometimes went into little drinking holes. There were instances of prostitution and even houses of prostitution. A lot! I was disappointed. I was in a hurry to leave. The rain, the heat, the mosquitoes, all of that. I told myself: “there is a lot to do to catch up with other capitals.” Of course the ideology was there. One taught the ideology to the people, the love of the nation. But beside that, one needed development. Everyone was aware of that.25

Whereas Alphonse negotiated a dramatic obstacle course of changes in living conditions and future expectations in the first years of independence, Benoit Gorovogui pursued his early schooling in prime conditions in his native

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Loma village of Daro. Benoit’s primary school experiences, beginning at the age of six in 1956, differed markedly from those of Alphonse, ten years his senior. Though his parents were simple farmers, they eagerly sent him to school hoping “he could become someone; maybe an administrator.” A majority of Daro boys were attending school at independence, with girls making up about a quarter of local enrollment. In contrast to revolutionary representations that stressed the foreign nature of late-colonial and post-independence schooling compared to traditional rural social processes, Benoit cast Daro’s primary school as integral to the village’s collective consciousness and activities. Created by colonial authorities in 1948, and beginning as a mere hangar sheltering a single class, Daro’s school had six classes and successfully prepared students for the pivotal Certificat d’Études Primaires (CEP) exams just a decade later. Benoit suggested that the local introduction and development of schools unfolded without the acute tensions and contradictions that Sékou Touré foresaw as a probable result of educational expansion in the Guinean countryside.26 In his personal narrative, Benoit repeatedly stressed forestiers’ warm openness to the benefits of schooling. Benoit greatly admired his first teachers’ classroom methodologies, as well as their organization of extracurricular activities such as football drills and matches. The advent of independence, coming at the beginning of third grade, impacted minimally on his school routines. The increasing politicization of pedagogical discourse among revolutionary leaders in Conakry appears to have had little effect on educational ideals and practices in Daro, at least through the early sixties. Neither demystification politics, the nationalization of schools, nor the state’s response to the teachers’ strike—each significantly shaping Alphonse’s educational itinerary—figured in Benoit’s portrayal of school life in Daro. His youthful sense of local autonomy versus externally driven transformative projects would soon, however, suffer serious shocks. As a post-primary student and later teacher, Benoit would be forced into intimate confrontations with the multidimensional revolutionary ideologies and policies, and the brutal abruptness with which they could operate.

The Years of Reshuffling and Maximization (1962–1968) Much like Fodé Lamine Touré’s evocation of schooling experiences in the 1930s in Une enfance africaine,27 Benoit’s recollections of his school days in Daro centered on the quest for the Certificat d’Etudes Primaires. The CEP exam figured as the most critical moment in local students’ lives. While the revolutionary leadership in Conakry was striving to displace academic credentials as paramount signs of individual youth development, young and adult citizens

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of Daro were “enframing” the local school as a distinctive and distinguishing place, enshrining primary certification as the definitive symbol of the value of education.28 The awarding of diplomas was among the most dramatic community rituals of any given year. It was a solemn day. All the parents were called to school. The director held the diplomas. Then the candidates were called one by one. The parents went up to receive their children’s diplomas. It was very moving. There were parents with two or three students with them. They took away two or three diplomas. People applauded and they were very happy. There were others who got nothing. It was very, very hard. [The awarding of diplomas] were extremely moving occasions and that’s why parents carefully observed their children at home. They even went to school to ask the teacher, “Is my child working well?”29

As a radiant recipient of the national CEP, Benoit entered the nearest collège in Macenta town in October 1963. It was the prefecture’s most prestigious school. He was proud of his significantly elevated status as “grand élève,” stating that collégiens were so admired in Daro that younger children fought with one another to wear their blue and white uniforms at vacation times. Becoming a bleu—the popular contemporary name for collégiens—was a source of immense pleasure to Benoit and all of his new secondary school peers. Benoit continued to study hard in Macenta. He keenly appreciated the variety of subjects and teaching styles encountered there, greatly superior to those he had known in Daro. French, taught by a seminary graduate, was his favorite subject, though he was yet to consider what major he might choose. His cardinal educational concern was to proceed to lycée—most likely in the regional capital of N’Zérékoré—then on to university in Conakry. Meanwhile, Benoit needed great resolve and clear objectives to endure the hardships he survived outside school grounds. His extracurricular life was marked by unprecedented struggles. In the village I was with my parents—my mother, my father, my brothers, my sisters. In town there were fundamental changes in my way of life. The fi rst year I didn’t have a tuteur.30 I was with my little sister who was in primary school. We took care of ourselves. I gathered wood kindling and sold it. And on Sunday I went to the village to get our rice. Thirty kilometers on foot. Can you imagine? I went Saturday and came back on Sunday. The next year I had a tuteur, but he wasn’t intimately linked to my family. I had to please him and at the same time myself as I tried to advance in school.31

Benoit scarcely mentioned theater, sports, or other Macenta youth activities. He deliberately avoided theater participation. Timid by nature, he was re-

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lieved for academic as well as emotional reasons that he was never compelled to join a troupe and perform in front of strangers. Though he sometimes observed local football matches, he never played. Occasional soirées dansantes that were the craze among many local youths seemed an unimaginably indulgent (mis)use of time. Accelerated learning was really his sole “urban” pleasure. His greatest pleasures as collégien were returning home on weekends and especially vacations when he could eat his fill, catch up with friends, help in the fields, and tutor primary students the same way collégiens had once tutored him. In the spring of 1967, Benoit prepared for the brevet exams32 that would determine his chances of admission to lycée. Of this critical time he recalled: At that time we prepared very seriously for the brevet. We had one advantage: there was electric light at the collège. Thus at night those who had no lamp in their homes, those who couldn’t afford the oil, gathered together at school. There was twenty-four hour electricity. I went there. Some professors came to help us review. They explained passages we hadn’t grasped well. Yet between us [students] really, we had all we needed. Those strong in math explained difficult points. Those strong in French did the same. We were very, very strict with ourselves. Each one of us had the spirit and the anxious desire to succeed. We stayed in classrooms until one in the morning, two in the morning. If I compare student motivation at that time with now, it’s not the same thing. It was imperative that I reach university; that was my goal.33

University for Benoit was more than the culminating point of a quest for knowledge and social distinction. The idea of reaching university symbolized his capacity to pursue individual dreams, to make the most of his powers of intellect, concentration, and endurance. The years in Macenta had been a trial by ordeal, full of hardships. They allegorically resembled the multiyear Poro initiation regimen he would have likely undergone as a teenager a generation earlier. Like an exemplary initiate, Benoit refrained from lamenting prior sufferings, but he anticipated symbolic compensation for his ordeals. He expected to acquire lycéen status, a life stage within which he was again prepared to suffer, if necessary, before arriving at the apex of his yearnings—university. It was not any traditional Poro authority but the comparatively abstract power of the postcolonial state—the very power that had granted life to his post-primary educational quest in the fi rst place—that blocked Benoit’s progress along his chosen path. Enjoying vacation in Daro after having successfully passed his brevet, Benoit learned of administrative plans that would send him directly to the national École Normale Pédagogique (ENP) in the central Guinean town of Farannah to be trained as a primary school teacher. Investigating further, hoping to find a loophole through which he could proceed to lycée, Benoit learned that the revolutionary leadership had recently judged the

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intellectual level of the national teaching corps inadequate. Over the summer of 1967 it was decided that certain of the prefectures’ successful brevet candidates should be tracked immediately toward teacher training instead of pursuing their envisioned general educational path. Macenta was one of the selected prefectures. This news, and the local administration’s unresponsiveness to his and his classmates’ pleas, shocked Benoit into a new consciousness of the power and nature of national politics. At seventeen, his projected destiny had been suddenly rewritten, his future abruptly redefi ned by Conakry-based revolutionaries who determined the nation’s needs. All of us who were [technically] admitted to lycée in our class revolted. We went to the [prefecture] governor and protested. We pleaded: “Those who failed the brevet should go to the École Normale, and those who passed should continue as they wish. We made a huge effort to be admitted!” We raged. The Governor at the time was an old Peulh. He came out and said: “Excuse me my children. Here’s what I can advise. The transport vehicle is there. You should embark and leave because the decision was not mine; it came from a higher place.” He went back inside his house and locked the door. We shouted and shouted. There was nothing to do. The vehicle was there, a big truck. Someone in charge said: “Get in.” Others among us said, “OK we’ll go. We can’t do otherwise.” We left. Those who refused and went to N’Zérékoré to try to enter the lycée were chased away. They joined us later in Farannah without other options. It was very disappointing. There were even some who fled, who went to Liberia in their discouragement. I wasn’t happy but I couldn’t do anything. I never even attended lycée.34

Alphonse’s Itinerary, 1962–68: “When a Toad Is Thrown Away from the House, Sometimes It Lands in a Pond” Sékou Touré’s post-independence speeches repeatedly accused young elites of selfishly longing for the comparatively modern, cosmopolitan attractions of Conakry life, and doing everything they could to get to, or stay in, the capital. At twenty-two, however, Alphonse had been repulsed by his fi rst exposure to the coastal city, and he much preferred to live and work in the forest. Just four years into postcolonial history, he had already developed a defensive attitude toward the dominant regime, one that he would nonetheless serve as educator, administrator, and even local party representative for more than two decades. It was impossible for Alphonse to see his native forest as “backward” when the nation’s capital itself failed to exhibit convincing signs of development. Yet, despite his opposition toward the ways nationalism and state power imposed themselves in the first years of independence, Alphonse’s life took some positive turns in the 1962–68 period of “reshuffling and maximization.”

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After the obligatory teachers’ seminar in the summer of 1962, Alphonse returned to Yomou to teach for another year. The following year he was able to transfer to N’Zo, a vibrant market town at the base of Mount Nimba35 on Guinea’s border with CÔte d’Ivoire. Alphonse was delighted with the change. N’Zo reminded him of Sérédou, his favorite posting to that point. Embracing its cultural liveliness and relatively cosmopolitan atmosphere, he hoped to make it his permanent home. Its renowned market and geographical position drew diverse types of international travelers. He proudly remembered being called upon by the local commandant to compose and deliver a welcoming speech to the wife of Patrice Lumumba, accompanied by a group of Chinese women dignitaries on their way to visit Mount Nimba. He also drew pleasure from playing guitar and banjo in small venues during the lively nights before and after the weekly market, and witnessing the emergence of Nimba Jazz, an electric ensemble that would later achieve national fame at Conakry arts festivals. Alphonse’s stay in N’Zo, however, ended abruptly in May 1964. Called in by the regional director of education in N’Zérékoré, he was told to prepare his bags and board the next truck passing from N’Zo to the remote village of Gama, where he was to serve as school director and local inspector of education. Though the new posting was a promotion in official terms, Alphonse was as demoralized by the news as he had been four years earlier when mission administrators transferred him from Samoe to Yomou. He felt like a passenger pigeon sent here and there by superiors without any care for his preferences. Gama was easily more remote than Yomou. Having spent almost his entire life in the forest, Alphonse had never even heard of the place. The inspector in N’Zérékoré said to me: “You’ve just been named inspector of the section scolaire in Gama.” I said, “Where? Where is that?” I left disappointed. I went to Lola.36 I met an old man who frequented Gama’s weekly market. He told me: “Monsieur Alphonse, you must go to Gama. I know Gama. People go there rarely because the road is bad. A vehicle will go over there once a month, or twice a month.” I said “What?” He said: “There is a proverb that says ‘When the toad comes close to the house, and one wants it to go away, one throws it a long way away. Sometimes at the end of its fl ight, it lands in a pond.’ And the toad likes the pond. . . . Those people of Gama, that’s how it is with them.” I went with the Benz.37 We arrived around May fifth or the sixth, but the festivities of May 1—the workers’ holiday—were still going on. People continued to dance in the neighborhoods. It was a big hidden village. When someone says “Celebration!” that’s the way it is.38

Life in Gama, the most peripheral locality Alphonse ever inhabited, spurred new environmental and sociological discoveries. The village and its surroundings captivated the heart and mind of the already well traveled, newly desig-

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nated, twenty-four-year-old education inspector. Initial surprises included a spellbinding abundance of bush meat—especially delicious agouti39—alongside rice, fruits, vegetables, and palm wine all sold at prices so low that Alphonse could not mention them without laughing. Alphonse’s professional duties generated unanticipated awe at the vastness of the forest, and the profound marginality of many of its communities vis-àvis state administrative structures and support. I was in charge of seven schools. I needed to understand the situation at each of them. There were schools that were completely lost, where there wasn’t even a road for vehicles. One had to go on foot through the grasses. One day I made my first visit to a distant school. A local child came with me. We walked until I didn’t know where we were. The grasses were so interlaced that we had to pull it apart with our hands to continue. I asked my companion: “Does this path even lead to a village?” Rain started pounding down. We arrived at the school around 10 am completely soaked. I said: “Call the teacher!” I saw someone coming, with ruffled hair, totally dirty. No one would have ever guessed him a teacher. Someone said to him: “Your boss his here.” He said: “What boss?” [laughter]. Someone said: “The one who commands the schools.” He asked me: “Where did you come from?” I said “Gama.” We went to visit the school. It was a hangar that stood there. There were children sitting on stools, others on chairs, others any which way. There was an old door painted black and attached to the wall that functioned as a blackboard. If I only had a camera to photograph these schools! These schools were just created with independence with one classroom in a hangar and one teacher, and maybe twenty pupils. One couldn’t ask the people to carry cement to construct a school when one had to cleave grasses just to arrive in their village. They refused all the same to send their children to study in another village out of fear that they would be mistreated.40

Alphonse stayed in Gama from 1964 to 1967; he married a local woman and started a family, enjoying his authority as local head of educational affairs, relatively comfortable living conditions, and increasingly friendly relations with local communities. Working in such a remote place, he was rarely subject to outside administrative pressure or surveillance. In 1967, however, he was suddenly designated director of L’École Primaire Mamadou Konaté in N’Zérékoré town, the oldest and most prestigious primary school in the prefecture, if not the entire region. The “years of cultural revolution” would however bring him back to Gama, under circumstances described below.

The Years of Cultural Revolution, 1968–1984 For clarity and comparative purposes, I divide the cultural revolutionary itineraries into two parts. “Teachers” follows the ongoing adventures of Benoit and Alphonse. “Students” features the plights, in the late-1960s and 1970s, of the younger Cécé Loua and Joachim Lamah.

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Part 1—Teachers The Cultural Revolution’s proclamation, in August 1968, found eighteenyear-old Benoit prepared to begin his second and fi nal year at Farannah’s ENP, acquiring general instruction, education theory, and classroom methodologies. His descriptions of Farannah as a town were vague, but he obviously made some important discoveries and underwent some significant personal transformations during his first prolonged stay outside the forest. He generally enjoyed life in the school’s dormitories, meeting peers from all parts of the country. Many of them shared similar predicaments and aspirations. Assuming the teacher’s role in classrooms in and around Farannah as part of his practicum, Benoit overcame much of his previous shyness. At the ENP it was no longer possible to willfully ignore the nature or scope of the state’s ideological and material projects. Exam questions were commonly inspired by citations from Sékou Touré’s tomes,41 which Benoit read widely, there being “no lack” of them on campus. He developed some sympathy for the ideals of the revolution. Of his initial response to the declaration of the Cultural Revolution in the summer of 1968, he stated: Our mentality was forged in such a way that everything concerning the revolution was a very beautiful thing; all that was entailed should contribute to the wellbeing of the country, the development of the country. Therefore, we welcomed the proclamation joyously. Perhaps in the application there were many difficulties, but on the surface, the ideas seemed marvelous to us.42

In June 1969 Benoit passed his final exams, and he requested the forest and the Fouta Djallon as first and second posting preferences. He was sent instead to Kankan, the capital of Upper Guinea. He was reminded again of the profound incongruities between his own wishes and state designs, even after he had worked exemplarily at the ENP, just as he had done in collège. At just nineteen, Benoit began his four years of teaching at primary schools in three very different localities within Kankan prefecture. At Farannah, he had become a capable speaker of Malinké, and had adapted to life outside the forest. Nonetheless, Kankan struck him as a daunting and distinctively foreign place—hot and dry, its urban core bigger and busier than Macenta’s or Farannah’s. Even more intimidating was Kankan’s status as the cultural capital of Guinea’s traditional Malinké and Muslim institutions and identities. Various elements of his ENP training enabled Benoit to work effectively and create a sense of personal stability in the “foreign” society of northeastern Guinea. He arrived in Kankan with an acute sense of his own technical proficiency and a clear vision of what Sékou Touré called “the teaching function.”43 He was confident that his earnestness and efficacy would convince all local

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people of his competency. Whereas upon entering the ENP he had felt himself an arbitrary victim of state politics and power, as a new teacher in a new post Benoit sought to affirm and embody the rationality of state-scripted educational methods and goals. The tactic was effective, both professionally and as a form of cultural and psychological defense. Benoit rarely felt intimidated during his years in Kankan, despite his young age and minority ethnic and religious identity. As in his student days, Benoit as teacher tried to minimize his involvement in extracurricular political activity. While in Kankan he was once obliged to fill the minor role of local party committee secretary. Recalling his feelings at such instances, he stated: There was only one party. There was a line of conduct one had to follow. At the time I interested myself very little in politics in their present form. My work focused only on school, what to do to make a school function. I came out (of the ENP) with new knowledges that I wanted to deploy in practice; that was my preoccupation. Politics impacted things. We were all caught within it. One danced when one had to dance; one sang when one had to sing (laughter).44

As a young teacher, Benoit felt simultaneously constrained and empowered by state politics. National administrative forces beyond his control circumscribed his opportunities, but also seemed to assure him professional employment as educator, and thus a social position meriting some respect within any Guinean community where he might be sent to work. Benoit’s sense of reliance on the revolutionary state did not prevent him, however, from making critical observations of the Cultural Revolution’s uneven effect on differently situated Guinean communities and youths. After two years teaching on the fringes of Kankan town (1969–71), Benoit was transferred to a remote site on the outskirts of Baranama (1971–72), before transferring again to the larger village of Makonon (1972–73), both located within Kankan prefecture. After Farannah and Kankan town, Benoit found the people of Baranama indifferent not just to cultural revolutionary politics per se, but to what he assumed were universal aspirations for modernity and development through schooling. The stay there proved a humbling experience, as he saw little value arising from his presence in an environment of remarkable social conservatism and material austerity: “The people of Baranama were in the fields permanently. This impacted school attendance. People were completely devoted to their agricultural operations. It was only with difficulty that they let their children go to school.”45 Benoit encountered a very different set of affairs in the larger village of Makonon. He taught at a well-functioning school in a comparatively dynamic

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community nestling the road connecting Kankan and Kissidougou. The road opened the village to the outside world, making its people more alert and curious. It also allowed the state to intervene easily and actively in local socioeconomic processes. At Makonon, a site at once rural and relatively progressive, Benoit had an optimal opportunity to observe the effects that cultural revolutionary policies could have on contemporary youths. Comparing youth activities in and around school in Makonon to those he had observed in Kankan town, Benoit noted: “The children of Makonon worked more. They were sturdier, more accustomed to working the soil than the town children. The state exploited their dispositions because they had more aptitudes. The state did the same thing with the youth of the forest.” Benoit was not alone in stressing the different aptitudes and exploitability of different categories of Guinean youth and the consequences for the forest. Images of forest youths’ exceptional discipline and submissive disposition in relation to traditional and modern forms of authority, as well as their “aptitudes” for various forms of strenuous physical labor, figure prominently in many forestiers’ explanations of the revolutionary state’s heightened levels of exploitative action in the region. In September 1973, after six years of study and work away from home, Benoit was transferred back to Macenta, fulfilling a wish he had repeatedly expressed to the administration. The return was professionally and emotionally gratifying. After his experiences in Upper Guinea, the return to the forest promised not just a renewal of former social ties, but also a return to properly modern, progressive educational conditions. Benoit stressed how strongly the social dynamics surrounding education in the forest differed from those observed throughout most of Kankan: There is a fundamental difference in the functioning of schools. When I was in Kankan one day exploring I ventured into the sub-prefecture of Fodékaria. But I saw a class being conducted in the open air! A school under the trees! The school shifted position according to the angle of the sun. It was really the fi rst time I’d encountered anything like that. In 1970, seventy-one, seventy-two, one still saw that over there. I was very intrigued to fi nd such a school. Meanwhile in the forest, there was not even a single school still built from straw. All the schools were in cement with sheet metal roofs. The school was important; people favorably welcomed schooling from very, very early on. While on the other side people weren’t persuaded very quickly of schooling’s value. And even today, the school enrollment rates in Upper Guinea and the forest are not even close.46

Benoit’s personal wishes probably played little role in his longed-for transfer back to his pays natal. National administrative decisions had tracked him toward Farannah then Kankan. A new wave of high-level decisions centering on language politics brought him back home, decisions that the young teacher,

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ironically, sternly opposed. As part of the burgeoning Cultural Revolution, the state strove in the early 1970s to expand the use of national languages in primary classrooms throughout the country.47 By the time Benoit had arrived in Baranama, for instance, Malinké was the official language of instruction at the sole local school. Though he understood and spoke Malinké well, he lacked the ability to teach any subject completely in Malinké—or, to put matters more accurately, as completely as his Malinké peers.48 He was relegated to teaching only French, which figured in the primary curriculum of the time as a foreign language taught in one hour blocks to different classes according to their weekly schedule. In the context of the new language policy, Benoit’s presence as a native Loma speaker was suddenly far more useful in Macenta than anywhere else. After more than a decade’s efforts to nationalize the social-professional consciousness of the Guinean teaching corps, the revolutionary state had set into motion a new division of pedagogical labor starkly emphasizing primary school teachers’ distinct linguistic, regional, and ethnic identities. Although overjoyed to return to Macenta under almost any circumstances, Benoit was acutely critical of the contradictions and shortcomings of the new language policies. Teaching in national languages at the stage of development where we were? I didn’t see a single advantage. The languages in which the teaching was performed were not yet codified, are still not codified, and do not lend themselves to that. That’s why we encountered an enormous amount of problems. The vocabulary was never stable. You call a given object by a given term here; in the other village a little further on people speaking the same language call it something else. When the student changes schools, problems arise. The language as vehicle of knowledge hadn’t been comprehensively studied, hadn’t been codified. Really I saw no advantage to teaching in national languages.49

A great many parents shared Benoit’s scorn for this nationalist reform measure. It was common during the period for parents to make their children translate lessons given in Loma (or any national language) back into the original French from which their teacher had painstakingly translated the same lesson at an earlier point from available Francophone pedagogical texts or personal notes. After returning to teach in Macenta town in 1973, Benoit went on to teach in Sérédou (1974–75), Bofossou (1975–80)—the launching site of the demystification campaign—and Panziazou (1980–87). Observing political and pedagogical processes in progressively smaller forest communities confi rmed his impressions that rural youths’ energies were more fully subordinated to state initiatives than were those of their (comparatively) urban peers. These observations also convinced him that forest youth as a whole were more vulnerable and victimized by contemporary productionist policies than were their peers

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in Upper Guinea. Over the latter years of his revolutionary career, Benoit continued to minimize his roles in political and production activities outside the school—something he would not have been able to do as a post-primary teacher. Old enough to overcome his fear of “recruitment,” Benoit cultivated a critical interest in militant theater. His astute observations on the impact and successes of forestier ballet, in particular, are examined in the next chapter. The elder Alphonse’s experience of the Cultural Revolution differed dramatically from Benoit’s. Whereas Benoit was just eighteen in 1968 and taking his first steps into a teaching career, Alphonse was a veteran educator, wise beyond his (twenty-eight) years as a result of multiple postings and misadventures, and the head of a family as well. Alphonse’s geographical movements after 1968 were, however, fairly limited. In September 1968, just after the Cultural Revolution’s proclamation, a delegation came to N’Zérékoré from Gama to request Alphonse’s return to open and direct the village’s first collège—or Centre d’Études Révolutionnaires (CER) deuxième cycle, in the official language of the time. The regional inspector of education allowed Alphonse to respond to the proposal as he saw fit, certain that he would reject it. Though Alphonse had what was considered a very good job running a well-known school in town, he was deeply moved by the delegation’s request. He decided “to go back into the bush” and opened Gama’s first collège/CER on January 9, 1969. This time he stayed ten years. Though obviously happy to return, Alphonse’s second stay in Gama would not be as pleasurable as his first. Increasingly aggressive state interventions to amplify agricultural production in all rural localities altered the roles of teachers and educational administrators within and beyond school grounds. Because enrollment rates were relatively high, and the gap between the region’s potential agricultural yields and contemporary output so vast—at least according to the revolutionary leadership in Conakry—forest communities and students felt the impact of new production-centered pedagogical initiatives as acutely, if not more so, than communities in any other part of the country. The creation of institutions such as Gama’s CER was intended to bridge this perceived production gap, to accelerate the establishment of more efficient, modernized collective agriculture in even the remotest sections of the interior. The political responsibilities of a CER director, particularly in the forest at the collège level, were heavier than those faced by school directors at any level before the Cultural Revolution. After 1968, such an administrator was not just encouraged to initiate and monitor notable transformations of rural life, but very much compelled to do so, under various pressures. Alphonse’s commentary on

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his second spell in Gama lacked the moments of excitement and enchantment marking his first impressions of the big hidden village in the mid-1960s. His newly elevated position within a reconfigured national political-pedagogical system required him to exploit local human and environmental resources he had come to admire. Where he had once stood in awe of Gama’s staggering agricultural endowments, he was now compelled to pressure students and their parents to extend and intensify exploitation of local rice fields and palm groves. The state’s increasing establishment and enforcement of production quotas—a form of taxin-kind—for all rural localities allowed the state to assess local officials’ commitment to revolutionary policies in defi nitive, quantitative terms.50 Abundant amounts of rice and palm oil were expected from every forest community.51 In this context, a local educational authority like Alphonse found it increasingly difficult to deviate from injunctions imposed by higher administrative realms, even at a site as remote as Gama. The differences between a good and bad CER director could be readily measured by the number of sacks of rice or barrels of palm oil he could present to state officials at the time when local quotas were due. The anguish Alphonse felt over his mediating role between an exploitative political regime and a generally admirable local community worsened at instances when state officials themselves failed to honor their side of production “agreements.” He bitterly recalled episodes where rice and other goods painstakingly cultivated by students and parents to meet imposed quotas rotted in local storehouses as state trucks failed to arrive anywhere near the appointed time to transport the yield to N’Zérékoré.52 (The ultimate destinations of the trucks were typically unknown.) The stench from local storehouses told CER students and the rest of the community that the season’s collective efforts had only symbolic significance at best and no practical value for their nation. While the revolutionary leadership steadily espoused the pedagogical slogan “produce to educate,” the major lesson learned by students in many if not most of their CER work initiatives was just how incapable the governing regime was of translating its theories of educational reform into palpable material improvements for Guineans. As CER director, every year Alphonse was also required to organize and supervise youth artistic troupes for dramatic plays, ballet, choir, and folklore in the months before annual regional competitions. His official position obliged him to exploit local cultural traditions in ways analogous to those he adopted toward the local material environment. He had long loved music and dance. Now he was among Gama’s designated artistic trainers, partly responsible for

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separating youths from home during highly intensive two to three week prequinzaine53 rehearsals, almost always against their parents’ will. Like most CER directors at the time, Alphonse drilled local youths to fashion their creative efforts in ways that would help them satisfy revolutionary juries hungry for displays of youthful exhibitions of “authenticity.” Alphonse left Gama for the newly designated prefectural capital of Lola in 1979, reaching the apex of his professional career as both primary education inspector for the entire prefecture and automatic holder of several minor political titles. In 1980 he received a letter from one of the Toussiana classmates with whom he had lived and studied two decades earlier. The classmate, now residing in the Ivorian regional capital of Man, only 150 kilometers from Lola, wrote to congratulate Alphonse on his professional achievements— which he had learned from a third party—and invite him to spend a vacation at his house, even offering the use of a personal car to facilitate the journey. Alphonse kindly declined the offer. The fleeting exchange abounded in irony for Alphonse. A friend he had not seen in twenty years had written him a congratulatory letter at a moment when personal disenchantment with his roles in local and national society was running distressingly high. Moreover, his newly elevated official status made it impossible for him to cross the border into CÔte d’Ivoire without the permission of other higher-ranking officials who would likely accuse him of intended fl ight, trafficking, or some other form of betrayal. In 1956, as a sixteen year old just out of primary school, he had traveled through Man, bound for Burkina Faso, positively intoxicated with the wealth of cross-cultural experiences and geographical discoveries his future promised. At forty, he was locked into a professional and political scenario that both soured his feelings of home and blighted the thrilling visions of mobility and adventure once so dear to him.

Part 2—Students Unlike their older counterparts, Alphonse and Benoit, the central educational experiences of the fi nal two narrators, Cécé and Joachim, unfolded during the cultural revolutionary era after 1968. Instead of shifting back and forth between their two itineraries I focus wholly on one and then the other. Though Joachim was born before Cécé, I saved his narrative for last. In taking us to Conakry and illuminating the profound differences marking student life there, Joachim’s story creates an informative comparative perspective for assessing the specifics of contemporary forest youths’ struggles. Also, his story is exceptionally dramatic. It is the only one to highlight the option of exile as a path to escape the constraints and contradictions of revolutionary politics that were so keenly felt by young forestiers and a great many other Guineans.

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Cécé’s Itinerary Cécé began primary school as an eight year old in 1968 in his native Kpelle village of Gampara, just twenty kilometers from the already mentioned large village of Samoe. His first school had just four classes. Cécé recalled that the hangar sheltering first grade sometimes collapsed during the heavy rains of the vacation period of July through September. Parents and students, however, would perform all the necessary repairs so that all classes could start their work on time in early October. Cécé began his primary studies just two months after the proclamation of the Cultural Revolution. Very unlike Benoit who had begun school a decade earlier at the moment of independence, and testifying to the concrete impact of recent pedagogical reforms, physical labor figured prominently in Cécé’s primary school routines. Brick making with riverbank clay, plowing the school’s local fields, and gathering wood and palm kernels from the surrounding forest were standard components of Cécé’s life as a pupil. His and his peers’ participation in all these tasks were closely monitored. Thursday mornings and afternoons were always devoted to production. There were also periodic campaigns where courses were interrupted for several days as students’ energies were channeled exclusively into a given production assignment, typically coinciding with a crucial time for planting, harvesting, or the execution of a public works project. Production was itself a graded curricular subject. The weight assigned to it was heavy enough that no youth (without special political connections) could evade production assignments on Thursdays or campaign tasks and still advance to the next grade. Cécé’s sketch of his first four years of schooling suggested that the small size of the Gampara community facilitated teachers’ and administrators’ surveillance of every student’s role in production. His comments corroborate Alphonse’s and Benoit’s claims that smaller villages suffered more state meddling into internal socioeconomic processes than larger, more populous communities, where monitoring of individual and family actions was more difficult. Cécé’s depictions of school vacations, however, advanced a very different picture, implying that Gampara’s rural marginality created special, significant pockets of communal independence from state power. He waxed nostalgic about extended summer spells in farming camps away from the village, in the surrounding forest, precisely because they created feelings of release and communitas. My parents had a big field five or six kilometers from the village. There were camps out there where people spent the night so they wouldn’t have to go back to the village all the time. The camps were bigger than single family homes. You

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could fi nd three, five, up to twenty families together in a camp. They organized their work as a team. These camps don’t exist anymore in this form, because of broader economic changes. When I went out there during the long vacation, I would stay for a month without returning to the village. It was fi ne. There was a lot of rice and bananas, a lot of everything. One wanted for nothing. I made big traps for animals with my father or my big sister’s husband. It was another life. It had nothing to do with scholastic life. We collected palm wine. We even gathered snails in the deep forest. It was a very beautiful life. Walks through the forest brought me enormous pleasure. During those periods you went about easily fi nding things to eat, or having them given to you by others, because there was so much around.54

The ideal spells in the forest could not last forever, of course. Alongside his memories of the ecological abundance and general collective well-being permeating the forest camps, Cécé also remembered how families debated the best ways to circumvent state taxes-in-kind upon their return to the village. Each summer, each family experimented with deceptive tactics aimed at maximizing their own yield while minimizing the amount they would have to give over to local officials. Back in the village Cécé was excelling in school. As Gampara had no fifth grade, he had to transfer to Samoe to complete primary school and take the pivotal CEP exams. He did so in June 1974, receiving higher marks than any of his classmates. Even though Samoe was a Kpelle village, Cécé heeded parental advice and absented himself from the proclamation of local exam results for fear of locals’ recriminations against an exceptionally successful “outsider.” The next logical step along Cécé’s academic path was the closest collège, again in Samoe. His efforts to sidestep Samoe and proceed instead to one of N’Zérékoré town’s collèges reveal further important facts about the consciousness of cultural-revolutionary youth and the unevenness of CER production regimens across different localities. Although he was reluctant to address how he eluded continuing on in Samoe—as he should have according to administrative rules—Cécé was clear about why the big village was an undesirable destination. Getting to N’Zérékoré was very difficult. I can’t explain everything. I should have continued my studies in Samoe. At the time everyone knew what Samoe represented. It was very hard. I was still very young, at fourteen, and my parents thought I would suffer a lot. Production was a bit overemphasized there. No one wanted to stay. The school heads were very, very rough. The production burdens were enormous. Students created low-lying fields [bas-fonds], a lot of manioc and peanut fields. Moreover they demanded palm kernels from students in enormous

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quantities. They collected huge piles of wood. If a matter of minor punishment arose, they demanded those involved to bring fifty pieces of wood, and so on. It was enormous. I had at any price to come directly to N’Zérékoré. That generated many problems. I succeeded all the same.55

Cultural-revolutionary politics altered schooling routines everywhere, but some institutions pushed student production far more than others, depending in large part on their urban or rural location and the particular political ardor and ambitions of local teachers and administrators. Cécé’s desire to transfer to N’Zérékoré, even though it was farther from home than Samoe, is logical and unsurprising. Urban settings generally promised youths greater freedom, at least to avoid the state’s appropriation of their time and physical energies. Cécé’s life as N’Zérékoré collégien was nonetheless strongly shaped by production requirements and other forms of physical work. During two of his three years at CER Félix Roland Mamoue, his overall marks ranked second among the ninety students in his class. At the time the second-best student in any cohort was automatically designated the class’s commissaire de production, with responsibility for monitoring classmates’ participation in all production assignments. These tasks typically occupied one full day in the weekly timetable, but often involved special evening tasks and, during campaign periods, an entire week of fieldwork while normal classes were suspended. Students who missed production tasks, often undertaken several kilometers from campus, were commonly forbidden entry into school grounds the following day, and sometimes subjected directly to some form of physical punishment by student popular militia members.56 In addition to taking roll at production sites, Cécé was often responsible for measuring classmates’ individual contributions of goods—typically palm kernels—to the school’s storehouses during designated campaigns. Cécé’s position allowed him unique insight into the diverse effects of CER production regimens on differently situated classmates, as well as the varied tactics they developed to evade them, or at least counter their most negative consequences. Cécé lived with an aunt three kilometers from school, sharing a room with two cousins. Classmates often visited him in the evenings, pleading with him to help them escape certain assignments by ignoring their absence, or by falsifying figures, such as the weight of palm kernels they had supplied during a recent campaign. Cécé did not comment in any detail on help he might have given, or not given, these students. He frankly professed his fear of militia members, who were as ready to sanction the wrongs of a commissaire as those committed by any common student. He said many friends ended up abandoning their studies because of production burdens they were unable or

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unwilling to fulfill, and he stressed the disproportionately high number of female students who left school for such reasons. Comparatively well-off students had multiple ways to evade the inconveniences of production. Cécé recounted the case of a Peulh classmate who, having been raised on the Fouta Djallon plateau, had little idea how to collect palm kernels, let alone in the heavy quantities demanded by CER directors. With Cécé’s help, the classmate, whose father was a local official, arranged the covert purchase of required amounts of kernels from local women delighted to gain extra income in an extremely lean economy. Other privileged students often approached school administrators directly with bribes that relieved them from particularly onerous physical tasks. Even with the many loopholes students found to sidestep production regimens, Cécé spoke in awe of the sheer amount of rice cultivated by his peers in the mid-1970s. It was an awe tinged with bitterness at the fact that much of these harvests rotted in local storehouses because of bureaucratic disorganization and miserable transport resources and infrastructure. At the same time that he was witnessing such squandering, he spent much of his limited free time with a handful of friends back in Gampara where together they gathered palm kernels in the surrounding forest, extracted the oil, and sold it at fair profits in the village or N’Zérékoré. In their tightly focused transparency of design and results, these micro-initiatives figured in Cécé’s heart and mind as positive counterexamples to the malfunctioning of CER and revolutionary politics more generally. They provided him with much needed money, a sense of true camaraderie, and a renewed appreciation of people, spaces, and possibilities that endured beyond the limits of official politics and exploitation. Cécé’s collège years were not completely consumed by academic, agricultural, and entrepreneurial work. Coming of age at the height of productionist pedagogies, Cécé was also coming of age at the height of militant theater. Among the best French speakers at school, he was often called upon to perform teachers’ or administrators’ roles in didactic plays. He spoke derisively of his acting efforts, but stressed that theater was no joke for students of the period. Theater participation was dreaded for the sheer amount of time it demanded. During peak rehearsal periods, Cécé attended school from 7:30 to 12:30, walked home (thirty minutes each way) to eat lunch with his cousins, then returned to school for rehearsals from 3 to 8 pm. He found these spells even more physically and psychologically draining than major production campaign times. Only the threat of being suspended or physically punished by school militia kept him coming to rehearsals. Cécé’s recollections of militant theater were, however, also marked by moments of enthusiasm and enchantment. Although loathing rehearsals, he

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greatly enjoyed witnessing the final versions of stage performances amid excited audiences at N’Zérékoré’s expansive Maison du Parti, and even enjoyed playing a part in minor “warm-up” acts.57 Like many others within his generational cohort, he detested theater as an additional mode of discipline and didacticism that he had to endure to advance academically. Yet, he also periodically reveled in the aesthetic and social pleasures generated within and around N’Zérékoré’s regional quinzaines. Whereas official discourse cast quinzaines as exhibitions confirming the vibrant legitimacy of anticolonial nationalism and cultural revolutionary policies, Cécé recalled them principally, and fondly, as moments of release from the myriad pressures structuring CER life. During the regional festival there was really a carnivalesque atmosphere. It stirred a lot of movement, especially among those involved in schooling. Every school sent its acts. Villagers slept in our schools. It was a real celebration. We looked forward to it. The town was lively. There were always shows at the Maison du Parti. We played football too. It’s only now that we cast a critical look at it; we try to speak of theater critically. If you suspend these criticisms, you remember that the songs were beautiful. They pleased everyone at the time. We applauded loudly, very loudly. The ballets, the choirs, all of them were staged at the Maison du Parti. They were unforgettable moments in the life of young people. Preparations for the quinzaine were painful, but the time of the quinzaine itself was full of joy, of celebration. I was very young, but I spent most of those nights in town, running home around midnight. Older students didn’t go home at all. They indulged in escapades, spoke sweetly to one another, and so on. It was an occasion for youth to get to know one another romantically. At times pregnancies must have resulted from all of this. A lot of girls had to drop their studies.58

“Carnivalesque” quinzaine periods released many local youths from typical routines and tensions. One should not, however, thus infer that they subverted the workings of state-endorsed pedagogies and politics. Rather, within a bounded timeframe, they dramatically shifted the ways in which state power was mediated, experienced, and appropriated. Cécé’s commentary, among others I heard, suggested that the pleasures afforded by quinzaines helped defuse oppositional sentiments among many comparatively well-educated youths. This was a very desirable, if officially unnoted, outcome for a revolutionary regime that worried constantly about the “antinational” sensibilities of the country’s aspiring intellectuals. After passing his brevet in 1977, Cécé left the forest for the coastal town of Boffa where his older brother had been newly posted as a minor administrator. He was able to pass successfully through the local lycée and receive his baccalaureate. He is the only one of this chapter’s narrators to fulfill the dream of en-

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try into the University of Conakry, from which he received a degree in French in 1984. For various reasons, the impact of militant theater on Joachim’s life was far more profound than its impact on Cécé’s, or on the two older narrators. Cécé saw theater participation as an obvious obstacle to his educational aspirations, and tried for the most part to minimize his involvement. Joachim’s appraisals of the relative values of schooling and theater unfolded in a different, more dramatic, manner. As an early teen, Joachim felt positively disposed toward both fields of activity. It was, in fact, his initial enchantment with theater that indirectly led him toward the kind of academic zeal embodied by Cécé. Joachim told me on several occasions that his experiences as a fifteen-year-old member of Samoe’s ballet contingent at the 1972 N’Zérékoré quinzaine was probably the most critical juncture of his entire youth, equaled only by his decision to flee Guinea for Liberia six years later. Up to that point in 1972, Joachim’s life as child and student had been fairly uneventful, even sheltered, compared to this chapter’s other narrators. He was never forced to leave his native village of Samoe for educational or other reasons. Entering collège, he assumed that he would stay with his family and continue his education in the big village as long as possible. Probably because of this strong sense of domestic security, Joachim expressed no anxieties over the production regimens at the local collège that so frightened the younger Cécé. Up until the second semester of seventh grade, when preparations for the upcoming regional quinzaine began, Joachim’s life was remarkably devoid of worries, especially considering the political turbulence of the times. Joachim was by nature very extroverted. He loved to sing and dance, and was talented in both from earliest childhood. Having already participated in minor dramatic and musical pieces in primary school, he was ready and willing to contribute his skills to any of the works his collège or community as a whole planned to present at the 1972 quinzaine. In the end he joined the Samoe’s principal ballet troupe. He was shocked, however, by the kinds of experiences he underwent before, during, and after the main competition. When you’re working on these things during your training no one feeds you.59 Only your parents feed you. You spend the whole day working from 8 o’clock sometimes to 4 o’clock. You go home for one or two hours, you look for food, you come back, you can stay up to midnight. You go home, the next day you start up again. I didn’t attend school for three months, but my teachers didn’t mind. All the responsables60 were just worried about the quinzaine. When we went to N’Zérékoré, they felt that they could give us a bit of money. It was about fifty francs a day per person. Fifty francs is nothing for the food of someone who is working hard. So they put that money together and bought and

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cooked some rice. You fight around the bowl. If you’re strong you eat; if you’re not strong you don’t eat. Then we used to dance. After the training we were to perform the next day. And I got ill. My leg was hurting because of the dancing—three months without rest, without proper conditions, without proper food. Imagine the strength you spend. My leg was hurting so I was left out on my own in N’Zérékoré, just like that. I came back home. I was obliged to come back on my own expenses. When I came back home, I spent about three months lying down in my bed, on the charge of my parents. Nobody even came around and said: “What about the child we left out there? How is he coming on?” No. This is how it usually was. The revolution used people like tools. If they’re used up, there’s no backing or regard for them.61

How, as a native son of Samoe, did Joachim not foresee the troubles he might encounter throwing himself into a ballet troupe? A recurrent theme in the experience of contemporary youth is the unexpected ways in which differently situated responsables would wield the powers they felt were theirs, and displace their own individual pressures from above onto local citizens. Quinzaine preparations in a provincial setting like Samoe could change dramatically from year to year for a number of reasons. High-ranking officials, including Sékou Touré, could suddenly voice concerns over a perceived lack of revolutionary dynamism or commitment in the community in question, challenging it to prove its militancy at the next round of theater competitions. Changes could occur within community power relations as well, with the arrival—through constant administrative transfers—of more zealous political-pedagogical authorities on the scene, or marked shifts in the sociopolitical designs and tactics of individual authorities already in place. Such sudden intensifications of theater’s importance were particularly common during the early years of the Cultural Revolution. In the end, given his recognizable talents, Joachim would likely have been pressured into dancing for the village whether he volunteered those talents or not. The community’s general lack of “regard” or “backing” during his convalescence in April–June 1972 disturbed Joachim even more than the brutal training regimens that had provoked his illness. This coolness signaled how deeply the dehumanizing attitudes of the revolutionary state had seeped into local mind-sets and “neighborly” routines. During his spell as village outcast, Joachim made a monumental decision. He decided to do everything possible to get out of Samoe and the forest altogether after obtaining his brevet, and to complete his remaining education in Conakry. The ardor with which he nurtured this plan helped him through an otherwise purgatorial spell of his life. Joachim completed eighth and ninth grades at the local collège keeping his Conakry plans secret from all. He continued on with mandatory participation

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in local theatrical endeavors, though with far less effort and far greater cynicism than before, saving as much time and energy as possible for his studies. He never derived the types of pleasures from N’Zérékoré quinzaines that Cécé did. What he saw during such events was a massive squandering of youths’ and other villagers’ time and energy similar to the useless exhaustion provoked by local CER production campaigns. These observations of the effects of revolutionary pedagogy on regional life steadily strengthened his resolve to get out of the forest altogether and start his personal development anew in the coastal capital. How did Joachim come to see moving to Conakry as a way to overcome, or at least reshape, his current predicaments and improve his opportunities? Why would he want to dwell in the city that housed the very government whose policies he felt were destroying his community and spoiling the futures of its rising youth? Conversations with student peers from Conakry spending vacation periods in Samoe confirmed Joachim’s instincts that he ought to be studying in the capital. Showing these visitors his own class notes and eliciting their commentary, he saw the superior pace and scope of their learning, despite the official existence of a comprehensive “national” curriculum. Gathering all the information he could from his peripheral vantage, Joachim began to grasp three pivotal, interconnected advantages to attending lycée in Conakry. First, the best-qualified teachers worked there. National leaders living in the city would tolerate nothing less than the best available teachers for their own children, and the best-trained teachers, like almost all intellectuals, preferred to live in the country’s most modern urban setting. Second, the cultural-revolutionary promotion of teaching in national languages had far less impact in Conakry classrooms than those in the forest. Thus the level of French taught and learned in the capital was superior. Third, mobilizations of youth for theater participation and production were relatively weak in Conakry, particularly compared to provincial forest settings. Students there were able to devote far more time and energy to their intellectual growth and academic progress. As he pursued his critical evaluation of the uneven dynamics of education within the country, Joachim increased his awareness of the gaps between official pedagogical discourse and the concrete actions undertaken by party elites. At the same time as these authorities were promulgating national language instruction, intensified agricultural production, and militant theater for youths in the interior, they subtly upheld the functioning of a comparatively classical, elite, metropolitan model of education for their own wards in the capital, thus assuring them a host of advantages over the “heroic” masses. Joachim had an uncle in Conakry, the husband of his father’s sister, who

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worked in the Ministry of Telecommunications. During a 1973 visit to Samoe he agreed to serve as Joachim’s tuteur, having himself been lodged by Joachim’s family at certain points in his youth. On an early morning in July 1974, during the vacation before tenth grade, Joachim packed his bags and went to N’Zérékoré to fi nd Conakry-bound transport, accompanied only by his father. Extreme secrecy was used out of fear that local administrators could, and probably would, block such a venture at first notice. Aged seventeen, Joachim left his father and undertook his first voyage out of the forest. The journey provided new, painful insights into the underdevelopment of the region and the country as a whole. I got my bag prepared on Sunday and my father took me to N’Zérékoré. We got a very big lorry we called gaz, a kind of lorry that people usually traveled by back then. The distance from N’Zérékoré to Macenta was 150 kilometers. We spent about seven days on the road to get to Macenta. It was rainy season. Imagine! You spend a whole day on twenty kilometers. You sleep on the road. You run around the bush to look for rocks that you can put in the mud so the truck can pass. You can stay on the road the whole day without ever seeing a car passing. The only transport you would see were very old trucks which you would never see today. They would roll twenty to thirty kilometers an hour, maximum, sending gasses all around. We spent a night in Macenta. Then we continued, two more days, to Conakry.62 When I arrived I was ill and very tired. It had taken us nine days to come from N’Zérékoré. No one ever made it in less than five.63

Joachim’s first impressions of Conakry failed to lift his spirits. When I came in 1974 the town stopped at the area we call Aéroport-Gbessia. The limits of today’s Conakry were surrounded by very large bush. Around the Medina market I asked people: “Where is Conakry?” They said: “You are in Conakry, in fact in the center of the city.” I couldn’t imagine it. My town was better than Conakry. Because in my town the priests built good houses, better than most of the houses in Conakry. When I came here I saw very rotten houses, with rocks on the roofs all around. The roofs were just old oil drums, sawed then straightened, and held in place by rocks. The walls of many of the houses were 1m.50 or 1m.20 high. When you want to get into these houses you have to bend, you almost crawl to get in. I couldn’t imagine seeing these things in the capital city. I told people it’s better to live in a hut; my village is better than Conakry. The people were offended. They told me: “We have a beach!” But there were no strong reasons in their argument. They say: “We have a beach,” but we lived better than they lived. I discussed this hotly with people at school. I told them: “I came down here because you speak French here, not because Conakry is good.” I didn’t expect to see things so mal-constructed like that. Fortunately my uncle’s lodgings were comfortable.64

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Joachim’s first responses to Conakry in 1974 bore strong resemblances to those of fellow forestier Alphonse during his first visit for the national teachers’ conference in 1962. Both young forestiers were struck by the city’s underdeveloped state, particularly local housing conditions. While neither saw the forest as “modern,” they affirmed the superiority of forest “rusticness” over the quasi-urban misery of the capital. Contemplating the true meaning of a city, Joachim added: “Driving cars and traffic in town—these things did not used to exist. What is a city? A city really has current [electricity], has running water, has facilities that make a city a city. There did not used to be a city in Guinea. There were only large villages and small villages.”65 Joachim’s purposes in coming to Conakry, however, differed deeply from Alphonse’s. There was no question of a quick return homeward, particularly when he discovered that his intuitions about academic life in Conakry were correct. He willingly endured many negative aspects of the Conakry environment just because schooling was comparatively good. There were many things that were better than my village; especially on the education side, which was my ambition. We usually had repetition [study] groups— five in a group, my friends and I. There was a Kissi, a Soussou, a Malinké, a Peulh, and I. Usually in the afternoon if we didn’t have to dance or play football we would go around from one house to another—one day to my house, the next day to my friend’s house, and so on. One of us prepared a lesson for the next day. You presented it to your friends, and you ask them questions like you were the teacher. This was one of the advantages of living in Conakry, because you have time to work on your notes and all. They also kept better teachers in Conakry than in the interior. If he was good they kept him here, because they knew that the authorities had their children here. There were no private schools, so they were obliged to keep the curriculum better here than in the interior. It was a more cosmopolitan place. People insisted correctly on the importance of French.66

Coming to Conakry overhauled Joachim’s academic life. He attended Lycée Château d’Eau in the center of town, one the country’s best-known schools built by the French in 1916. In sharp contrast to his collège days in Samoe, he benefited from an environment and resources ideal for accelerated academic progress—small class sizes, good teachers, sufficient study time, and likeminded, hardworking peers. He took pride in his intellectual gains. At certain points in the year, however, these ideal circumstances were disrupted by theater—during the two or three months preceding a given quinzaine—and more fleetingly, but also more painfully, by obligatory stadium performances known as mouvements d’ensemble. Given the urban outlook and multiethnic diversity of the lycée’s student body, it is not surprising that local administrators placed little emphasis on ballet or folklore. Ballet was gener-

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ally dominated by troupes from the interior exalted by revolutionary juries as the most convincing performers of African moral integrity and aesthetic authenticity.67 Dramatic plays, by contrast, were seen as the competition genre in which Conakry lycéens could shine and win awards because of their comfortable fluency in French and generally more extroverted, even bold, personalities. All of Joachim’s memories of theater participation in Conakry centered on plays. Because of his language skills and what many of his teachers and peers considered an Ivorian-sounding accent,68 Joachim acquired the leading role in the work that his lycée presented at the regional 1976 quinzaine: “Le meilleur citoyen de la Révolution” (“The Best Citizen of the Revolution”). Twenty-five years on, Joachim summarized the plot: There was one student who left his school and went to another country, then returned, with subversive ideas. There was another student who stayed in Guinea and fi nished his school and became a very good socialist and revolutionary. These counter-arguments were developed in the play. I was the one who unfortunately went outside. I was asked to perform someone who came back from Ivory Coast. I was asked to put my shirt in my trousers, and polish my shoes—act like someone who came from outside. He didn’t know or say any good things about Guinea. In the end I was caught by an agent and put into prison to lament my crimes, so that I could change my mind, and become a good “citizen.” At the end of the play I repented and people danced around me. I made a revolutionary speech. I memorized and narrated one of Sékou Touré’s speeches to show I was converted (laughter). Everybody clapped. We didn’t receive any prizes but we got a lot of applause.69

During the most intensive preparations, rehearsals could last from 3:00 pm to 10:00 pm, making homework almost impossible. But theater in Conakry never consumed Joachim’s time and energy as completely as it had in Samoe. Even during intensive rehearsal spells, morning school routines went on in a regular manner. Joachim was never physically or emotionally harmed by theatrical work in the capital. Though they swallowed less time, his memories of mouvements d’ensemble were more painful and bitter. The mouvements were performed by hundreds of local students at Conakry’s twenty-thousand-seat stadium “2 Octobre”70 during frequent official celebrations marking national holidays or the reception of major foreign dignitaries. Mouvement participants held up cards functioning as small pieces of a puzzle that together formed massive images of Sékou Touré, another past or present hero or guest, or some other image symbolizing national or international triumph. The frequency of such events and their ubiquitous coverage in the contemporary official press—with multiple photographs and extended

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transcriptions of speeches—testify to how crucial they were to Guinean leaders’ understanding and affirmation of their own power. James Scott has written eloquently of the political spirit and desires driving such “mass movements.” The image of coordination aspired to [is comprised of] thousands of bodies moving in constant unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. . . . The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex—and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and selfconfidence of the elites.71

Joachim would certainly concur with Scott’s mention of the “demeaning” aspects of the movements. It was the activities in the stadium that really bothered us at school. We used to create pictures at the stadium they called mouvements d’ensemble. They put people on the seats. You all have large books. There’s a small portion of a drawing on each page. There were about thirty pages. Each time you turn a page you’re contributing to the building of one big picture—for example the picture of Sékou Touré, or the picture of someone who is farming, or writing a slogan from the revolutionary language. But you don’t do it automatically; you do it by being directed. There is someone standing on the roof over the audience. They will never know there is someone there with three flags: yellow, green, and red. Red means you have to turn the page. Yellow meant you have to raise your book. When you raise it a bit no one sees your faces or your head. The books join together to give the image. At this time, there are some people down on the field performing dance and other movements, and other people parading around the track. Sékou Touré loved public appearances. The dignitaries sat in the shade. We sat on the other side in the sun. Sékou Touré gives his speech. His speech was usually about four hours long, even six hours.72 He would talk from 8 to 12, or 2 o’clock. He didn’t stop. You sit there from 7 am to 4 o’clock. Nobody cared that you had to eat. Nobody cared that you had to drink. You don’t leave your seat! And nobody comes around and says: “Take some water.” No. You’re there just like a machine, performing the act they want. Most of the time you go home for two days and you don’t go to work, you don’t go to school. You come back very exhausted and dehydrated. You perspired the whole day without drinking. At home you drank a little bit of water, but you don’t eat. You are not able to eat, because you’re tired, and even your brain is hot. You don’t even have the mind of eating. This is how it used to be.73

As repugnant as stadium days were for Joachim, his anger before and after such events was mitigated by several factors. Their duration was short com-

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pared to the training ordeals he had undergone in Samoe. Moreover, because he was performing exactly the same actions and undergoing the same sufferings as several hundred other youths, it was impossible for him to take his treatment during mouvements as a personal affront. Perhaps most important, the mouvements only lightly affected his academic pursuits, interrupting schoolwork only days at a time rather than weeks or months, as had been the case with theater in the interior. Joachim was soon to experience another far more demoralizing and consequential confl ict with revolutionary politics. By the time he had successfully passed his baccalaureate exams in 1977 at the age of twenty, Joachim had decided to study medicine at the university. He felt that his strong scores on the bac entitled him to pursue the academic major of his choice. Like many in his graduating cohort, he felt that medical studies would avail him of the optimal professional and social possibilities. The university administration, however, refused his application for the medical faculty, directing him instead toward either education or public administration. Neither of these appealed to Joachim. Either track of studies would simply plug him into a subaltern position within the poorly functioning state bureaucracy, offering minimal material or social advantage. Joachim thought it best to defer his entry into university and reapply for medical studies in 1978. He was rejected again. During his fruitless year of pleading with educational and other administrative bureaucrats for admission into his desired field, Joachim developed an acutely distressing view of ethnic politics and prejudices within the government. Piecing together available information on the ethnic identities of the students composing the major university faculties, Joachim discerned clear demographic patterns. He grew sure that it was his forestier identity that was excluding him from consideration as a potential doctor and, moreover, that there were deeply entrenched administrative structures operating to police the social-professional mobility of all forestier youth. Joachim had long been aware of the forest’s multiple marginalities and subordinate status in the nation-state. During his lycée years, however, he had lost some of his ethnic self-consciousness. He spoke French in his uncle’s house and knew only two Kpelle students at school, neither of whom had grown up in the forest or spoke much Kpelle. Though he made a special effort to attend N’Zérékoré performances at the national quinzaines hosted in Conakry, he rarely felt the need or desire to designate himself or anyone else as forestier. Though reluctant to praise Conakry in any direct terms, Joachim had come to consider it a comparatively cosmopolitan space and appreciate its multiethnic dynamism, exhibited most concretely in his own productive interactions with

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the diverse members of his lycée study group. His exclusion from medical studies destroyed these positive impressions of cultural pluralism. It pushed him to new ideas about the nature and causes of forestier subordination. He developed a theory that there existed within the national government a kind of “secret committee on forest affairs” composed of diversely situated officials, some of whom were co-opted forestiers. The committee monitored forestier activities throughout the country in order to prevent any disruptions of the regime’s exploitation of forest communities and resources. Though he lacked precise ideas on the historical origin of the committee, Joachim firmly believed that it had survived the revolution and continued to function in the newly dawned twenty-first century. Over the course of 1978 Joachim realized he would never become a doctor in Guinea. An initial traumatic encounter with the nature of revolutionary power during 1972 quinzaine preparations had turned him away from the forest and toward Conakry. In 1978 another traumatic confrontation with a different facet of revolutionary power drove him out of the capital and back to the forest. But once there he did not linger for long. Unable to pursue the career he envisioned, he saw no reason to stay in Guinea at all. Following some of the same paths as tens of thousands of Guineans before him,74 Joachim tracked southward from Samoe toward the border village of Dyéké, and into Liberia, in early 1979. He worked there in various forms of commerce until 1985. At that point, a year after Sékou Touré’s death and deeply hungry for news from home, he was convinced by correspondence with Guinean friends that affairs within the country were really going to change. Equipped with fluency in English, he returned to Conakry to enroll in the École Normale Pédagogique newly built on the city’s outskirts. There, he acquired certification to teach English to lycéens. He was soon doing exactly this back in N’Zérékoré, working and living just a half-hour motorcycle ride from his birthplace. Only eight years earlier Joachim had firmly rejected the option of a teaching career. Why the change? He said that the enforced humility and poverty of the revolutionary years had deprived most of his countrymen of their capacity or faith to invest meaningfully in their future: “They were made to worry only about eating and dancing.” With Sékou Touré and his party gone, parents would once more worry constructively over their children’s future, making sure they attended and performed well at school. Guinea would henceforth be a much better place to teach.

Conclusion Forestier autobiographical narratives reveal how deeply revolutionary pedagogical reforms affected both the routine experiences and individual struggles

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of contemporary students and teachers from independence through the fall of the Touré regime in 1984. But they also reveal the limited scope of many state-envisioned transformations. The limits emerge most clearly in Joachim’s narrative when the seventeen year-old forestier, arriving in the capital for the first time to begin tenth grade, tells local people: “I came down here because you speak French here, not because Conakry is good.” Joachim’s framing of French as the definitive symbol and modality of a “classical” education he ought to be getting in the forest but could only obtain in the capital city expressed a staunchly counterrevolutionary stance. Joachim stressed the superior value of metropolitan languages and learning over the African-socialist pedagogies vaunted by the revolutionary regime. Perhaps more critical, he highlighted the irrefutable inequalities permeating a national educational system that was properly educating the country’s most urban youths while yoking their rural peers to semi-ignorance and futile, draining displays of agrarian cooperation and cultural authenticity via “production” and militant theater. While such openly combative assertions were certainly rare at the time, Joachim’s sentiments were widely shared throughout the country, perhaps most passionately by contemporary teachers. The revolutionary regime effectively transformed many concretely observable physical practices marking youths’ time in and around school; it never, however, transformed either oppositional elite or popular notions of the fundamental modes of teaching and learning that should be occurring at local schools. The ridicule and circumvention that greeted and continued around the post-1968 promulgations of national language instruction eloquently attested to the state’s failure to accomplish any genuine revolution in popular ideologies of education. It would be convenient for millions of Guinean adults still denouncing revolutionary ideologies and policies, alongside more visible international critics of Touré’s regime, to conclude that revolutionary ideas and institutions never really penetrated most Guineans’ hearts or outlooks on the world. But the narratives examined here demonstrate the poverty of such comforting fictions. Each narrator would rather concur with the spirit of Lila Abu-Lughod’s critique of “the romance of resistance” when she memorably states that “we respect everyday resistance not just by arguing for the dignity and heroism of resistors but by letting their practices teach us about the complex inter-workings of historically changing structures of power.”75 Acts of willful forgetting do nothing to enrich understandings of Guinea’s complicated postcolonial history. It is only by “combing through”76 the many ways that revolutionary interventions affected forestier youths’ emotions, thoughts, and actions, that one grasps the sophistication of their life stories and, at the same time, the myriad faces, forms, and forces of contemporary state power. When I completed recording these narratives in 2001, each of the men

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lived in N’Zérékoré and worked in education. Having reached sixty, Alphonse had been forced to retire from a decade-long posting at the main offices of the Regional Inspection of Education. Still amply energetic, he had become director of one of N’Zérékoré’s many new private primary schools.77 The small institution he was running had been created through funds transmitted by a local Kpelle woman who had immigrated to the United States. Benoit continued working at the Inspection offices that Alphonse had left. Cécé worked at the regional Centre d’Animation Pédagogique—a teachers’ training project funded by the French government. Joachim had recently been named director of a Swiss-sponsored “youth village” on the outskirts of town designed to shelter and school Guinean and Liberian orphans.78 Of the four men, all but Benoit’s current positions reflected the substantial impact of pro-Western, postrevolutionary ideologies of “openness”79 on contemporary life in a relatively urban forest setting. Each of the men lived comfortably by local standards. Three owned motorcycles, and Benoit owned a car—possessions very difficult to come by in the Touré years. Alphonse was the least wealthy and Joachim the wealthiest, most socially visible, and respected. I was surprised one day to hear Cécé applauding Joachim’s intellect when he himself, unlike Joachim, had a university degree. When I questioned him on the point he responded simply, “Joachim has traveled.” He proceeded to explain that his friend’s 1979–85 adventures in Liberia had opened his eyes and mind to ways of thinking and acting that were simply beyond the imagination of the Guinean peers he left behind, whatever their formal educational attainments might be. According to Cécé and many others I spoke with, the greatest power of revolutionary politics was that it forced Guineans to constantly worry over minor, immediate issues such as how to evade onerous production assignments or the chances for a local theatrical effort to succeed. Such anxieties prevented those involved from critically confronting broader, major issues absolutely central to collective progress, like the need for improved hygiene, nourishment, hospitals, roads, electricity, and, of course, more schools—the very “things” of development.80 The revolution effectively ensnared youths’ minds and bodies in a welter of easily enforceable local engagements, thus all but eliminating the time and space essential for measured critical or comparative thinking. Returning to Joachim’s earlier analogy, it was as difficult for a young revolutionary-era forestier to imaginatively project himself beyond his immediate existential trials as it would be for a hypothetical lost traveler to imagine himself beyond a dense unfamiliar forest with no visible limits. Cécé’s tribute to the enlightening character of Joachim’s immigration is a tribute to the strength of revolutionary pedagogies to shape lives and minds at home. But it

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is also a critique of the revolutionary regime’s self-designation as an engine of demystification, chiefly in the forest. With the possible exception of Alphonse, each of the narrators argued that it was the actions of the revolutionary state, not preexisting forestier traditions, that fostered “mystification” in the postcolonial forest. For them, the revolutionary era itself was a time marked by intensified opacity, uncertainty, subjugation, and ignorance—all phenomena the state claimed to be eradicating. Genuine demystification could not be achieved by embracing the spirit and actions of Sékou Touré’s party; on the contrary such critical transcendence could be best pursued by getting out of the country altogether. For all their criticism of Guinean national politics (before and after Touré), insatiable interest in the outside world, and hunger for international travel, none of the narrators felt that Guineans, as individual persons, were in any way inferior to citizens dwelling in neighboring states where socialist-revolutionary politics had never dominated, or to local youths coming of age in the current conjuncture of postrevolutionary “liberalism.” The struggles and sufferings that post-independence cohorts had endured under the former regime had forged degrees of dignity and moral integrity absent in both neighboring states, particularly Liberia, and in their own children’s generation. To understand the meanings and pride forestiers culled from their revolutionary travails, one must turn to a deeper investigation of local histories of militant theater.

7 Forestier Stories of Militant Theater: Discovering the Motives and Moralities of a Revolutionary State The ruling class strives to impart a supraclass, eternal character to the ideological sign to extinguish or drive inward the struggle between social value judgments which occurs in it, to make the sign unaccentual. In actual fact, each living ideological sign has two faces, like Janus. Any current curse word can become a word of praise, any current truth must inevitably sound to many people as the greatest lie. This inner dialectic quality of the sign comes out fully in the open only in times of social crisis or revolutionary change. —V. N. Voloshinov 1

Like many twentieth-century counterparts, Guinea’s revolutionary regime struggled to assign defi nitive positive or negative meanings to the people, places, institutions, and broader social themes that were inescapable elements of the nation’s history and contemporary social dynamics.2 But such efforts to manage social semantics were often doomed to failure. Some social symbols crucial to defining the contours and character of the Guinean nation could not be neatly slotted into positive or negative categories. One such intrinsically slippery, ambiguous symbol that was both integral and awkward for nationalist discourse was “the forest.” As the realm where fetishists and fetishism flourished, the forest often carried negative connotations in official ideology. But the forest was an indelible part of the national whole, and, as will become

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clear in this chapter, a place where breathtakingly authentic forms of African cultural performance were seen to thrive. It was thus impossible, drawing on Voloshinov’s terminology, to make the meaning of the forest “eternal” or “unaccentual.” Even within the generally rigid boundaries and binary oppositions of official revolutionary discourse, the forest was “Janus-faced.” The revolutionary regime failed in its totalitarian aspirations to fi x the meaning of historical events, authoritarian initiatives, and broader social dynamics. Like far more powerful previous and subsequent regimes, it lacked the capacity to dominate the living vibrancy of individual and collective language, sentiment, and interpretation unfolding at and beyond the edges of its claims to power.3 Many ideas and transformations praised and held up as truths by PDG leaders were reviled or refuted by diverse elements of the Guinean masses. One of the engines of cultural transformation dearest to these leaders was militant theater. Revolutionary discourse tirelessly exalted theater’s capacity to infuse contemporary youth with properly nationalist sentiments and goals. Authorities lauded the power of young people’s skillful performances to inspire the entire population, in all its diversity, to new heights of productive militant citizenship. Few Guineans young or old ever saw the meanings or values of theater in the celebratory terms embraced by the state. In the forest region, a rift between official enthusiasm and local sentiments emerged very quickly. Barely two years after militant theater competition had been launched as a major political and pedagogical initiative, a Horoya news correspondent noted a forestier father’s complaints about the onset of youthful “theatrical activity” in his locality. In the midst of a public meeting honoring one of Sékou Touré’s early presidential visits to the southeastern region, Horoya reported: “One heard the father of a family vigorously denounce theatrical activity. Invited to more fully share his thoughts, he responded: ‘When the girls leave home in the evening to go to practices, they don’t come back until the next morning; they go to bed and can’t help with any work.’ ”4 The father’s anguish was just one instance of an extremely broad range of unofficial responses to theater’s impact on young people’s morality and intergenerational relations in the postcolonial forest. By considering an array of official and unofficial voices, this chapter explores the remarkable potency and diversity of consequences attributed to theater’s multiple encroachments upon forestier individuals and communities. The confl icting values attributed to theater in such wide-ranging commentaries reflects the poignant ambivalence that many forestiers still feel toward the most powerful of all nationalists, Sékou Touré, and the unique nation-state he dreamed of creating.

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Discovering the Forest through Theater: Stories of the Rise of Regional Ballet In May 1962, soon after the official end of the demystification campaign, Sékou Touré delivered a speech to the Ministry of Youth, Arts, and Culture commenting on the special challenges facing young forestiers currently involved in militant theater competition. The president said that he had seen some excellent plays coming out of the forest. These works were commendable for their revealing depictions and critical assaults on various forms of fetishism, the central problem facing the progress of forest communities. In seeking to educate local audiences about the illusory nature of fetishist beliefs and the very real damages caused by this custom-enshrouded pathology, the young participants were pursuing a proper artistic and political path. They were, in regional terms, ideal militants. Touré was, however, also quick to stress the limitations of the young forestiers’ theatrical endeavors. While they were acting correctly in targeting immediate local obstacles to revolutionary change, the particular nature of the obstacles they attacked prevented their work from possessing a “national reach.”5 Since fetishism was a problem that menaced the forest far more than the country’s other regions, plays combating it could not hope to be considered for awards at national quinzaines in Conakry. At the same time that Touré was stigmatizing forestier playwrights and actors, stressing the essential provincialism of their efforts, ballets produced in the forest began to dominate in national competition. In the seven national quinzaines held in Conakry from 1962 to 1973, the forest was the only region never to stage a prizewinning play. During this same interval, forest ballet troupes won top honors six times, with Guekédou winning in 1962 and 1963; Macenta in 1964, 1967, and 1968; and the two regions sharing the award in 1973. Horoya coverage of quinzaines during these years evokes some sense of the spell forest ballets cast over Conakry spectators. “Filial Love” is the theme of the Guekédou ballet. An original ballet with a dance of masks. New steps, color, enthusiasm, and humor. A good ballet worthy of the great [forest] federation . . . with masterfully done background tableaux. Yomou stayed loyal to its soil. With its gracious amazons the ballet corps dances the steps of the forest. Beautiful legs and chests. The suppleness of the dancers and the smoothness of the choreography lacked nothing in precision or beauty. 6

Why, at the same time as Touré was gently scorning regional plays, did forest ballet soar to such heights of praise? The question becomes even more intriguing when one considers the precise timing of the ascent. The rise of forest

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ballets to national prominence corresponded almost precisely with the official end of the demystification campaign.7 Moreover, the region’s celebrated ballets typically depicted elements of local Poro/Sande initiation rituals that had been violently attacked during the campaign. The region’s initial first prize, won by Guekédou in 1962, came for a work titled The forêt sacrée in celebration. Macenta’s first top award in 1964 came for The Initiates. All the photographs and captions depicting forestier stage performances in Guinée Festival, an official account of the first nine national quinzaines, stress the works’ direct relations to formal and moral elements of forêt sacrée initiation ceremonies (see figures 7.1 and 7.2). Unlike contemporary plays, whose strengths and weaknesses he dissected at length,8 Sékou Touré spoke minimally on the topic of ballet. Other official voices, however, help us understand that it was more than “beauty” that drove revolutionary juries toward their keen appreciation of forest dance. A section on “Arts and Youth” in Guinea’s contribution to a UNESCO series on national cultural policies helps us grasp the distinctive political attractions forest ballet held for revolutionary elites. Outlining a kind of narrative of postcolonial cultural progress, the text states: Young people form the group that is most readily disposed and suited to artistic activities. They have the soundest psychological make-up and are the best interpreters of the artistic programme of the socialist cultural revolution. The artists of the JRDA have become people’s artists. The artificial walls that made art the preserve of a group of specialists called griots 9 have been broken down, the myth of caste superiority has been extinguished, racial barriers have been overturned, and the complex of the intellectual has been eradicated. Now the people themselves create culture, and through it achieve self-realization. The sacred forests have delivered up their secrets, the spirits and witch-doctors have gone to the ground, the devil no longer has any place in society. Art has become a weapon in the hands of young people and throughout Guinea has brought enlightenment, awakened the consciousness of the people, laid the foundations for tomorrow’s world and established a new value system.10

In this pitched narrative, the forest, and particularly its youth, figures as a dramatic end point and ultimate staging ground for revolutionary progress. Young forestiers’ artistic enactments of their communities’ newly “demystified” status mark the climax of a series of successful revolutionary struggles with formerly entrenched anti-national forces. Militant assaults on the artistic privileging of griots in Malinké communities, caste discriminations within Malinké and other groups, interethnic strife, and arrogant intellectualism had all spurred pivotal victories in the party-state’s transformation of national society. But no such “culture war” had been as crucial and revelatory of the state’s

FIGU R ES I A N D 2 .

Images of forestier ballet from the 1977 arts brochure Guinée Festival

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transformative desires and capacities as the “grounding” of forest fetishism and fetishists by local young artists. Forestier youth ballet was the most important communicative weapon in both the demystification and enchanting delivery of forest “secrets” to national audiences. Forestiers coming of age at the time of regional ballet’s climb to national fame developed their own critical interpretations of the causes and stakes of the craze over forest dance productions. Benoit Gorovogui, introduced earlier, stressed the radical novelty of forest rhythm and dance aesthetics for most Guinean onlookers witnessing them for the first time. Even he, born and raised in Macenta, was deeply moved by the specific qualities of the performances he saw at local post-independence competitions. I attended several quinzaines in Macenta. There were good acts; the town was very lively. Among the theater disciplines, I especially liked to see ballet. The dance steps dazzled me. The great success of Macenta ballets arose from the specificity of the music, the rhythm, and the dance steps. At the national level, I’ve seen the nature of the rhythms and dance steps of Upper Guinea, Lower Guinea, and Peulh country. There are certainly parallels between them. But there is too much specificity when it comes to the rhythms and cadences of the forest and especially the forêt sacrée, and it is very unique to the region. I think it was this that caused people always to be amazed by its forms. For most of them it was the first discovery, so the people were ecstatic about all of it. It was something authentic, drawn immediately from the locale.11

Though Benoit never invoked the term directly, his depiction of contemporary audience response implied that many Guineans were thrilled by the exoticism of what they saw in forest dance, as if they were engaged in a form of highly pleasurable cultural tourism within their own country. The causes of the popularity of forest dance within Guinea thus bore uncanny resemblances to those that drove the initial successes of predominately Guinean troupes in Europe a decade earlier under the directorship of Fodéba Kéita.12 Both sets of audiences, one “metropolitan,” and one “peripheral,” reveled in their discoveries of Africa’s vivid treasures of cultural diversity and otherness. One of Benoit’s Macenta peers, Hawa Guilavogui, born in the Loma village of Koyama in 1956, advanced a more politically cynical explanation of the triumph of local ballet. On the political level theater was a winning proposition. Demystification and ballet were completely linked. On the stage the troupes simulated secret scarification rituals. . . . They did it all while dancing. Non-forestiers knew nothing of that, and among forestiers as well the women knew nothing, only the men. That was why Macenta always won prizes. Sékou Touré enjoyed these pieces a lot, because his force was to demystify everything. Because if he had left people with their cus-

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toms, their forêts sacrées, they could have eliminated him. They would have killed him through occult forces. Thus during his rule he prohibited all of that. It was necessary to gather up all the young boys and young girls and put them in theater because otherwise they were bound for forêts sacrées. He banned that completely. Theater was a way to show secrets everywhere. Women spectators saw tattooing and things they shouldn’t see. Old people didn’t go. Attendance wasn’t obligatory. One paid to enter, but the hall was always packed. People from Conakry and all the regions came to see. People—youths and adults, everyone, loved theater. Me too, I loved theater.13

Although differing considerably, Benoit’s and Hawa’s perspectives are not irreconcilable, nor do they subvert the official portrayal of the history of forest ballet published in the UNESCO report. All three imply that there was something both formally compelling and politically meaningful about forest ballet in the context of the revolution. The conflict between the viewpoints arises in their assessments of the nature of ballet’s significance for forestier individuals and communities. The official writer was eager to stress the emancipatory impact of militant artistic performance for local youths. But there is no hint of emancipation in the forestier accounts. Rather, there is an evocation of the novel burdens the success of regional dance created. For Benoit, ballet imposed a burden of easily discernible difference on local artists. Once the particular forms of local dance were “discovered,” forestier participants had constantly to fulfill audience expectations of regional “specificity” and otherness. Thus, to be an “authentic” forestier within the new nation-state, one had to enact a marked social distance from easily categorized cultural traditions rooted in Guinea’s other more interrelated, mutually comparable regions. From Benoit’s vantage, regional ballet did not help to integrate the forest within national society. Instead, it reinforced dominant perceptions and expectations of forest marginality and separateness. Hawa’s comments also address the theme of sociopolitical division but in a different and deeper manner. She shares Benoit’s interest in what Guinean outsiders gained from the discovery of forest dance, while laying far greater stress on the political nature and value of the pleasures it afforded to both general and elite audiences. Hawa’s viewpoints are especially important, however, for signaling the micro-political power of militant theater. She stressed theater’s capacities to invade specific localities and aggravate social cleavages within close-knit communities, provoking novel forms of tension and conflict within young and adult individuals. As we will see, even as she recalled the pleasures of spectatorship, Hawa was eager to expound upon theater’s unique capacity to degrade the moral standards and social conduct of many forestiers, with devastating effects for many individual and collective biographies.

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Discovering Revolutionary Immorality through Theater During an interview with Hawa in spring 2001, I asked her to speak broadly on the meanings and consequences of militant theater for forest communities. Her response lasted more than an hour, punctuated only by a few follow-up questions and requests for further details. As she gathered momentum, Hawa’s descriptions and explanations took the form of an increasingly textured and memorable record of the unofficial, undocumented, and often unpalatable career of militant theater in the forest and elsewhere. It referenced many types of experience and confl ict I had already noted fragmentarily through questionnaires and informal conversations, bringing them together as interconnected parts of a collective saga. I have excerpted some of the most poignant sequences of Hawa’s extensive exposé. They provide pathways toward understanding theater’s modes of invasion and division, and the particularly visceral resentments it produced. In the time of Sékou Touré, in general, women and young girls hated theater a lot. They hated it because just at the time they were coming from the harvest or from laboring the fields the JRDA 14 would come. It would conduct recruitment. The parent who refused would dance in the place of his daughter. Thus parents were obliged to give over their girls. Many fled for Liberia. For those who were enrolled in theater, there were truly tears. Parents cried. The individual in question cried. At the village level it was the chief of the JRDA who was responsible for theater, him and the militiamen. They were there to hit and take the girls by force. Sometimes they even tied them up, because the girls resisted. The militiamen were usually twenty, eighteen, up to twenty-five years old. The girls at recruitment were usually from twelve up to about sixteen or eighteen. Why this age? One supposed that a young girl who had not yet intimately known a man, the one who is thoroughly young, she is apt for dancing. She won’t tire out. Beauty also counted. When they came to recruit, it wasn’t just any girl one would take. One needed apt girls. For example, if you were fat you wouldn’t be taken. Beauty, size, shape, athleticism, good condition all mattered. If she had had a child, it was fi nished! One wouldn’t take her. One danced bare-chested because one sweated. The party responsables liked seeing the young girls a lot. They liked that. Why did I say that theater impacted a lot upon the youth of our villages? Because when they recruited girls, when they examined them, some responsables, even those from the JRDA, took them as their own women, slept with them. One hit women too. When for instance a girl refused to be the friend of a theater responsable, he would hit her during practices. When there was training, it was always her that he would hit. I knew a woman who said she lost one of her girlfriends due to a serious beating during rehearsals. She died. One struck her to death.

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Most JDRA members were illiterate. Students wanted to study. It was usually the illiterates that supervised theater. When one sent girls, each ( JRDA) wanted to sleep with them. One began training girls in the (local) village. But later, they were often convoked to other sections, regions, federations. A young village girl is all the sudden far from her parents. She doesn’t know anyone where they send her. One takes her from Sérédou to Macenta, or Koyama to Macenta. Who do they know out there? One sends her as far as Conakry. That ruined the life of many girls. Some fell pregnant; some even married responsables. But they would marry many young girls, and abandon them with time. It was grave. One feared the JRDA in the village. They were linked with the militiamen. The militiamen, they were youth who did not want to work; they engaged in politics instead. They liked that. The responsables gave the order to militiamen: “Go into such house, in such family. Take the girl. Bring her!” There was a girl who fled. She went to Liberia. They took her father and mother and put them in theater. They told them: “Since you made your daughter flee, you’re going to dance in her place.” When the daughter learned her father and mother had been taken into theater, she was obliged to return. Guerzés, Tomas,15 Malinkés served as responsables. To know the secrets of a village, to have the girls of a village, one needed a native of the village. One comes, one takes two or three village youth, one gives them money, everything. One says: “You are now chiefs here.” The youth, they know the secrets of the village. Even the girls who ran away, who went to hide in [outlying] hamlets in the countryside, these youth would go and take them because they knew the families there—[they knew] such family has this many girls, this many boys. Thus the party responsables made use of subjects within the villages. They became spies for the PDG.16

Three layers of vehement anti-state criticism emerge in Hawa’s account of the micro-politics of theater. At the most obvious material level, theater is resented for being counterproductive. It is no accident that Hawa introduces her recollection with a scene in which girls are returning from routine labor in outlying fields. For a period that could last up to several months, a significant portion of the productive effort that recruited girls normally devoted to farming and various household tasks was lost. Their energy was siphoned off by theater. Hawa gives voice to the sentiment, shared widely by contemporary forestier parents as well as schooled and unschooled youth, that theater participation was antithetical to purposeful work that individuals could and ought to be performing in classrooms, fields, or homes. The bulk of Hawa’s commentary is, however, concerned with more painful moral transgressions perpetrated in the name of theater. The tears she mentions are shed not over lost productivity but rather over the cruel nature of the actions legitimized, at least indirectly, by revolutionary infatuation with theater, particularly ballet. The second layer of Hawa’s condemnations focuses on theater’s profound transformation of rural girls’ lives. She sketches two typical scenarios for those girls unfortunate enough to be deemed “apt” by recruit-

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ers. At best, the selected girl withstood the abuses (and possible temptations) encountered during her training and returned to her family essentially unchanged by the experience. Such an un-dramatic outcome reflected the quality of the girl’s upbringing and integrity, and, by extension, the superior strength of local moral codes over the rashness and corrupt spirit of many party representatives from distant areas, as well as co-opted insiders. The other likely trajectory for the recruited girl entailed her transformation into a very different person than she was before recruitment. Undergoing harassment, she eventually succumbed to intimate relationships with JRDA youth or adult responsables, often resulting in unwanted pregnancies or ill-fated marriages. Tragically, it was their ideal attributes in the eyes of revolutionaries that channeled such girls toward lives led at greater and greater distances both from home and from the moral standards and expectations of their native forest communities. Their very talents, catapulting them to the highest levels of performance and competition, rendered them exceptionally vulnerable to the erotic designs of increasingly powerful men. As Hawa sympathetically laments of these girls’ plights, “Who do they know out there?” If rural girls are the victims in Hawa’s indictment, then it is male members of their own peer group who figure as the arch villains. The third and perhaps gravest dimension of Hawa’s criticism focuses on theater’s corruption of local boys and men representing the JRDA and popular militia. The despicable actions taken by these groups—each enabled and often encouraged by the requirements of militant theater—included the forceful disruption of agricultural routines; the abduction, beating, sexual harassment, and impregnation of teenage girls; and the further betrayal of co-villagers through the transmission of inside knowledge to external authorities bent on cracking any degree of village defiance of state authority. For Hawa, as for most forestiers, the conduct of JRDA and miliciens represented the worst of the revolution’s consequences for the social life and morality of local youth. Laziness, stupidity, cupidity, impetuousness, and false bravura—the traits commonly attributed to these youths—are diametrically opposed to the social conduct that ought to typify the young forestier. Traditional ideologies of social production in which Poro initiation regimens figured massively stressed the fundamental importance of humility before elders; diligence in individual and collective agricultural and other forms of work; patience and forbearance; sincerity among fellow initiates; and (perhaps above all else) the sacred obligation to defend inside knowledge from the encroachments of all non-initiates. Though seldom explicitly stated by forestiers, one can infer from the comments of Hawa and others that the demystification campaign factored deeply in creating the conditions for the blasphemous transgressions committed during the subsequent

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rise of militant theater. The acts of violation and betrayal committed by JRDA and militia youths against their peers and elders would have been unthinkable had customary initiation practices and their staunch sanctions not lost so much of their former power. Although girls suffered most during the epoch of militant theater, the misconduct of co-opted young men posed the greatest threat to forestier standards of behavior and morality. The unprecedented nature of their transgressions against co-villagers signaled a severe erosion of formerly upheld codes of “ethnic-republican citizenship.” Stephen N’Degwa has written eloquently on the complicated fate of such communally binding dictates in the broader African postcolonial dispensation: The liberal vision of citizenship holds that rights inhere in individuals, exist prior to community, and are guaranteed with minimum obligation to community. The civic-republican vision considers rights not as inherent but as acquired through civic practice that upholds obligations to community. In the communal realm, citizenship takes an active civic-republican form, while in the modern state it is defi ned in liberal terms deemed appropriate to (elusive) constitutional democracy. In the modern state, a republican virtue is an ideal sought but not yet achieved at the national level. . . . Within the postcolonial state, liberal citizenship qualifies one to participate in the inclusive national community, while in the ethnic community republican citizenship requires members to participate in the group’s preservation.17

Hawa’s and other forestiers’ post-independence anxieties at being surrounded by inimical moral forces and invaded by various state-backed actors deigning themselves “good nationalists” echo concerns voiced by many other subordinate subjects within and outside Africa and the postcolonial world more generally. In her study of “The Etatization of Time in Ceausescu’s Romania,” Katherine Verdery highlights the ways in which a range of socialist-totalitarian ideologies drained tangible and intangible resources essential to local enactments of traditional Romanian conceptions of proper sociality and hospitality. Under conditions of scarcity and strict state surveillance, the Romanians in Verdery’s study feared a complete withering of the customary cultural practices through which they struggled to sustain a sense of collective identity and difference from other social groups, particularly the cold, “inhospitable” Germans with whom they resided in many villages.18 Though the differentiating terms deployed differ from those used by Romanians, many if not most forestiers see their Malinké “compatriots” as foreigners to local standards of proper social and moral comportment. Compared to the Romanians’ plight, the forestier predicament was worsened by the fact that the pioneering leader of “their” nation was himself Malinké. Many

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forestiers’ comments to me clearly indicated that theater’s rise to prominence under the Touré regime spurred intensified reflections on the nature, extent, and fate of cultural differences between the two groups. Hawa told me one day that the very act of taking stage in any public arena to proclaim one’s own or another’s attributes—as customarily done by Malinké griots—was intrinsically opposed to forestier cultural norms. The Toma, the forestier in general, is disciplined. . . . He is submissive. The forestier doesn’t like to cry out in front of the world. Thus theater really bothered our parents a lot. It caused many to immigrate to Liberia. For the Toma man, if you stop what you’re doing, you take the microphone, you act the griot, you sing. He’s going to say that you’re not doing anything. If you have to go out and sing so that everyone sees you, one will guess that you can’t fi nd any other way to eat. On the other hand if you labor, you prepare your fields, you acquire your food, that’s normal. If you need to go sing so that someone gives you money, that’s grave. The Toma will tell you: “I will never beg like that.” It’s only very recently that one observes Tomas getting up on stage and beginning to sing. That’s a real miracle.19

One day when I was discussing the revolutionary regime’s international policy with Joachim Lamah,20 he surprised me by relating it all to the Malinké love of theater: “We gave a lot of help and rice to Angola, Mozambique, (Guinea) Bissau, even though people in the interior were starving. You see, Mandingos love to show off, acting like they have it even when they don’t have it. That’s why Sékou loved spectacles, loved theater.”21 Hawa and Joachim both sought to distance themselves from the (a)moral values of theatrical activity, even though they had at specific points in their youths drawn considerable pleasure from some theatrical events. Casting public performance as an emblematic expression of Malinké preferences for selfpromotion over earnest labor, and exaggerated dissimulation over sincerity, pragmatism, and responsibility, they sought to instantiate a boundary marking the nature and limits of theater’s and Malinkés’ encroachments on forestier moral and cultural integrity. Such symbolic boundaries, and the assurance that they afforded at least tacit ethnic solidarity in the face of revolutionary/ Malinké incursions, were, however, often impossible to sustain. In her testimony, Hawa strived to specify and isolate a distinct set of young forestiers— JRDA and miliciens—who were archly responsible for straining and weakening the psychosocial fabric of local communities. Other forestiers, however, shared stories of deeper forms of infiltration and subversion that all but shattered trust in anyone, regardless of their social standing or background. One such story was recounted by Pépé Onivogui. Originally from Macenta, Pépé’s family moved to N’Zérékoré when he was a child. His father was a low-ranking cadre who, like most of his peers, was frequently transferred to

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new posts. Pépé lived in N’Zérékoré town with his mother, attending school until he was fourteen. He decided to quit school during sixth grade (ca. 1975) out of frustration with classroom teaching in the Kpelle language rather than French, and because of frequent beatings meted out by school supervisors during obligatory afternoon production tasks.22 Pépé decided to return to Macenta to live with an uncle, but he was quickly recruited for ballet. Taken to a camp deep in the forest, his sufferings were great. He was whipped often and lost significant weight. All the youth in his troupe ate from the same pot and fought for handfuls of rice. Supervising miliciens enjoyed heightening mealtime drama by bringing food around piping hot so that their young charges would have to choose between scalding their hands and mouths or dancing and sleeping on an empty stomach. One day Pépé’s father appeared at the theater camp. Witnessing his son’s plight, he told him he would go into town and talk to the officials who could assure his release. A week later, without any news from his father, Pépé plotted his escape. His closest friend there, whose situation was even more pathetic, begged Pépé to take him along. Pépé told his confidant the name of the village where he was heading, and promised that he would persuade his father to help him as soon as possible. Pépé fled camp. However, he spent just one night at an uncle’s home in a nearby village before miliciens arrived. They whipped Pépé severely, telling him that his friend had revealed his plans. Pépé was detained in a hut for two days before his father arrived and managed to persuade his persecutors to let him stay in the village. Summing up his misadventure, Pépé learned two core lessons from his revolutionary experience: a child’s fate always ultimately depended on his father, and you could not trust anyone during the revolution, even someone you liked or pitied, even someone you thought incapable of harm. Alphonse Béavogui23 shared a very different story of revolutionary politics and broken trust among forestiers. Though not strictly a “story of theater,” Alphonse recounted it in the midst of a discussion of demystification and theater in the remote southeastern village of Gama. Told with great warmth, it revolved around a dramatic scene that erupted at the formal inauguration of Gama’s first collège. Gama is a region where religions have penetrated difficultly. There are people there who don’t even know what a priest is. Perhaps they know some Muslims. But it was a zone of fetishists, completely bound to that. Thus the [demystification] campaign was very, very slow around there. I remember one day there was a bad scene over there. There was a delegation from the federal bureau of N’Zérékoré that came to visit. There was a big recep-

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tion. And in the midst of the reception, one had a decorated mask appear. The mask came with drumming into the crowd. The federal secretary present said before everyone: “Stop! Take the mask of that man’s head!” Voum! They took it off. That is one of the greatest offenses one can commit in that area. The [unmasked] man ran off behind a house. He left Gama and went into CÔte d’Ivoire. Up until the time when the party ceded power, he never returned to Guinea. It was very difficult. The one who commanded that the mask be lifted was a forestier, a Kpelle from N’Zo. The crowd broke up. The scene disturbed the people of Gama a lot. They still talk about it.24

By 1969 Alphonse had already weathered many vicissitudes of revolutionary politics, and was still to experience many others. What made the Gama scene such a poignant, painful memory? At the most obvious level, one sees the disastrous failure of a community-orchestrated event meant to celebrate local educational progress and Gama’s increased integration into modern national development dynamics. The lead official’s iconoclastic act turned a moment of local pride and optimism abruptly into one triggering mixed feelings of shock, shame, and resentment. Rather than applauding the community’s earnest efforts at progress, this figure chose instead to affirm his own—and by extension the state’s—perceptions of Gama’s persisting cultural backwardness. Alphonse’s account brings out the Gama citizens’ mixed feelings of affront, discouragement, and humiliation. They had wished to warmly welcome a state representative who should, as a locally raised forestier, regardless of official demystification politics, still harbor an appreciation of local ritual and ceremonial folklore. These folkloric elements were at the time admired, when performed on stage, as living symbols of Guinean cultural authenticity. The official’s refusal to condone any sort of informal off-stage evocation of pre-demystification ritual practices was sobering, not only for what it revealed about communitystate relations but even more so for what it revealed about the changing nature of social relations within the forest. The most poignant moment in Alphonse’s rendering of the event comes when he says, “The one who commanded that the mask be lifted was a forestier, a Kpelle from N’Zo.” The inauguration taught Alphonse and others present not only to distrust “the state” but to question their personal knowledge and expectations regarding the behaviors of any of its representative figures at any moment. Like those of Hawa, Pépé, and many others, Alphonse’s story richly evoked the atmosphere of uncertainty, insecurity, and vulnerability that reigned in even seemingly “benign” interactions with state authorities during the revolutionary era. At the height of the demystification campaign, state officials attributed deeply troubling opacity and inscrutable motivations to forestier individuals

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and communities. These attributions justified the iconoclastic state-sanctioned “anti-fetishist” assaults on southeastern villages and towns in the immediate post-independence period. However, it was not long before the very character traits that state discourses projected onto the forest were being redirected by forestiers onto state officials, as well as a host of duplicitous insiders who forged local influence through political connections. A decade into independence, many forestiers saw diversely situated state officials as unpredictable implementers of wide-ranging pressures and punishments with aims that were often difficult to fathom, forgive, or forget. The rise and specific careers of militant theater in forest communities were central factors in the creation of such pervasive distrust, anxiety, and resentment. Not surprisingly, in the wake of Sékou Touré’s death in 1984 Poro initiation was revived in forest prefectures,25 probably as an attempt to reestablish traditional forms of ethnic solidarity after a quarter-century of perceived Malinké-revolutionary infiltrations, contamination, and contortions of local communities and selves.

Stories of Mobilization: Discovering the Nation through Theater Theater acts not only upon the intellect, but also upon sensation; by the physical presence of the actors, the materiality of the decors, the comportment of characters on stage, it delivers an expression more complete than that of the literary work. The margin of interpretation left to the spectator and, consequently, the possibilities of error in interpretation are infi nitely less for the spectator than for the reader or the listener. It is for this reason that we consider theater an important element of revolutionary mobilization, education, and formation. —Sékou Touré, 196226 Me too, I loved theater. —Hawa Guilavogui, 2001

Stories of anxiety and suffering form a considerable but by no means exclusive part of the entirety of theater-centered narratives recounted by forestiers who came of age during the revolution. After exposure to Hawa’s extended testimony and other more tightly focused accounts of theater-related transgressions, it may seem impossible to credit the words of either Sékou Touré or Hawa prefacing this section. The president’s words may seem sheer propaganda. Hawa’s statement, given her previously cited portrayals of theater’s influence, may seem impossibly contradictory. Yet, as the stories below demonstrate, militant theater experiences in Guinea often did possess the mobilizing capacities exalted by Sékou Touré, even in the marginalized forest. Despite growing opposition to the PDG after independence, theater frequently

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produced impassioned admiration for Guinea’s diverse cultural traditions and the fundamental legitimacy of the anticolonial nationalism championed by the party-state. Theater, as we will see, lived and continues to live a double life in the forestier political imagination. At the same time as it repelled most regional youths from any enthusiasm for the character or workings of the partystate, it also spurred (often among the very same youths) significant degrees of enchantment with the multicultural nation, its rightful sovereignty, and the dignity of the ideals that brought it into being. The three stories below demonstrate some of the ways that specific theatrical experiences functioned to intensify “non-militant” forest youths’ feelings of belonging and allegiance to the nation-state, while fostering enchantment with some of the fundamental tenets of revolutionary nationalism espoused by Touré and the PDG.

Hawa at the 1970 Quinzaine When she was thirteen, Hawa’s father, a native of the Macenta village of Koyama who had become an influential functionary in the Touré regime, was transferred from his current post in N’Zérékoré to the predominately Malinké prefecture of Kerouané to the north. He brought his family with him. Although her memories of theater date back to 1965, Hawa had her first experiences as a performer during her one year of study in Kerouané in 1969–70. Her early ballet efforts culminated with a journey to Conakry to dance at the national quinzaine of March 1970. Three decades later when we conducted interviews, Hawa was almost as eager to share reflections of her personal energetic involvement in theater as she was to denounce its generally negative impact on her forestier peers. Hawa began obligatory ballet and choir practices in the afternoons and early evenings after school in November 1969. She was physically mature for her age, prided herself on athleticism and endurance, and loved to dance. Her initial round of rehearsals did not disrupt her school routine. She felt none of the misgivings and resentment about her recruitment that her father did. When he approached Kerouané’s governor to have his daughter excused from rehearsals, he was accused of being reactionary and counterrevolutionary. As the highest-ranking official in the area, the governor took special care that all appropriately aged youth in Kerouané town and villages, including his own children, contributed to the prefecture’s quest for a prize at the next national quinzaine. There was no question of Hawa opting out of theater. She did, however, enjoy advantages over many of her peers in the dance troupe, particularly girls arriving from outlying rural communities. Hawa and her schoolmates continued living with their parents and following their educational pursuits

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without major disruptions. Their largely unschooled rural counterparts negotiated very different, unenviable conditions in the local military camp where practices were held. Before one recruited us from school, there were already village girls in the camp rehearsing. All of us rehearsed together every evening at the camp, but we [students] didn’t spend the night. We weren’t boarded there. We came sometime in the afternoon and stayed until six or eight in the evening then we left. Sometimes new girls were brought in from a village. They came crying.27

In January 1970 trainers made a first selection of dancers who would continue to compete for a chance to make the journey to the national quinzaine in Conakry. Practices became more intense and were moved from the camp to the main municipal civic exhibition space located in the building known as the Permanence du Parti. Hawa’s participation in choir ended, though she easily recalled some of the lyrics of the patriotic war song the choral troupe went on to perform at the quinzaine, singing the words first in Malinké and then translating them into French.28 Because she was a student and a gifted dancer, and her trainers knew of her father’s administrative rank, Hawa eluded the harshest acts of discipline commonly meted out during rehearsals. Our ballet recounted the history of Soundiata Kéita, who was paralyzed for over thirty years. He stood up to walk and make war. We performed a dance of Soundiata. We did a month of rehearsals at the Permanence. One taught us how to dance, how to jump. If you didn’t jump well, you were hit, or you had to kneel and stay motionless. I wasn’t hit because of my father. Each time you messed up a step, it was a lash from the whip. But I never made a mistake. You had to dance, dance, dance with the drumming. You had to jump. Our piece lasted forty-five minutes. That meant nothing to me. I was totally young. Even when trainers said “enough” I still felt the rhythm. There were others who had breakdowns. They were dehydrated. They weren’t fed well. All of that, it was hard.29

In early February preparations intensified again. Around sixty youths, including Hawa, were moved to the military camp for two weeks to concentrate solely on perfecting their routines. Hawa’s father was furious but powerless. Recalling it as “a soldier’s life,” Hawa was nonetheless unfazed by the ordeal, saying that it enhanced camaraderie within the troupe, particularly between town and village girls. She was deeply excited when a formal dress rehearsal of La danse de Soundiata, along with the play and choral work that were to represent Kerouané in Conakry, was finally performed before a general public and all the local officials in a major soirée artistique. After a fi nal cut of some performers and a cri-

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tique of weaknesses that might still be repaired, Kerouané’s exemplary young militant artists were ready to head off to the coastal capital. Hawa was among the youngest members of the Conakry-bound troupes, the bulk of whom ranged from sixteen to twenty-five. A total of fifty performers plus trainers embarked on two trucks, men on one, women on the other. The voyaging youths and the parents they were leaving behind experienced the departure very differently. “Just as we moved out of town,” Hawa remembered, “there was a big mango tree that fell down behind us. That shook up the entire town. The parents cried. They said we were going to meet some calamity. Me, I was very glad to be free with my friends, proud to be chosen among the best dancers.” Hawa saw her coastward journey as a reward for hard work, and a coveted opportunity for learning and pleasure. She enjoyed seeing and spending a night in the regional center of Kankan, another in the Foutah town of Mamou, and the roadside scenery all the way to Conakry. The capital was the high point of the adventure. Given the personal enthusiasm surrounding the moment, it is not surprising that Hawa’s experiences and impressions of the city differed drastically from those recounted by fellow forestiers Alphonse and Joachim.30 “Arriving in Conakry,” she told me, We were very, very happy. There were cinemas. We saw a lot of things that impressed us. We were curious. We looked around here and there. Life in Conakry was completely different. I myself got lost several times in town. When we discovered the ocean, I was blown away. It brought me a lot of pleasure to get out of Kerouané.31

Hawa’s observations on Conakry youth were more mixed, though tinged with envy. The youth of the city were much more evolved than us. They made fun of us, of our clothes. The clothing styles weren’t the same, or their fashion of wearing their hair. I started wearing a headscarf all the time. The Soussous were mean. They said: “Look at those village girls!” Sometimes we got angry; sometimes we just let it go. We started trying to wear our hair like Conakry youths.32

The Kerouané performers lodged together in the military camp Alpha Yaya Diallo in Matoto quarter, then considered the very edge of town. Artists of other regions said that the peripheral lodgings showed that Kerounané was a minor place with no chance to win. Hawa did not mind. She felt spoiled rather than slighted throughout her month in Conakry. Soon after her troupe’s arrival, local soldiers with ties to Kerouané organized the first of many soirées dansantes Hawa and her mates were to enjoy. They received steady visits and excellent food from other Kerounané natives wishing their representative youth

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the utmost success. During her limited free time, Hawa also connected with extended kin and friends of her parents originally from Macenta, now either living in Conakry or there for the quinzaine. They, too, provided moral and material support. She professed her continued allegiance to the region where she and her father were born, and eagerly asserted that Macenta’s ballets over the years were far superior to La danse de Soundiata or anything else Kerouané could put together. Rehearsals recommenced in the days before the opening of the quinzaine and intensified when the stellar performances of other troupes were seen. Even under heightened pressure, Hawa discovered new enchantments. She, like all the other participants, received a free entry pass to the Palais du Peuple33 where the various competitions unfolded. Like her trainers Hawa was both excited and humbled by the mass of spectators, the competitive atmosphere, and the degree and range of talents she saw at the Palais: Each night, even if we weren’t performing, we went by the Palais. We went in; we saw the people. The house was full. Can you imagine? Every time that someone performed, the others needed to go to see them. And then the general public [was there]. Thus the house was jam packed. Sékou was there in the fi rst rows. Each region’s34 ballet was different. When we saw another region, we would say we hadn’t accomplished anything; we were intimidated. When we got back to camp, our chiefs told us: “Tomorrow it’s going to be rehearsals, rehearsals! Did you see such and such a region? They did that. We too, we are going to improve and improve.”35

The night of Kerouané’s ballet act fi nally came toward the end of the competition. Instead of merging into the crowd and watching others, Hawa would be onstage herself. Finally we danced at the Palais. We had to stay in a waiting room. It was airconditioned. We weren’t used to that. We got cold. Then one called for Kerouané. It was our first time to dance at the Palais. The hall was jam packed. Sékou was there in the fi rst rows. When you dance you feel curious to see him, so you’re really motivated! I need to be the best! I could even gaze at his face for a while. When you hear applause it incites you. It helps you jump some more. You do your best, even better than you were used to doing during all the rehearsals. Onstage, there was a kind of overload of energy.36

Kerouané’s dancers soon learned their ranking among all the prefectures: twenty-fifth of twenty-six prefectures. Hawa shared her peers’ and trainers’ deep disappointment. It was more than the poor result that cast a shadow over her fi nal days in Conakry. She would miss various aspects of the charged social atmosphere in which she had circulated for a month.

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We stayed a month in Conakry in all. Leaving, we were a little sad. One had gotten used to the capital: the fi lms, the theater, the soirées dansantes, invitations here and there, new acquaintances, meetings with old friends from Macenta. All of that was very interesting. It was hard to get back on the road.

On their departure, the young performers reveled as their parents wept. On their return, it was almost just the opposite. Hawa and all her fellow performers were warmly received, their ranking in Conakry irrelevant. The parents were very happy to see their children. None had fallen ill. They said that during each festival year there were deaths—youths that died in road accidents or from malaria or from malnutrition. All of that worried the parents. But we came back in very good shape, not even tired. One treated young artists very well in the time of Sékou Touré. We had money. We ate whatever we wanted in Conakry.37

Hawa’s experiences of militant theater participation in 1969–70 reveal some of the ways that theater fostered what might be called “nationalizing” knowledges, actions, and effects among contemporary youth. Hawa’s experiences enriched her awareness of both salient sociological divisions within the country and the power of militant theater to elide those divisions in temporary but intensely memorable ways. Her particular position as the daughter of an elite functionary studying in a peripheral town generated some exceptionally useful vantages on the unifying capacities of theater—the very quality that made it appeal most to Sékou Touré. Three elements of Hawa’s narrative stand out in this regard. The first was her father’s failure to gain her release from theater participation, and the governor’s accusation that his request was nothing short of counterrevolutionary. Hawa’s integration, alongside her fellow students, into Kerouané’s push for quinzaine success demonstrated the thoroughness of the local administration’s commitment to the importance of militant theater as a domain of national culture and politics. Hawa’s recruitment and subsequent outpouring of considerable time, energy, and emotion into the local ballet project attested to the fairly equal responsibility of all youths involved to shoulder the responsibility of carrying the nation’s best cultural traditions forward into the future, enriching and elaborating upon them when needed as the revolution confronted new struggles, enemies, and opportunities. Also testifying to theater’s unifying capacities were Hawa’s transformed feelings toward, and relations with, the rural girls with whom she danced. The initial picture of these girls as more or less mysterious, pitiable arrivals from “elsewhere,” remarkable mainly for the seriousness of their hardships, subsides in the course of Hawa’s story. The boundaries separating these girls from

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one another diminished significantly during shared confinement in the military camp, living together “like soldiers.” Hawa draws no distinction between schooled and unschooled girls as she describes fi nal preparation and selection. This emerging indifference toward educational status—one of the cardinal virtues of the “ideal” revolutionary youth that Touré exalted —persists in Hawa’s account of the climactic month in Conakry. The various teasing over “style” that she endured from local Soussou youth furthered her humbling perception that she resembled the village girls who, like her, were seen as walking signs of “the rural” in the eyes of their Conakry peers. At a more abstract but critical level, Hawa’s experiences at and around quinzaine events spurred new perspectives and sentiments regarding the nature and extent of Guinean national unity. Hawa’s ability to imagine her homeland as a diversely constituted yet integrated whole was far greater after her month in Conakry than it had been at any previous point in her life, with important ramifications for her future political sensibilities. Social rounds among extended Kerouané and Macenta communities, and even more so her spellbinding observations of dozens of performances by youths from all over the country, enabled Hawa to clearly picture Guinea as a mosaic of particular heritages and communities, marked by significantly different artistic histories but all aspiring to aesthetic authenticity and excellence. The symbolic and material gains that could be derived from an exceptional performance—more significant for trainers and responsables than for performing youths38 —certainly improved the quality of individual works and enhanced the impressions and memories of the quinzaine for the tens of thousands of spectators able to squeeze into the focal Palais over the course of the two weeks. Although a highly circumscribed event in many senses, one should not dismiss the power of the Conakry quinzaines to draw subjects of all parts of the country into a kind of elaborate “web”39 of perceived solidarity and cohesion. Quinzaine experiences had one final, deeply important effect upon Hawa: they forged a new admiration, reverence, and perhaps even love for none other than the most potent embodiment of Guinean nationalism, Sékou Touré himself. His face was the focal point of the Palais audience that energized her, spurring her to transcend what she had previously considered her optimal dancing efforts. At the time of her return home, she had emotionally allied herself with Touré as a benevolent paternal figure—at least toward young artists—whose character and interests in contemporary youth and cultural performance had been misunderstood by the older people of Kerouané and other provincial zones. Hawa was far from the only Guinean youth to fall under the charms of the president for brief or enduring spells.

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Reciting “La Complainte de la femme africaine” An evening of militant theater—whether held in a simple village hangar, a prefectural Permanence, or the luxurious Palais in the capital—typically began with declamations of selected revolutionary poetry, memorized and pitched loudly to the crowd by local students. Though not an official competition genre, state authorities considered such récital a crucial element of militant theater. Récital is a theatrical and literary genre that has been developed in the artistic activities of school-going and university youth . . . Thanks to this genre, the works of the PDG, the militant poems of the Supreme Leader of the Revolution, the verse and prose works of Guinean writers participate in the popular education and entertaining animation of spectacles in the cities and countryside.40

Memories of récital emerged with striking frequency in interviews and questionnaires I circulated on revolutionary schooling and theater in the forest. Three broad factors explained this. First, several forestiers told me that they experienced récital as a transgression; although not equating it exactly with “acting like a griot,”41 they felt that their passion for public attention at such instances clashed with traditional forestier behavioral standards of youth. In the past, the notion of one or several youths dictating ideas and values to any group of adults at any place or time would have been met with either wrath or ridicule. Some forestiers I spoke to also appreciated récital’s role in helping them overcome their former timidity before strangers. They felt that traditional intergenerational strictures limited local youths’ possibilities to engage with or learn about the world beyond their father’s home. A similar interplay of reticence and enthusiasm is evident in forestier reflections on involvement in the scout-like mouvement pionnier, or Pioneer movement. Another related reason for recitation’s importance in forestiers’ memories of the revolution is that it was for many students the first time they had ever performed before a sizable crowd. As we saw in chapter 6, most students strove to minimize their involvement in theater because of the temporal and physical burdens it entailed. Recitation permitted a considerable number of students to draw some of the thrill of participating in a major artistic event without enduring—like ballet performers in their countless practices—the most taxing aspects of event preparation. Récital also allowed students to proudly exhibit the French language skills they were working hard to acquire at school before a general public. Their fleeting moment onstage was thus both exciting and selfaffirming. Finally, récital is remembered for its absurdity. Most of the first-person rec-

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ollections of recitation I heard ended in outbursts of satirical laughter. A typical scenario was for an individual to affirm that he had indeed recited, then voice a few verses of one of Touré’s poems more or less fluently, and adapt an increasingly ironic tone or posture before finally stopping to laugh. The comic character that the performer ascribed to the recitation actually mocked both the totalitarian didacticism of revolutionary ideology and the former self (and generational cohort) that had reiterated that ideology with pride—a pride, the laughter implied, that had to be disavowed as ridiculous in the postrevolutionary world. As with the revolutionary leader’s voluminous tomes, few Guineans recalled the specific title of the president’s poems, even those they memorized and recited in part or in whole in class or on stage. One poem, however, stands sharply apart from the rest of the work: Touré’s “La Complainte de la femme africaine,” originally composed and delivered to a 1964 “Pan-African Women’s Conference” in the southwestern town of Kindia.42 Though the range of themes expressed in “La Complainte” was fairly typical of Guinean revolutionary poetry as a whole, I have never heard anyone—even those most critical of Touré—mock any of its lines. That its fictive narrating voice belongs to a long-suffering, remarkably resilient woman is certainly crucial to the aura surrounding the work. Beyond its emotional content, the poem’s exceptional length—236 lines over 11 long stanzas—contributed significantly to its appeal to organizers and audiences at theatrical events. Its delivery was typically divided into speaking parts of around 20 lines. Each youthful conveyer of “the complaint” would enunciate his or her lines with the utmost dramatic clarity before yielding quickly to another who strove to sustain or intensify the increasingly emotional atmosphere in the hall. Two detailed personal accounts of reciting “La Complainte” help us understand its unique allure and impact on contemporary youth. The first comes from Cécé Loua, introduced in chapter 6. The second comes from Mariam Camara, daughter of an elite Malinké family, born in N’Zérékoré town in 1957. The differences and affinities in their stories reflect both the special place of Touré’s best-remembered poem in the Guinean political imagination, and the broader power of theater to engender an atmosphere of collective solidarity even when understandings of the meanings of its specific elements diverged. Cécé recited a segment of the poem at the 1973 N’Zérékoré regional quinzaine. He stressed the poignancy of the ambiance that its youthful, multi-vocal delivery created in the hall, as well as the specific ways that the poem worked on his emotions.

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Me, I recited “La Complainte de la femme africaine.” We subdivided the poem between us. It was a moment of great emotion. The poem speaks of the hard life of the African woman. When one declaimed that, one thought about the fact that women really do deal with a lot of difficult things in their lives. It’s as if one reenvisioned the life of one’s village, of one’s family, of one’s mother. When I recited it, for example, I thought about my mother. Thus it became for me . . . It’s no longer a collective issue. It’s an individual issue. I thought of her and then I said [following the poem]: “This woman, she must be rehabilitated, must be helped,” and so on. It provoked heavy feelings in the hall. I don’t know; it must have made some people cry.43

The most remarkable aspect of Cécé’s description is the way the poem enabled him to think passionately of his mother and the distinctness of her life— in lieu of the prototypical maternal figure delineated by Touré—without those individual thoughts detracting from the mounting collective force of the recitation moment. He made the poem personally moving by relating it to his mother. But he was in turn equally captivated by the general swell of emotion its delivery created in a crowd composed of individuals with distinct social backgrounds and family histories. Few of them knew anything of Cécé’s mother, nor he of theirs, and yet a sense of kindred feeling and historical connections emerged all the same. Cécé’s story testifies to Touré’s uncanny capacity to deploy communicative genres and images that forged emotional bonds between individual psyches and the more abstract spirit of the nation.44 Mariam Camara recited lines from “La Complainte” at N’Zérékoré’s 1969 quinzaine. Her recollections of the poem’s symbolic power—setting the biography of “la femme” in its precise historical context and deploying direct citations from beginning and middle stanzas—were closer to the spirit of the original text than Cécé’s. Like Cécé, Mariam’s attachment to the poem was driven largely by pity and a certain degree of anguish. The object of her emotions was, however, a more pressing sense of African women’s powerlessness and tragic loss under colonial rule. Her emphasis on the profound immorality of the colonial agents portrayed in the work makes her reading more ideally revolutionary and militant than Cécé’s. It is at the same time a more feminist reading. I admired “La Complainte de la femme africaine” a lot. I didn’t live in that time, but I read the poem, and I recited it too. The woman drew a comparison between her current life, meaning her revolutionary life, and the life of colonial times. When the colonialists came they would enter among families. One of them sees a pretty girl over there. He can take her by force. The father of the family cannot oppose him, or the mother. That is why it says somewhere in the poem: “My body aches / It is needled by pain / It is needled by expectation.” That’s to tell you

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that the woman who brought this child into the world, who suffered to raise the child . . . Now she must give up without gaining anything from this child. This child is gone by force in another’s hands, leaving her nothing to do. We recited “La Complainte de la femme africaine.” That pleased the people. “Love your sister, man of Africa.” You can fi nd that in the tomes: “Like you / I want to live / In liberty and dignity.”45

Though Cécé and Mariam never recited “La Complainte” together on the stage, their recollections underscore the poem’s capacity to convince diverse young people and adults of the noble purpose of the anticolonial struggle waged by Touré and his party in the past and the present. In his successful creative evocation of the voice of a nobly suffering colonial-era African woman, Touré fashioned an ideal vehicle through which to convey the moral valor of his radical reformist political visions. Youths’ widespread public recitations of the work served Touré’s rhetorical and ideological aims perfectly, revivifying the poem’s cathartic force again and again. In the complex interethnic environment of forest towns like N’Zérékoré, where forestier and Malinké students recited before ethnically mixed audiences, the poem had yet another political value. It eroded, momentarily but memorably, forestiers’ perceptions of their otherness and marginality within a Malinké-governed nation-state. The catharsis it provoked in youths and adults fostered a sense of unanimity in all Guinean compatriots’ understandings of former colonial injustice.

Witnessing “Beautiful Was the Crocodile’s Skin” A fi nal story of theater’s capacity to generate forestier feelings of alliance with the anticolonial fervor of the revolutionary regime comes from Hawa Guilavogui. Having already recorded her synopsis of theater’s demoralizing impact on the forest, and her account of her youthful journey to the 1970 quinzaine, I conducted a final interview with Hawa in late May 2001. It was near the very end of my fieldwork. Hawa and I had already covered a lot of ground. I was having difficulty fi nding questions that inspired her memory or imagination. I asked her, as I had asked many others of her generation, to comment on the significance of the declaration of the “Socialist Cultural Revolution” of 1968. She responded flatly: “We were just going along with our lives. When one said ‘Production,’ it was production. ‘Go to school!’ And you go to school.” I then asked her, as I asked all interviewees, to comment on the meaning of authenticité during the revolution. Her thoughts on authenticity instantaneously animated our conversation, taking it in a wholly unanticipated direction and generating another poignant story of theater’s mobilizing capacities. This story centered on a play she had seen as a university student in the Upper Guinean capital of

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Kankan, titled “Belle était la peau du caïman” [“Beautiful Was the Crocodile’s Skin”]. All theater was based on authenticity—the things that happened in the past. Theater spoke of chieftaincy, of whites, of colonization. For example one put on a play in Kankan when I was a student at the IPK [Institut Polytechnique de Kankan]. One performed “Belle était la peau du caïman.” It treated colonization. A white commandant demanded a crocodile’s skin to send back to France. And what did he ask to be done? To lure the crocodile one must deliver its prey to the riverside. When one places the prey the crocodile will come out to take it. And what did the white man say? The white man said that to obtain the crocodile’s skin, one should send neither calf nor sheep, but only a négrillon, a black baby, that one will take from its mother, to offer it to the crocodile. And just when the crocodile comes out to take the child, one will kill it. They performed this theater. People cried in the hall. The child died. The crocodile ate it. Here was the setting. The women were dressed like village women. They wore their hair like that (gesture). They carried their children on their back. Some women pounded rice, others were working the fields, others cleaned rice. Then one heard “boum-boum, boum-boum.” One was beating a drum. The people knew that when one beat it, something was up. It was the village chief coming with his bodyguards. When they had all arrived all the women stopped their work. They sat on the ground to look on. The chief said: “Listen! The white man says he wants a crocodile skin. But he is demanding a baby that will be offered to get the skin.” Ah! The women started to cry on the ground. Each one of them started praying. Each one took hold of its child. If one wanted to flee, there were whites who came to guard the village so that no woman could leave. Later one took the baby of a woman who fell to the ground. She began to sing through her tears. That made the whole audience cry. It was interesting. When a delegation arrived from Conakry, one told them to perform it again, because it was so interesting.

When I asked her how she assessed the historical accuracy of the play, Hawa responded warmly. Those are real things! Those are realities that occurred in Mandingue [Malinké country]. The whites did a lot of things! The colon knew that the child was going to die. He did it intentionally. Otherwise he could have sent a sheep. He could have sent a calf. He said very clearly that only a black baby would work. This man, he considered the black an animal. Am I making myself understood?46

Hawa was an active member in one of Conakry’s Protestant churches, highly cosmopolitan, and as open to forging connections with Westerners as any Guinean I have known. She had never expressed any hostile views of France, Christianity, or any other representative force of Euro-American im-

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perial power in my presence. She was also acutely attuned to the rhetorical resourcefulness of the revolutionary regime and those who sought its favor, as well as the seemingly boundless readiness of various figures to exaggerate or erase historical facts. I was thus surprised and fascinated by the vehemence with which Hawa was defending the historiographic veracity of “Belle était la peau.” I suggested that the history of colonization in her native forest region must have been quite distinct from the Mandingue where the play was set. Feeling my statement granted “exemplary” status to the intensity of Malinké anticolonial sentiment, thus implicitly challenging the extent of colonial-era suffering or anticolonial sentiment in the forest, Hawa again responded warmly. She refuted my proposition, telling me: “With the whites, it was the same thing everywhere. Everywhere! They held a complete monopoly in Guinea.” Hawa did not want to grant Malinkés any moral distinction they might claim through artistic renderings of the depths of the wrongs their people had experienced. In another surprising remark reflecting her apprehension that her own and other forestiers’ conversion to Christianity somehow tarnished her native region’s anticolonial “credentials,” Hawa added: “The forestier didn’t start going to church willingly. And up until now there are many who don’t go.” Both Hawa’s moving description of “Belle était la peau” and passionate responses to follow-up questions attested once again to the capacity of militant theater experiences to align forestier youth with some of the core tenets of official revolutionary nationalism, particularly its staunch emphasis on the evils of colonialism. This aspect of theater’s power united the forest and Mandinge, and forestiers and Malinkés, as places and peoples linked by the scars of an oppressive history. This sense of affi nity was often potent, in spite of both groups’ steady insistence on the strange, more or less inimical and antithetical character of the “other” culture’s traditions. Grasping these fraught experiential and symbolic linkages furthers our understanding of significant traces of ambivalence in many forestiers’ judgments of the moral character of the most important Malinké of them all, Sékou Touré, despite their almost unanimous opposition to the bulk of the cultural and development policies he forced on his people.

Conclusion This book’s discussion of relations between the forest and the revolutionary state has repeatedly stressed their combative interaction. The analysis of the demystification campaign, the tracing of forestier students’ narratives across revolutionary educational spheres, and theater’s unwanted impingements upon

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forestier communities and individual biographies have all cast the policies of the postcolonial nation-state as alien to the normative values of forestier social groups and selves. This analytical framework implies that forestier political convictions in the revolutionary era emerged either through clear collaboration with, or stark opposition to, the revolutionary regime. The local young JRDA and militia recruiters described by Hawa figure as villainous “collaborationists,” whereas the great majority of “non-militant” forestiers are more or less praiseworthy examples of opposition. But much of the evidence in this chapter, like the previous ones, underscores the inadequacies of the either/or template for understanding the complex character of national citizenship and nationalist sentiment among forestiers who came of age during the revolution. The personal stories and broader social commentaries of the narrators signal the need for subtler approaches to forestiers’ understandings and assessments of the ways nationalist-revolutionary ideals and policies shaped their lives and those of other Guineans.

8 Conclusion: Nationalism and Memory after the Revolution April 3 [1984] in Guinea is not just another banal event; it is the end of a process of rotting, of erasure that lasted twenty-six years, while the people always wanted to be itself, free in its actions, responsible in the handling of its destinies. Why hadn’t the army taken power during all this time, one asks? For us who have undergone the curses of the defunct regime, the answer is selfevident. In fact, intimidation and harassment had become quotidian routines applied to everyone. One had to bend before them. . . . The [revolutionary] heritage is heavy and at the moment when we are once again becoming ourselves, there is no place for a single method of the old regime. —Horoya, 12 April 1984 Only a dialogic and participatory orientation takes another person’s discourse seriously, and is capable of approaching it both as a semantic position and as another point of view. Only through such an inner dialogic orientation can my discourse fi nd itself in intimate contact with someone else’s discourse, and yet at the same time not fuse with it, not swallow it up, not dissolve the other person’s power to mean. —Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics

On March 26, 1984, in his twenty-sixth year as president, Sékou Touré died abruptly. After a week of profound uncertainty in Conakry and throughout the country, a group of military officials led by Colonel Lansana Conté formed a Military Committee of National Recovery (Comité Militaire de Redressement

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National, or CMRN) that monopolized military force, abolished Touré’s Parti Démocratique de Guinée, and designated itself the governing body of the nation’s second republic. The CMRN quickly distanced itself from the former regime, espousing a liberal economy that championed private, domestic initiative and transnational investment by the capitalist world. The new regime called for a thoroughgoing conversion of the Guinean people’s mind-set, which was seen as battered, contorted, and contaminated by the revolutionary (dis) order. Development, portrayed in terms of economic rationality and performance, replaced revolution as the transcendent guide and goal of official national politics. At the time of this writing, twenty-four years after Touré’s demise, Lansana Conté still rules the country, apparently bent on matching his predecessor’s tenure. The years since Touré’s death have witnessed intense academic interest in Third World nationalisms. Two major analytical approaches have gathered force within this expanding interdisciplinary subfield. The first of these, exemplified foremost in the work of Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee, has been theoretically oriented and literary-historical in outlook and methodology.1 Marked by some critical disagreements, this work nonetheless coheres around its fascination with nationalism’s thorough restructurings of sociopolitical institutions, relationships, and imaginaries over vast geographical expanses. Within such studies, nationalism figures as a historically novel engine of change with poignant and irreversible effects. The second main approach, driven mainly by anthropological field research, has been more empirically oriented and ethnographic in practice and emphasis. In contrast to the rivaling theoretical approach, ethnographic texts have commonly emphasized the inability of nationalism to enfold peripheral localities within its hegemonic visions of ideal citizenship, modernity, and progress.2 The assimilative, integrative power of nationalism heralded (and often lamented) in the literary-historical work is replaced by portrayals of the uneven, unintended, or negligible character of nationalism’s concrete effects on specific geographical areas and social groups. The stress here is on the failure of nationalism to recast the present or past in terms that further its own legitimacy and influence. Not surprisingly, these contrasting portrayals of the effects of nationalism have been paralleled in divergent assessments of the powers of individual states to reconfigure popular experiences of politics, culture, and the movement of history. Emphasizing the state’s strategic deployment of traditional and emergent communication media to hegemonic ends, the literary-historical approach has explored the modern state’s unequaled capacity to reshape individual and collective sentiments of belonging and attachment to the nation.3

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Meanwhile, most ethnographic studies have documented events and processes underscoring the failure of states’ discursive efforts to secure the consent, trust, or enthusiasm of the people.4 Within African Studies, state-scripted nationalism has become largely an object of ridicule. Even the kind of literary-historical perspectives that have elsewhere been intrigued by nationalist imagery have framed Africa’s prototypical “postcolony” as the ultimate staging ground for the banality and impotency of nationalism. Striving for more measured accounts of the fate of African nationalism in the wake of Achille Mbembe’s and others’ incinerating critiques,5 a subset of ethnographers specializing in cultural performance and pedagogies have sought to develop more detailed explanations of the lack of popular enthusiasm for promotion of “national” culture across Africa. Based on research conducted in Senegal, Ghana, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe, recently published books by Francesca Castaldi, Cati Coe, Kelly Askew, and Thomas Turino have documented confl icting appraisals of local cultural traditions and nationalist cultural reforms as advanced by state officials, minor functionaries, young and old performers, and variously situated spectators and students.6 Given the pervasive environment of postcolonial disillusionment within which they were composed, it is not surprising that each book passes rather dismal verdicts on the motives that spurred official interest in national culture, and on the long-term effects of cultural policies that the states adopted. In doing so, the books confirm the conventional wisdom on the weakness of postcolonial regimes’ cultural initiatives, and the weak emotional bonds that most local citizens have to the nation. It is disappointing that projects so deeply interested in the privileged place that cultural ideals once had in anticolonialism and post-independence nation building have yielded so few new interpretive vantages that might destabilize and reconfigure, rather than reconsolidate, contemporary judgments on the faded life of African “cultural nationalism.”7 The projects—skeptical of attempted nationalist appropriations of traditional and innovative artistic practices emerging in diverse urban and rural localities—tend to celebrate evasions by local subjects of the forms of cultural regimentation sought by state power. Contributing to a longer ethnographic tradition celebrating subaltern subjects’ capacities to resist or elude the transformative designs of modernizing states,8 they have all but consigned African nationalisms to the dustbin of history. Cultural analysts working across the continent seem generally eager to discard the relevance of nationalist ideologies and policies to the real life of contemporary African communities and cultural dynamics. State-sponsored nationalisms have been subjected to multiple critical demystifications. Forestier stories examined in this book, however, suggest that dismissal of the workings

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of state power in the cultural realm results in an underestimation, rather than due appreciation, of the complexities of life histories, political sentiments, and cultural imaginings that have been unfolding since independence. The visceral feelings and complex ambivalence marking forestiers’ memories of Guinean revolutionary cultural politics call for a qualitatively different kind of critical engagement. These memories carry intense emotional and moral views that demand a broader interpretive framework to understand why the affective power of nationalism at the country’s margins ought to die, but instead pulses on, with varying force, in individuals’ consciousness. Discussions of what has gone right and wrong in Guinean national politics after the disintegration of the revolutionary state abound. Debates on internal affairs have focused on the increasingly corrupt ways and absolutist stances of Lansana Conté toward political rivals and the citizenry as a whole.9 Debates on external affairs have focused on the government’s turbulent relations with neighboring states, chiefly Liberia and Sierra Leone, in a millennial conjuncture wracked by civil wars, secret cross-border insurgencies, and voluminous flows of refugees into Guinea.10 Centered on contemporary political malfunction, these general lines of inquiry and argument have done little to enrich our knowledge of the bearings of Guinean culture and society over time. They have deflected attention away from any aspect of national life that does not promise to shed direct light either on Conté’s moral degeneration or the cross-border turbulence. The revolution, meanwhile, has been relegated to the margins of current Guinean studies. The very meaning of the revolution has basically dwindled and morphed into the lone figure of Sékou Touré. That nationalist icon’s career is occasionally retrieved, cloaked in tyrannical imagery, to help explain the historical roots of Lansana Conté’s demonstrated hunger for totalitarian power. The revolutionary era thus figures as a half-submerged vault of political toxins that still leak, in hidden as well as more visible ways, into the spirit of the postrevolutionary leader and the Guinean body politic more generally. At the moment of Touré’s death, local Guinean intellectuals worked remarkably quickly to confi ne rather than expand the scope of inquiry into a whole quarter-century of collective experience, reflection, and maneuvering. At the precise point that it seemed possible to take stock of the complex nature and range of subaltern resentments, ambivalences, and evasions that had developed throughout the country after independence, the largely Conakry-based intelligentsia, seeking favor with the new regime, generated normative scripts that rigidly dictated how the national past and present should be depicted and appraised. The first epigraph to this chapter, drawn from a feature article titled “I Vis-

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ited Boiro” published in the first local newspaper to appear after Touré’s death, exemplifies the content and tone of the nationalist historiography that emerged in the postrevolutionary era. (Dozens of other contemporary texts could have served the purpose equally well.) Citing the infamous Conakry prison camp11 as a microcosm of the depths of moral decay into which the revolutionary state and society had fallen, the piece stressed the externality of revolutionary authority vis-à-vis the “true” spirit of the Guinean people. Joyously, the falling of the despotic regime and the rise of a new political dispensation, guided by benevolent leaders, promised the resurgence of the best elements of this longabused collective spirit. Initially churned up by the rapid-fire events in the spring of 1984, this romantic narrative broadcasting a sudden reawakening and transformation of the Guinean people from dormancy to dynamism, from spiritual emptiness to spiritual abundance, quickly pervaded how the nation was portrayed by figures ranging from the head of state and his ministers to transnational economic operators and artists who had developed hatred toward Sékou Touré.12 No one contests that the demise of the revolution was a massively important historical event for Guineans at home and abroad, one that merited various degrees of what Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, addressing an analogous period in the Congo, has called “cathartic effervescence.”13 More jarring and disappointing are the specific types of sociopolitical meanings that have been favored over others in supposedly critical reflections on 1984 and the period that followed. The moment of Touré’s death has often been cast as much more than a chronological marker dividing one kind of dominant political regime from another; it has been sanctified as a kind of mass existential threshold separating one pervasive type of Guinean popular subjectivity—one model of Guinean personhood exhibiting highly characteristic habits, sensibilities, and shortcomings— from a subsequent more vital and developed one.14 Postrevolutionary texts preoccupied with transition characterized the prototypical revolutionary-era individual as a one-dimensional figure concerned almost wholly with material survival, a person lacking in any noteworthy capacities of imagination, reflection, or synthesis—still less any type of comparative, cosmopolitan, critical consciousness. The places where this emblematic figure resided were depicted as correspondingly dormant, utterly dependent upon novel external forces for any form of dynamism or meaningful change. Ever since the mid-1990s, with local and international opinion on the political merits and personal character of Lansana Conté declining steadily, initial enthusiasm over the prospects for a prosperous, progressive Guinean civil society has withered. Guinea has instead (re-)entered a long list of African countries seen to vividly exhibit the stultifying corruption, counterproductivity,

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public complicity, and “carnivalesque” delusions that Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe has famously categorized under the rubric of “the postcolony.”15 Seen through the cynical eyes of Mbembe, arguments over the nature and scope of changes in Guinean state and society after 1984 would surely appear spurious. Either chapter of national history would furnish him with abundant spectacles of banal, collective “zombification.”16 With Conté well into his third decade of increasingly inflexible and unpopular rule, prior faith in 1984 as a time of invigorating transformation seems naïve at best. Over the last decade, perspectives on Guinean postcolonial political experience as a whole seem to have been swallowed in the maw of “Afro-pessimism,” a term invoked by the Guinean-American scholar and fi lmmaker Manthia Diawara, guided by the Guinean novelist Williams Sassine’s scathing criticisms of national politics across the continent.17 Seen from the cynical perspectives of Mbembe or Sassine, it would seem that inquiry into Guinean social and cultural history has, in the fi rst decade of the twenty-first century, reached a dead end. From this nihilistic viewpoint, the only worthy task left in researching the national past is to adumbrate the actors and factors that have combined over time to betray popular imaginings of the nation as a possible engine for genuine collective emancipation. Such a project amounts to what Filip de Boeck, writing on Zaire and the “new” Congo, has chillingly called an “autopsy of crisis” for a country that “has died.”18 Thankfully, as Diawara’s work over the last decade and the richly complicated forestier narratives featured in this book remind us, there are still many other perspectives one can adopt toward Guinea’s career as a nationstate.19 The time is ripe for a measured critique of the two influential regimes of representation—one marked by transitional euphoria and exculpation, the other by post-transition pessimism—that have dominated appraisals of the revolution and, increasingly, postcolonial experience in general since 1984. Essential for revivifying modern Guinean historiography, such a critique is also politically crucial. The flaws of the “transitional” renderings of the revolution that flourished in the wake of Touré’s death are easily specified. In an act of surreptitious emulation, avid counterrevolutionary intellectuals appropriated the rigid, absolute, morally judgmental language that Touré had used to condemn (neo) colonialism, and then turned that language’s central oppositional themes and incinerating ire directly against the former leader himself. Once dead, Touré became the new target of the passionately accusative rhetorical style that he had so perfected across his presidency. Touré had portrayed Guinée française as a place and a time deeply foreign to “his” nation. He characterized the colony as a realm of oppression, manipulation, ignorance, and delusion that could only

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be overturned and defi nitively superseded through the people’s zealous espousal of the codes and conduct of revolutionary nationalism. When he died, newly unveiled oppositionists cast Guinea of the revolutionary years in the same deeply dehumanizing imagery that Touré had used to attack the French colony where he had come of age. The strategic redirection of the interpretive and expressive venom of official anticolonialism against the revolution itself appealed to contemporary intellectuals—ranging from major administrative heads and official writers to schoolteachers and minor functionaries—for a host of reasons. Primarily, such redirection allowed figures whose lives had become deeply entangled with the more or less brutal workings and malfunctions of revolutionary power to declare their opposition to the former tyranny in categorical terms readily understandable to everyone. It was an ideal discursive path for them to seek “abdicated responsibility”20 for the sheer duration, glaring counterproductivity, and compulsive invasiveness of the regime they had served. Such drastic, complete renunciations of revolutionary doctrine allowed these seemingly tainted figures to represent themselves as (trust)worthy competitors in new battles for power and wealth that were unleashed by anticipated massive changes in local politics and economics.21 My intention is not to blame various stakeholders in the post-1984 transitional drama for their castigation of Touré as author of Guinea’s woes. Another round of blanket accusations, launched from whatever quarter, is the last thing Guinea or Guinean studies needs. The far more important task is to draw attention to the hunger, even “rage,”22 for systematic reductions and rigid explanations that have characterized the politically dominant portrayals of the Guinean past for at least half a century. The consequences of such historiographic straightjacketing have been destructive on many levels. Their negative impact lingers on today. Raymond Williams helps us understand what is at stake when responsibilities for recording a society’s history are usurped by analysts who insist on uncovering, clarifying, and propounding the essential structural coherence and consistency of distinct chronological periods that have unfolded within it. Williams, one of the greatest interdisciplinary humanists of the twentieth century, lamented the multilayered seams of historical consciousness and knowledge that have been suppressed, squandered, or completely overlooked in places and times where “epochal,” rather than “authentic historical analysis,” reigned. Williams’s formulation of the differences between the two approaches elucidates the constrictive analytical impulses that have plagued most writing of “national” experience in Guinea. Of the means and ends of “epochal analysis,” Williams wrote:

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A cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and defi nitive lineaments and features is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then often happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is to connect with the future as well as with the past. In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelations between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specifi c and effective dominance.23

A key purpose of exploring the forestiers’ passage through revolutionary schooling, militant theater, and related subfields of cultural activity is to highlight the inadequacy of treating revolutionary time and space as an all-encompassing epoch whose “determinate dominant features” fully dictated collective thought and action. Both Touré and the counterrevolutionaries who sought the political spotlight after 1984 had good reasons to flatten and “linearize” fi rst colonial, then revolutionary, history.24 Such rhetorical moves allowed those seeking popular legitimacy or power to (re)present themselves, with varying degrees of credibility, as catalysts of a radical break with a repugnant past, and heroic authors of a future marked by unprecedented justice, integrity, and prosperity. Very few Guineans now have any need or time for such messianic story lines, at least those issuing from secular personalities. Perhaps they never did. Throughout my experiences in Conakry and the forest, I have been steadily struck by the chasm between the categorical rigidities of official political discourse and the subtlety and ambivalence with which most Guineans, young and old, express their own observations of past and present conditions. Forestier acquaintances, in particular, eschew epochal meta-narratives that strain to explain away or avoid life’s twists, turns, and opacities. They require no encouragement from post-modernist theory to stress that, when it comes to understanding local pasts or present, one must wrestle with “stories all the way down—stories of stories of stories.”25 Guineans are generally ready to endorse the anthropologist David William Cohen’s call for a “more spacious and challenging view of history,” a way of describing the past “in which it is recognized that there are multiple locations of historical knowledge.”26 The more pressing issues to address are why views of Guinea’s postcolonial history need to be expanded now, why academic researchers should set out to record multisited evocations of personal and communal confl icts, and why Guineans who have already endured so much should even be bothered with such unofficial historiographic undertakings. Is enriching the historical record the only benefit? Or is there more at stake, some debt to the future as well as the past?

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Answers to these questions emerge clearly when one considers recent Afropessimist depictions of the Guinean past, and the calamities that wracked Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s. During his interview with Diawara in 1996, Williams Sassine, Guinea’s most eloquent Afro-pessimist, offered a chilling portrayal of the human costs of the revolution: So far in Guinea, Sékou Touré’s revolution has created three types of mutants: the flatterers, the floaters, and the deflated. The flatterers say everything the president wants to hear—that’s why they become the ministers, general managers, and ambassadors in every regime. The floaters barely survive between governments. The deflated, on the other hand, constitute a race unto themselves. . . . A deflated person is someone beyond good and evil, beyond feeling the blues of unemployment. He has reached a point where he says to himself, “They don’t need me because I don’t know how to do anything. They don’t know me. They don’t see me.” African dictatorships are producing this kind of man every day. He knows that no matter what he does, he will not get anywhere. The statistics are against him: he will die young. He sits down and looks to see if people see him. He sees from the others’ gazes that he is transparent. He does not know how to do anything, and he does not want to do anything.27

Later Sassine proposes a single exit from the reigning, seemingly unbounded epoch of abject “deflation.” The only solution is violence. You must break everything. As they say, “You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Things will just continue if you don’t destroy them. They will transmit their power to their children. And on it will go. You cannot create anything new without breaking the old things. We need an apocalypse to clean everything.28

Disturbing in any context, Sassine’s picture of Guineans’ psychosocial ailments and the measures necessary for their cure becomes even darker in view of its similarity to the widely shared forms of resentment and anomie—particularly among youths—that have been documented as root causes and catalysts of Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s catastrophic civil wars.29 Before falling into such dire pessimism, however, one should examine the accuracy of Sassine’s grounding observations. Are the symptoms and diseases he specifies really present in Guinea to the depth and extent that he posits? Or are they merely projections of his exceptionally vivid and anguished imagination? In fact, there is little resemblance between Sassine’s “flatterers, floaters, and deflated” and the complex thinking, agility, purposefulness, pride, and yearnings of the forestier narrators in this book. The deflated man of Afropessimism, in particular, is, like the vaguely drawn collective subject of the “suffering masses” alternately championed by Guinean revolutionaries and

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counterrevolutionaries, a product of epochal abstraction, an imagined rather than an authentic “historical personality.”30 For almost fifty years, hosts of diversely trained national and foreign intellectuals have sought to tell the world what has been happening in postcolonial Guinea—usually extremely good or extremely bad news—without incorporating the viewpoints of any “common” Guineans whose voices, it was presumed, simply failed to carry any distinctive message. Those who “cover” Guinea as media workers, diplomats, artists, or academics have generally been far more concerned with stipulating politico-economic forces determining collective mentalities than they have been with exploring subordinate individuals’ and groups’ modes of forging meaning and value from the trials, vicissitudes, and pleasures of national belonging. Given the wide-ranging forms of suffering that Guineans have experienced during and after the revolution, it may seem fl ippant to advocate, drawing on Indian scholar Ranajit Guha, an alternative historiographic approach that casts postcolonial Guinean lives as tales of suspense, or “thrillers.”31 Such a move, however, is crucial to shift the study of national life away from despotic or benevolent forms of authoritarian power and toward the strategies Guinean subjects have employed in creating useful knowledge from past and present misadventures, enchantments, and worries. Guineans today are living through the early period of what looks like another ominous century. The least anyone who claims to be an ally of the country can do is to allow its people to speak of their lives in ways that are meaningful to them, and to listen to them with a respectful, inquisitive ear. Considerate attention is especially important when the experiences and appraisals conveyed by local voices diverge from broader pictures of change, continuity, or cataclysm drawn by “experts” and prophets who stake out prestigious positions above the fray where the “masses” dwell. The divergences remind us that Guinean postcolonial experience is not a landscape that can be easily mapped or “enframed.”32 It is more like an embattled forest with ambiguous boundaries, an expanse marked by alternating pockets of darkness, haze, oppressiveness, clarity, and beauty. Within this terrain, stories of dejection abound. Reflections on unresolved tensions seem to stretch indefi nitely. Stories of enchantment emerge when the listener least expects them, triggering the hope that they might last forever. Guinean revolutionaries liked to think of youths’ participation in militant theater as a weapon against both neocolonialism and all the material and moral forces that disrupted a youth’s commitment to proper nationalist modes of thought and conduct. Forestier stories of revolutionary experience might also be seen as a type of weaponry of far more humble character designed for very different purposes. The stories allow their tellers to reengage diverse fields of au-

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thoritarian power without fear, despite the many undesirable effects this power has had upon their own lives. Recalling widespread instances of vulnerability and uncertainty suffered in the past, the narratives ironically serve as a source of strength in the present. Recollections of past travails remind adult forestiers of their own resiliency and excitement amid myriad misadventures churned up by overzealous revolutionary measures. The memories provide their tellers with a sense of superior wisdom and toughness compared to contemporary Guinean youth, who never experienced comparably intense spells of collective struggle, malaise, or effervescence.33 The same memories generate feelings of decisive moral superiority over the refugees who had to flee Sierra Leone and Liberia throughout the 1990s, people representing countries that—at least from a Guinean adult’s perspective—never experienced nationalism or a nation-building vision in any deep sense, and thus never cultivated meaningful degrees of collective cohesion, belonging, or loyalty.34 Defensive weapons for combating the injuries and resentments spurred by revolutionary rule, the comparative moral laxity of present-day youth, and the violent social disorders plaguing neighboring countries, the stories can also be seen as weapons wielding faith and hope. They brandish a faith that one’s own unchosen youthful ordeals generated uniquely meaningful knowledge and capacities relevant to all challenges the ambiguous future may bring. They pack a hope that one day a cohort of forestiers will rise to higher levels of development and integrity, cautiously embracing a nation difficult to love, harder still to forget.

Notes

1. Introduction 1. Interview, 24 May 2001, N’Zérékoré. 2. This name is fictive like the names of other interviewees cited throughout the book. Many details of Alphonse’s life are presented in chapters 6 and 7. 3. A blanket term for the mainly non-Muslim minority ethnic groups commonly seen (in the popular imagination) as the indigenous peoples of forested southeastern Guinea. The complex roots and ramifications of the term are explored in detail in chapter 5. 4. For illuminating studies of Touré’s talents and aspirations as orator and literary artist, see Alpha Ousmane Barry, Pouvoir du discours & discours du pouvoir: l’art oratoire chez Sékou Touré de 1958 à 1984 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002); and Bernard Moualis, “Sékou Touré et l’écriture: réflexions sur un cas de scribomanie,” in Littérature Guinéenne (Saint Etienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1987). 5. The Guinean-American director David Achkar’s Allah Tantou, a film project that hauntingly evokes his own father’s detention and death in Boiro, is perhaps the most memorable study of the prison. He has commented thoughtfully on the motivations and formal qualities of his work in Patricia Aufderheide’s “Memory and History in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Interview with David Achkar,” Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 2: 107–113. The most influential book on Boiro is former detainee JeanPaul Atala’s Prison d’Afrique (Paris: Seuil, 1983). 6. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chavravorty Spivak (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77. 7. See Ivan Karp, “Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse,” in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 87.

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8. Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 51. 9. For a detailed study of peasants’ experiences of the revolution, see Michael McGovern, “Unmasking the State: Developing Modern Political Subjectivities in Twentieth-Century Guinea” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2004). 10. For a particularly illuminating examination of the nation as a historical field of entangled and confl icting fragments, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 11. For productive interrogations of invocations of the “popular” and “the people,” see Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981); and Tony Bennett, “Marxist Cultural Politics: In Search of the ‘Popular,’ ” Australian Journal of Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (1983): 2–27. 12. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 156. 13. Ibid., 190 14. Guinea’s “Révolution Culturelle Socialiste” was launched in 1968. Chapter 4 explores its motivations in some detail. 15. Originating in a pioneering essay by the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe, the notion of “the postcolony” is usually invoked to address or explain the violence, moral and material corruption, and counterproductivity of the workings of state power in late-twentieth-century Africa. “The notion ‘postcolony,’ ” writes Mbembe, “identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship, par excellence, involves. . . . The postcolony is characterised by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and a lack of proportion as well as by distinctive ways in which identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. . . . [T]he postcolony is a particularly revealing (and rather dramatic) stage on which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its corollary, discipline” (Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Africa 62, no. 1 [1992]: 3–37, 3; for a fuller elaboration, see Mbembe’s On the Postcolony [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001]). For a selection of critical explorations and interrogations of the “postcolony” idea and Mbembe’s broader intellectual project, see Richard Werbner, ed., Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power (London: Zed Books, 1998); Adebayo Williams, “The Postcolony as Trope: Searching for a Lost Continent in a Boundless World,” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 2 (2000): 179–193; Mikael Karlstrom, “On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony,” Africa 73, no. 1 (2003): 57–76; and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). “Afro-pessimism” expresses similar disillusionment with African postcolonial history. It is perhaps less preoccupied with pathologies of state power and state/ subject relations within the continent, and more interested in broader causes and con-

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sequences of Africa’s positions of dependency and abjection within global modernity. For a selection of debates on the roots, validity, and effects of Afro-pessimism, see David Rieff, “In Defense of Afro-pessimism,” World Policy Journal 15, no. 4 (1998/99): 10–22; Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford, England, and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1999); Manthia Diawara, In Search of Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, “The Cultural Dimensions of Development in Africa,” African Studies Review 45, no. 3 (2002): 1–16. 16. For an excellent overview of the range of vehement judgments and defenses, see the introduction to Mohamed Saliou Camara’s His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea under Sékou Touré (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005). 17. The term is inspired by the literary theory of Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, who claimed that the production of sociolinguistic polyphony was the ultimate achievement of the modern novelist. Inspired by this idea, I advance a plea for a more polyphonic approach to the writing of Guinean national history in the conclusion of this book. 18. For an illuminating study of the broad backdrop of socioeconomic tensions leading up to the rejection, as well as other specifics on the referendum, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005). 19. For a study of the intellectual history and influence of Présence, see Benetta Jules-Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers’ Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). 20. Tamsir Djibril Niane, “Chants Révolutionnaires Guinéens,” Présence Africaine 29 (1959): 89–103. 21. For a summary of the many real and imagined plots shaping the course of revolutionary politics, see Claude Rivière, Guinea: The Mobilization of a People, trans. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), chap. 4. 22. Camara Laye, Dramouss (Paris: Editions Plon, 1966). 23. For a rich investigation of the interplay of these two dominant images, see Ibrahima Baba Kaké, Sékou Touré: Le héros et le tyran (Paris: Groupe Jeune Afrique, 1987). 24. Alioum Fantouré, Le cercle des tropiques (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1972). For an examination of the novel’s place in the history of “Afro-pessimism,” see Pius Adesanmi, “Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Durée: Reflections on the Francophone African Novel,” Comparative Literature 56, no. 3 (2004): 227–242. 25. Lansiné Kaba, “The Cultural Revolution, Artistic Creativity, and Freedom of Expression in Guinea,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 2 (1976): 201–218. 26. Sidiki Kobélé Kéita, Ahmed Sékou Touré: L’Homme et son combat anti-colonial, 1922–1958 (Conakry: Editions SKK, 1998). 27. See, for example, Charles Sorry, Sékou Touré L’Ange Exterminateur: Un Passé à

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dépasser (Paris: Harmattan, 2000); Camara Kaba, Dans la Guinée de Sékou Touré Cela a bien eu lieu (Paris: Harmattan, 1998); Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo, Noviciat d’un Evêque: Captivité sous Sékou Touré (Paris: Fayard, 1987); Mouralis, “Sékou Touré et l’écriture”; Ardo Ousmane Ba, Camp Boiro, sinistre geôle de Sékou Touré (Paris: Harmattan, 1986); Diallo, Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, La Vérité du ministre: Dix ans dans les geôles de Sékou Touré (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1985); Jean-Paul Atala, Prison d’Afrique (Paris: Seuil, 1983). 28. See Miller, Theories of Africans, 51–62. 29. Frederick Cooper, “Confl ict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History,” American Historical Review 5 (1994): 1516–1545, 1544. 30. For particularly relevant comparative studies, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); Stacy Leigh Pigg, “Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, no. 3 ( July 1992): 491–513; and Karp, “Development and Personhood.” 31. The text most vividly and amply illustrating this desire to portray the revolutionary rural interior as a dead zone is C. Colle, ed., Guinéoscope: La Guinée à l’aube du IIIème millénaire (Paris: Sofra Press, 1997). The volume features a range of essays, speeches, and interviews from Touré’s death through the mid-nineties, all championing subsequent president Lansana Conté and his Parti de l’Unité et du Progrès (PUP) as veritable saviors of the nation. Several Guinean novels have advanced the same general message regarding the state of the revolutionary interior; see Fantouré, Le Cercle; Williams Sassine, Le Zéhéros n’est pas n’importe qui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1985); and Yacine Boubacar Diallo, Larmes de Joie (Conakry: Editions Ganndal, 2000). 32. For a synopsis of the content of these critiques and advancements of alternative accounts, see Phillip Corrigan, Harvey Ramsey, and Derek Sayer, For Mao (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1979); Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1997); and Rofel, Other Modernities, chaps. 3–6. 33. Rofel, Other Modernities, 142. 34. Texts exemplifying Guinean scar literature would include Kaba, Dans la Guinée; Tchidimbo, Noviciat d’un Evêque; Ba, Camp Boiro; and Atala, Prison d’Afrique. 35. For a critique of “epochal” generalization, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), chap. 8. For a critique of the “compulsion” to draw categorical conclusions about historical periods or political systems, see Albert Hirschman, “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Human Understanding,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 36. For a particularly illuminating discussion of the meanings and dynamics of these terms within and across interdisciplinary boundaries, see Timothy Mitch-

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ell, “Everyday Metaphors of Power,” Theory and Society 19 (1990): 545–577; and Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55. 37. Touré’s dream of exhibiting Guinea’s new unique youth was a pivotal factor in his political promulgation and personal love for “militant theater.” These dynamics are explored in chapters 4–7. See also Jay Straker, “Stories of ‘Militant Theatre’ in the Guinean Forest: ‘Demystifying’ the Motives and Moralities of a Revolutionary Nation-State,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2007): 207–233. 38. See Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 10. 39. These facts are examined more fully in chapter 7. 40. See, respectively, Rofel, Other Modernities, 137–139; and Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 107–109. 41. The term is inspired by Roger Lancaster’s compelling study of the sociopolitical sensibilities of Managua’s urban poor in the midst of the Sandinista revolution; see Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 42. For a synopsis of Guinean political conditions at the turn of the century, see Elimane Fall, “Instaurer un cercle vertueux,” Jeune Afrique: l’Etat de l’Afrique 2006, 258. 2. Envisioning Youth across the Border of Independence 1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2. 2. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 120 (emphasis added). 3. Ibid., 130. 4. Chatterjee’s studies of women’s roles in Indian nationalism echo many of Fanon’s observations on cultural, political, and military confl icts before and during the Franco-Algerian war. See, in particular, Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965). 5. That the Guinean leader is cited glowingly in The Wretched of the Earth makes this conclusion easy to draw. For a particularly staunch, damning assertion of the two figures’ mutual affi nities, see Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 2. For a well-articulated counterperspective, see Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98–100. 6. Cati Coe’s work on post-independence Ghana points to some analogous dilemmas confronting nationalist cultural politics there. This is especially interesting

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given the close ties between Kwame Nkrumah and Sékou Touré. See Coe, Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 7. Roland Pré, L’Avenir de la Guinée Française (Paris: Presses de Roger Lescaret, 1951). 8. Roland Pré, “Une Programme pour le développement social de la Guinée Française” (Conakry: Guinée Press, 1950), 10. All quotes from French-language titles are my translations. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. Janòs Riesz, “La Jeunesse en Afrique et l’avenir du continent africain dans la littérature coloniale de la langue française, 1919–1939,” in Les Jeunes en Afrique: Évolution et Rôle (XIXe–XXe siècles), ed. Hélène d’Almeida-Topor, Odile Georg, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, and Françoise Guitart (Paris: Harmattan, 1992). 11. Pré, “Une Programme,” 11. 12. Ibid. 13. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the History and Politics of Knowledge, ed. Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 14. Pré, “Une Programme,” 15. 15. Ibid., 17 (emphasis added). 16. Ibid. (emphasis added). 17. Ibid., 20. 18. Johannes Fabian, “Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjecture,” Africa 48, no. 4 (1978): 315–334, 327. 19. This set of feelings about the proper value that should be assigned to and gained from formal education, shared by advanced students, their parents, and many others throughout Guinean society yearning for more schooling, helped spark the 1961 “teachers’ strike” discussed below. This collective valorization of schooling as a mark of social distinction and practical guarantee of material success, accompanied by intense worries over certain exam preparations and results, had emerged in much of the country by the 1930s. Two Guinean literary works powerfully evoke this ensemble of contemporary pedagogical sentiments and experiences. See Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953); and Fodé Lamine Touré, Une enfance africaine (Conakry: Bibliothèque Franco-Guinéenne, 1997). 20. Pré, L’Avenir de la Guinée Française, 259. Taïnakry and Kaloum are designations for the peninsular outlet occupied, and eventually completely encompassed, by the growing city of Conakry. 21. For an excellent study of the roots and outcomes of urban visions akin to Pré’s, see James Scott, “The High Modernist City,” in idem, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 4. 22. Pré, “Une Programme,” 27.

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23. Ibid., 29. 24. See Claude Rivière, “Les investissements éducatifs en République de Guinée,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 5, no 4 (1965): 618–634. 25. Ibid. 26. The emergence and elaborations of militant theater in official policy and their impingements on the lives of youths and adults in the forest region are the focus of chapters 4 and 7 of this book. 27. Tibou Tounkara, “Prise de Conscience,” La Voix des Jeunes, 20 February 1956. 28. Sékou Touré, “Union Nécessaire, Finances Indispensables,” La Voix, 20 March 1956. 29. For a detailed view of the organizational frameworks and actions pursued by Touré and his party from World War II through independence, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005). 30. Tibou Tounkara and Mamady Kaba, “Rapport présenté par l’Unité d’Action des Jeunes de Guinée,” La Voix, 20 February 1956. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Claude Rivière, Guinea: The Mobilization of a People, trans. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 28–30. 35. Mamady Kaba, “La Jeunesse et le Paysannat,” La Voix, 20 March 1956. 36. Tibou Tounkara, “Des Maisons des Jeunes et de la Culture: A l’adresse de la Jeunesse de Conakry,” La Voix, 20 March 1956. “AOF” is the abbreviation for Afrique Occidentale Française, or French West Africa. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Studies of Touré’s antagonism toward African intellectuals possessing academic credentials and other forms of cultural capital superior to his own are abundant. See Lansiné Kaba, “The Cultural Revolution, Artistic Creativity, and Freedom of Expression in Guinea,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 2 (1976): 201–218; Bernard Mouralis, “Sékou Touré et l’écriture: réflexions sur un cas de scribomanie,” in Littérature Guinéenne (Saint Etienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1987); and Miller, Theories of Africans, chap. 2. 41. Mamady Kaba, “A Propos de la Maison des Jeunes de Boké,” La Voix, 20 March 1956. 42. Ibid. 43. Official voting records registered 1,132,324 affi rmative to 56,981 negative votes. See Rivière, Guinea, 82. 44. The image of youth as construction agents is explored in detail in Hillary

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Pilkington, Russia’s Youth and Its Culture: A Nation’s Constructors and Constructed (London: Routledge, 1994). 45. Nî is the Malinké term for soul. 46. Emile Cissé, Faraloko: Roman d’un petit village africain (Rennes: Imprimerie Commerciale, 1958), 34–36. 47. These men would eventually become presidents of Guinea, Senegal, CÔte d’Ivoire, and Mali, respectively. 48. For another memorable literary evocation of sentiments driving non-elite Africans toward ardent support of the RDA, see Ahmadou Kourouma, Monné, outrages et défi s (Paris: Seuil, 1998). 49. For a useful comparison of the “liberal” conception of citizenship with other “civic-republican” conceptions stressing individual obligations to the community, see Stephen Ndegwa, “Citizenship and Ethnicity: An Examination of Two Transition Moments in Kenyan Politics,” American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (1997): 599–616; and “Citizenship amid Economic and Political Change in Kenya,” Africa Today 45, nos. 3–4 (1998): 351–368. 50. Like the far more famous Guinean-Malinké literary figures Camara Laye and Fodéba Kéita, Cissé initially supported Touré’s political projects and rose to a certain degree of fame within Guinea as a celebrated playwright during the 1960s. His work “Et la nuit s’illumine” was featured and awarded at national and international levels. Like many other Guinean elites, Cissé was eventually convicted of conspiracy and died under detention in 1970 during the crackdown on intellectuals following Portuguese attacks on Guinea. See Rivière, Guinea, 136–137, and Miller, Theories of Africans, chap. 2. 51. Sékou Touré, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1962), 39. 52. Ibid., 122. 53. Ibid., 123. 54. Ibid., 123–124. 55. The idea of individual youth “mirroring” the growth of the postcolonial nation has been most deeply explored by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (New York: Knopf, 1981). Within African literature, see Emmanuel Dongala, Little Boys Come from the Stars, trans. Joel Réjouis and Val Vinokurov (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001). 56. This is a direct translation of one of Touré’s favorite phrases: “Prêt pour la révolution!” Touré and all Guineans obligingly declared themselves “ready” in precisely these terms in an array of communicative contexts in order to demonstrate their support of his regime. Like many other contemporary political slogans, the phrase was often uttered without any sincerity, or with a high degree of deliberate irony, particularly over time as enthusiasm for revolutionary nationalism steadily dwindled.

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57. Soussou, Malinké, and Guerzé are the most commonly spoken languages, respectively, of coastal, northeastern, and southeastern Guinea. 58. Touré, L’Action, 52. 59. Ibid., 51. The parallels between the perspectives of Touré and Guinea’s most famous author, Camara Laye, on the productive challenges and discoveries opened by elite youths’ rural “migration” are remarkable, even more so given that Touré and Laye became enemies. See Laye’s portraits of life in the Malinké village of Tindican in L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953), chaps. 3–5. For insight into Laye’s feelings toward Touré, see his allegorical novel Dramouss (Paris: Editions Plon, 1966). See also the biographies by Sonia Lee, Camara Laye (Boston: Twayne, 1984); and Adèle King, The Writings of Camara Laye (London: Harmattan, 1980). 60. Touré, L’Action, 45. 61. The equivalent of American junior high school. 62. Touré, L’Action, 51. 63. The extent of the gap separating the French-language skills of a Conakry collégien from his typical rural peer in the early years of independence (or after) should not be underestimated. The French anthropologist Claude Rivière noted many problems occurring during the government’s rush to fi nd qualified teachers for the new schools being built in rural zones. Many families in these settings, he reported, were deeply upset by how slowly their children were learning, complaining that it took their “seven-year-olds a whole year to learn to count to twenty” (“Les investissements éducatifs,” 630). 64. Touré repeatedly stressed the essential “correctness” of rural youths’ political behaviors, telling his audience that they would fi nd in the countryside “a life perfectly organized by the collective of youths” (L’Action, 50). 65. Ibid., 46 (emphasis added). 66. Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 67. Pheng Cheah, “Spectral Nationality: Living on [sur-vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization,” Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 3 (1999): 225– 252, 229. 68. Ibid. 69. “Horoya” means “liberty” in Soussou and Malinké, the major languages of coastal and northeastern (Upper) Guinea. For a brief description of the paper’s origins, see A. Amadou Bano Barry, Les Violences Collectives en Afrique: Le Cas Guinéen (Paris: Harmattan, 2000), 114. For an overview of multiple components of the revolutionary media apparatus, see Mohamed Saliou Camara, His Master’s Voice: Mass Communication and Single Party Politics in Guinea under Sékou Touré (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2005). 70. “Manifestations antinationales scolaires: Le fi lm des évènements,” Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 71. Rivière, Guinea, 128.

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72. The strike events have been revisited more recently in the Guinean-American scholar and documentary filmmaker Manthia Diawara’s Conakry Kas (New York: Third World Newsreel), 2003. It includes a conversation with Tamsir Djibril Niane, one of the teacher-intellectuals strongly accused of provoking the troubles. For alternative accounts, see Anne Blancart, “Entretien avec Jean-Paul Atala,” Politique Africaine, no. 7 (1982): 17–39; and VèVè A. Clark, “ ‘I Have Made Peace with My Island’: An Interview with Maryse Condé,” Callaloo 38, no. 1 (1989): 87–133. 73. “Manifestations antinationales scolaires,” Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 74. For an extended discussion of the pervasiveness of “extraversion” in African political ideas and practices, see Jean-François Bayart, “Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion,” African Affairs 99: 212–267. 75. Touré, L’Action, 83–84. 76. Ibid., 82. 77. This theme is taken up in detail in chapter 3. 78. “Manifestations antinationales scolaires,” Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 79. “Le film des évènements,” Horoya, 13 December 1961. 80. “Manifestations antinationales scolaires,” Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 81. Ibid. (emphasis added). 82. Alpha Yaya and Samory, named after precolonial resistance heroes, are camps in central Conakry. 83. Interview with Charlotte Loua, N’Zérékoré, 7 June 2001. This name is fictive like the names of other interviewees cited throughout the book. 84. Ibid.

3. Ideologies of Schooling, Teachers’ Authority, and Cultural Revolution 1. Sékou Touré, “L’Instituteur et L’Ecole guinéenne,” Revue de L’Education Nationale de la Jeunesse, des Arts, et de la Culture, no. 4 (1964): 3. 2. Chapter 6 pursues this type of inquiry, focusing on detailed depictions of the consequences of nationalist educational reforms for young people coming of age in the country’s southeastern forest region. 3. See Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953), chap. 6. 4. F. L. Touré was deeply involved in Guinean nationalist politics, serving as Minister of Education at one point in an extensive administrative career within the revolutionary regime. 5. Fodé Lamine Touré, Une enfance africaine (Conakry: Bibliothèque FrancoGuinéenne, 1997), 2:27 (emphasis added). 6. This uncle is, in fact, referred to as N’Touma Fodé. The “last” name is dropped here to avoid confusing him with his narrating nephew. 7. Touré, Une enfance africaine, 2:75. 8. Ibid. 9. N’Zérékoré is the name of the forest’s largest town and administrative center, and of the prefecture within which Dyéké was then located.

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10. F. L. Touré, Une enfance, 77 (emphasis added). 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 80. 13. Sékou Touré, L’Afrique en Marche, 4th ed. (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1967), 542. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 544–545. 16. Ibid., 545 (emphasis added). 17. Ibid., 551. 18. Ibid., 549. 19. Ibid., 552. 20. Ibid., 554. 21. Revue de l’Education Nationale de la Jeunesse, des Arts, et de la Culture, no. 5 (1964): 28. 22. Revue du Travailleur de l’Education Nationale, no. 5 (1964): 11. 23. Ibid., 19. 24. Ibid. (emphasis added). 25. Ibid. 26. Revue du Travailleur de l’Education Nationale, no. 6 (1965): 26. 27. Ibid. (emphasis added). 28. Quoted in Xavier Leunda, “La Réforme de l’enseignement et son incidence sur l’évolution rurale en Guinée,” Civilisations 22, no. 2 (1972): 232–262, 236 (emphasis added). 29. For an extended investigation of this dynamic, see Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 30. Leunda, “La Réforme,” 237. 31. L’Enseignement Révolutionnaire, no. 2 (October 1968): 1–2 (emphasis added). This journal replaced the Revue du Travaileur de l’Education Nationale. 32. For a useful discussion of intellectuals, artists, and politicians as social engineers in socialist settings across postcolonial Francophone Africa, see Dominic Thomas, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), chap. 1. 33. CER now had a new meaning, explained below. 34. L’Enseignement Révolutionnaire, no. 2 (October 1968): 5. 35. Ibid., 6. 36. The regime’s desire to make teaching in national languages more prominent in all localities was genuine. The scope of the intention may be seen in a perusal of a three-hundred-page dictionary, organized by the country’s “Academy of Languages,” that translated terms from the “exact sciences” into six local languages: Malinké, Soussou, Pular, Kpelle, Kissi, and Loma; see Académie des Langues, République Populaire Révolutionnaire de Guinée, Lexique Fondamental des Sciences Exactes (Paris: Hatier, 1980). Such examples of translation work were scattered across contemporary

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issues of Horoya-Hebdo with the aim of convincing the readership (largely teachers and students) of the aptitudes of local languages as vehicles to express any modern knowledge or experience. Some of the uneven effects of nationalist language policies after 1968 are examined in chapter 6. 37. For a memorable evocation of the troubling powers sometimes wielded by these exemplarily militant students on and around school grounds, see Boubacar Diallo’s short story “La Pièce du Théâtre,” in La Source Enchantée (Conakry: Editions Ganndal, 1993). 38. The dynamics guiding the revolutionary enchantment with youth theater are explored in chapter 4. Chapters 6 and 7 document some of the concrete effects of theater on individual biographies and broader sociopolitical relations in the forest region. 39. “Diecké et son CER: L’Example que nous voulons,” Horoya-Hebdo, no. 79 (18–24 July 1970): 9–10. 40. In late May 1984, just two months after Touré’s death and seven weeks into Guinea’s transition toward “liberal” government, a group of national and regional educational administrators convened in Conakry to hold the country’s fi rst postrevolutionary National Educational Conference. The preliminary speech in the published account of conference business was titled “General Critiques of the Educational System of the Defunct Regime.” In it an anonymous, impassioned postrevolutionary critic underscored aspects of revolutionary educational ideology and policy that teachers, parents, and youth throughout the country had resented most deeply. The critic began by attacking the imperious intentions of Sékou Touré himself: “For a quarter of a century the dictatorial regime wanted an entire people to share together the same ideas, the same feelings in every situation . . . and which ideas? Which feelings? Those of the chief.” In the midst of an extended scornful recollection of reforms undertaken in the name of cultural revolution after 1968, the critic saved his most venomous ire for the reform that most acutely exemplified the demotion of teachers’ social-professional status. “Who among us did not witness the spectacle of a student member [of an administrative council] irrupting into a classroom, interrupting the course, and, barely acknowledging the impotent professor, removing a student, a group of students, or even the whole class which had been suddenly designated for another activity? Where had the teacher’s authority gone?” See République de Guinée, “Actes de la Conférence de l’Education Nationale” (Conakry: Institut Pédagogique National, 1984), 26–27 (emphasis added). 41. Examining such discrepancies is the focus of chapter 6.

4. The Rise of Militant Theater 1. The other main genres were folklore and traditional and modern orchestra. The goal of a folklore troupe was to present precolonial modes of dress and dance in as purely authentic states as possible. The relation of ballet to precolonial traditions and contemporary notions of “authenticity” was, as we will see, much more complicated. Traditional orchestra competition focused on acoustic folk music, whereas

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modern orchestra competition featured electric African jazz. Many performers of each genre enjoyed tremendous popularity with officials and the general public. 2. Jean-Marie Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer; Un instrument efficace: le théâtre,” in Littérature Guinéenne (Saint Etienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1987), 89. 3. The most exemplary instance is the “Ballets-Africains” whose historical roots in Europe and Guinea are examined in this chapter. 4. For recent useful explorations of these dynamics across postcolonial Africa, see Francesca Castaldi, Choreographies of African Identities: Négritude, Dance, and the National Ballet of Senegal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Cati Coe, Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 5. For a compelling visual record of the cultural initiatives of the era, and further historical reflections, see Manthia Diawara’s Conakry Kas (New York: Third World Newsreel, 2003). 6. See République de Guinée, “Actes de la Conférence de l’Education Nationale” (Conakry: Institut Pédagogique National, 1984). Beyond the valuable information it offers on schooling dynamics and malfunction in the revolution’s fi nal years, “Actes” also provides an illuminating window onto forms of political maneuvering occurring at a time of massive transition in national leadership and socioeconomic direction. For a literary exploration of militant theater as political psychopathology, see Alioum Fantouré, Le Récit du Cirque . . . de la Vallée des Morts (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975). 7. Most Guineans who studied or taught during the revolution remember (often with laughter) the official exaltation of revolutionary pedagogy as “global and multiform,” incorporating and interweaving the distinct values of schooling, theater, the scout-like Pioneer movements, sports (foremost soccer), and even participation in popular militia. 8. Sékou Touré, L’Afrique en Marche, 4th ed. (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1967), 550 (emphasis added). 9. Dozens of schools around Guinea still bear Samory’s name. Samory died in a French prison in Gabon in 1900 after establishing a “Samorian” Malinké state encompassing much of eastern Guinea and neighboring territories. He remains a foremost icon of anticolonial resistance in French West Africa, discussed below. The classic study of his political and military ventures is Yves Person’s Samori, une révolution dyula (Dakar: Institut Français de l’Afrique Noire, 1970/75). For a more recent and concise biography, see Khalil Fofana, Samori Touré, l’empereur: récit historique (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998). 10. It is often claimed that Sékou Touré is the grandson of Samory. For a reconstruction of this possible lineage, see Sidiki Kobélé Kéita, Ahmed Sékou Touré: L’Homme et son combat anti-colonial, 1922–1958 (Conakry: Editions SKK, 1998), chap. 1. 11. The classic example of this revolutionary subgenre was Ousmen, an award-

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winning play presented by Mamou prefecture at the national quinzaine of 1964. Ousmen is one of the few specific play titles I have heard any Guinean mention, outside reference to works named after specific resistance heroes. Most plays were utterly forgettable to most Guineans because of their pedantic tone, predictable story lines, and general dullness. But Ousmen is remembered with vivid heartfelt laughter. J.-M. Touré provides the following synopsis: “A young man, named Ousmane, chooses exile when he perceives that Guinea intends to follow an original political course. His sojourn in Europe leads to his complete transformation. . . . Upon returning to his country, in a dress suit, he gives his acquaintances the impression that he is no longer the man they knew. His (Peulh) speech, littered with French words, his mentality, his world view attest sufficiently to this fact.” Fans of the work recalled the protagonist’s absurd ostentation and pretentiousness. The regime hoped such works “showed [Guinean] intellectuals the futility of leaving their country” and mimicking French elitism ( J.-M. Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 94). The comedic quality of Ousmen and probably many others of its genre is unquestionable. Whether the audience’s laughter generated through the staging of such scripts really served the political objectives sought by officials is far less certain. For a more personal account of participation in a satirical stage production, see Joachim Lamah’s recollections of his role in The Best Citizen of the Revolution in chapter 6. 12. A presentation and analysis of these visions is pursued in chapter 2. 13. UNESCO, Cultural Policy in Guinea (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), 79. 14. Sékou Touré, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1962), 74–75 (emphasis added). 15. The politics and aesthetics of demystification are studied below, and in chapters 5, 6, and 7. 16. Horoya-Hebdo, 7–13 March 1970, 40. 17. J.-M. Touré places “Guinean” in quotation marks to underscore the colonialist origins of stage theater and its distance from local collective cultural practices. In the same historical survey he refers to revolutionary theater as “Le théâtre dit de l’indépendance”—the so-called theater of independence—to signal the presence of countervailing unofficial assessments of the political motivations and effects of postcolonial theater; see “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 89. 18. For an overview of Ponty’s significance in relation to broader transformations of French West African colonial society and politics, see Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa, 1880–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chap. 3; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), chap. 7. 19. The term pontins is a common shorthand for youths attending the prestigious school. 20. Jean-Marie Touré, “Théâtre et Liberté en Afrique Noire de 1930–1985,” doctoral diss., University of Paris, 1997, 122. 21. J.-M. Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 88.

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22. See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion of the multiple meanings of the Maisons in the years leading up to independence. 23. J.-M. Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 88. 24. Ibid. 25. Sékou Touré was elected the fi rst director of the PDG in June 1951. By then the party had already gained a militant reputation and the attention of the colonial regime. See S. K. Kéita, Ahmed Sékou Touré, chap. 3. 26. See Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005), chap. 4. 27. An almost identical political dynamic is observed in Fodé Lamine Touré’s Une enfance africaine, Vol. 2 (Conakry: Bibliothèque Franco-Guinéenne, 1997). The figure of intervention in that case is a Guinean school director. For a discussion of that nonfictional vignette, see chapter 3 of this book. 28. The sofas were the select team of warriors who protected and fought for Samory. Like their leader, the sofas have been much celebrated in Guinean postcolonial official and popular culture. 29. J.-M. Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 87–88. 30. Touré, L’Action, 122 (emphasis added). 31. Touré purposely chooses four hypothetical youths so they can each represent a major portion of Guinea’s ethnographic map: Soussou, Peulh, Malinké, and forestier. The complicated character of the fi nal ethnic label is explored in later chapters. 32. Touré, L’Action, 17–18 (emphasis added). 33. Labé has been a major prefecture throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, and is also the name of the city serving as the administrative capital of Guinea’s central plateau region, the Fouta Djallon. Given the anonymous authorship of the great bulk of revolutionary plays, it was common practice simply to assign collective authorship to the prefecture where the performers in the work resided. 34. Addressing Guinean success in Algiers, J.-M. Touré notes a prizewinning play, Et la nuit s’illumine (And the Night Comes Alight), a concert entitled “Reflecting on the Past,” and two national ballets (“Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 95). The author of the play was Emile Cissé, who also wrote the novel Faraloko examined in chapter 2. 35. Claude Rivière recounts the November 22, 1970, attack, inspired by Conakry’s support for Amilcar Cabral in Bissau, in the following terms: “An invasion force disembarked in Conakry just at the time Guinea least expected it to come. It consisted of soldiers from Guinea-Bissau . . . along with Guineans . . . who wanted to overthrow the Touré regime—for their own private reasons, no doubt. They seized control of two military camps but failed in their attempt to attack the president’s palace and the radio station. . . . Among [the coup’s] consequences were the closing of Guinea to newspapermen.” See Rivière’s Guinea: Mobilization of a People, trans. Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 136. The attack had an intensely negative impact on Guinean political dynamics, providing the leadership with real or imagined reasons to crack down on any sign of oppositional or subversive

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sentiment, particularly among intellectuals. Already a prominent theme in many contemporary works, promoting revolutionary-nationalist vigilance became an increasingly crucial aim in theatrical endeavor and official critical-evaluative criteria after November 1970, as evidenced by the plot and praise for El Hadj Millions. 36. Horoya-Hebdo, 14–20 March 1970, 18. 37. Of the formation and practices of “popular militias” of the type depicted in El Hadj Millions, Rivière writes: “[These groups] served as training for civic mobilization, and were also a means of self-defense and a bulwark against political plotters. Organized in villages and city wards, the Militias aimed to nip potential political aberrations in the bud.” Initially directed at “reviving the rural economy and giving political training to young people of both sexes between the ages of twenty and thirty,” local militia groups took on more “paramilitary” and “repressive” roles after 1966, following the Ghanaian coup’s overthrow of Sékou Touré’s friend and ally, Kwame Nkrumah. Turning to the groups’ more menacing traits, Rivière continues: “Destructive in their zeal, militiamen would sometimes force their way into privately owned places and compel anyone they encountered to attend a meeting or a parade. They were immoderate and inopportune in their reactions, inexperienced, garrulous, and only recently indoctrinated. It is no wonder, therefore, that from time to time clashes occurred between these auxiliary police and the population or army” (Guinea, 126–127). Rivière’s latter portrayal correlates closely with accounts of militia behavior I heard from Guineans reflecting on the revolutionary years. That officially endorsed plays like El Hadj Millions cast militia members as exemplary citizens helps one grasp one of the many reasons why Guineans generally felt little enthusiasm for revolutionary dramatic works rich in propaganda but also poor in realistic evocations of quotidian perceptions and predicaments. 38. Horoya-Hebdo, 21–27 March 1970, 3–4. 39. Ibid., 4 (emphasis added). 40. For various reasons examined in part 2, ballet had an exceptionally important impact upon cultural activity and political sensibilities in the country’s forest prefectures. 41. Fanon specifically praises Kéita’s mixed-genre work L’Aube africain (African Dawn) as emblematic of the rich political potential of the African anticolonial cultural endeavor. He links the piece to the emerging nationalist cultural ideologies espoused by Sékou Touré. In a segment of his Theories of Africans devoted to what he calls “the prison-house of Guinea,” Miller, attacking Fanon and Touré, interprets the compelling structure and meanings of African Dawn as arising from local Malinké aesthetic traditions that predate revolutionary politics by centuries. These traditions, he argues, have nothing to do with the spirit or actions of Touré’s regime. See Fodéba Kéita, L’Aube Africaine (Paris: Pierre Seghers, 1965); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), chap. 4; and Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chap. 2. For a subsequent critical reading of Miller’s venomous critique of Fanon, see Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and

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Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 98–100. 42. Bingo, April 1957, 10. 43. The reference is to the colonial territory now known as the Republic of Mali. 44. Bingo, April 1957, 10 (emphasis added). 45. Ibid., 21 (emphasis added). 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., 20. 48. Ibid. 49. The 1957 Bingo focusing on Kéita does not mention these members’ ages. The photographs accompanying the issue and subsequent articles suggest, however, that some of the women were only in their early teens. The April 1964 Bingo contained a piece on a postcolonial incarnation of Ballets-Africains—“Orgie de rhythmes avec les Ballets Guinéens qui triomphent de toute Europe”—featuring an interview with its new “star,” fourteen-year-old Nakani Kouyaté. She told the staff reporter that she was recruited into the troupe at age twelve and that the governor of Guinea’s N’Zérékoré region had to pressure her father—“a religious chief”—into permitting her daughter to tour internationally. The key general point is that Guinean ballet directors, working in national and international venues, have often aggressively sought out girls and young women whose athletic talents and beauty could heighten the aesthetic impact of performances. This facet of the history of ballet, as detailed in chapter 7, has generated broad resentment within the country. 50. Bingo, April 1957, 20–21. 51. Kéita was serving the Touré government in this capacity when he was accused of plotting against it and was ultimately executed on May 27, 1969. Christopher Miller has portrayed Kéita, along with novelists Camara Laye and Ahmadou Kourouma, as a modern heroic exemplar of the enduring brilliance of Mandingue/Malinké civilization. See Miller, Theories of Africans, 59–62. Many Guineans feel that Kéita, in his last years, had become deeply instrumental in many of the abusive dynamics of PDG power, including increasingly brutal forms of social policing and interrogation. 52. The first official “Rapport” of the Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée (Organ of Action for the Youth of Guinea) to the territorial assembly strongly emphasized the importance of sports, particularly but not solely football, to the well-being of urban Guinean youths struggling through various new moral and material difficulties. Originally presented in November 1955 and published in the second issue of La Voix des Jeunes, the report deemed football essential to local youths’ physical, moral, intellectual, and technical development, as well as their self-cultivation as capable citizens in a modern(izing) world. It cited superior equipment in Dakar and Abidjan as a vivid sign of the extent that French power marginalized and neglected Guinean youths. See “Rapport presenté par ‘l’Unité d’Action des Jeunes de Guinée’ à la Session budgetaire de l’Assemblée Territoriale de la Guinée,” La Voix des Jeunes, 20 February 1956. For further discussion of the scope of issues addressed in the paper, see chapter 2 of this book.

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53. Laye’s initial return to Guinea from France in 1954, a year after his fi rst novel was published, was triumphant. Both Adèle King and Sonia Lee have written on Laye’s initial success and later work in Guinean national and international politics, followed by his fairly rapid disillusionment with the Touré regime and permanent exile to Senegal in 1966. See Adèle King, The Writings of Camara Laye (London: Harmattan, 1980); and Sonia Lee, Camara Laye (Boston: Twayne, 1984). Debates over the authenticity of Laye’s authorship of L’Enfant noir have been recently rekindled by King in her Rereading Camara Laye (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). 54. Outside special mention of the kora soloist and singer Kouyaté Koundia, who was to become a major celebrity in postcolonial Guinea, Bingo’s 1957 coverage of Ballets-Africains underscored the remarkable cohesion and mutually reinforcing qualities of each of the youthful members’ talents: “The artistic reputation of the other ballet members needs no further comment: dancers, danceuses, drummers, singers excel in their genre and form a group of such harmony that one would not know how to speak of them other than as a whole.” See Bingo, April 1957, 20. 55. J.-M. Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer,” 91. 56. For an overview of the revolutionary state’s militant cultural assaults on customary initiation and ritual practices in the forest, see Claude Rivière, Mutations sociales en Guinée (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1971), chap. 5. 57. No title is given for this work. 58. Horoya-Hebdo, 14–20 March 1970, 36–37. 59. In J.-M. Touré’s account, “the constitution of the JRDA announced the shattering of private theatrical groups and the complete taking in hand, by the PDG, of the organization of artistic and cultural affairs over the extent of the national territory . . . through the action of the JRDA.” See “Théâtre et Liberté,” 26. 60. Horoya-Hebdo, 21–27 March 1970, 33. 61. Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 62. Touré, L’Action, 76–77. 63. Chapter 7 addresses personal accounts and commentaries on these “backstage” sexual dynamics, which often involved brutal forms of harassment and unwanted pregnancies. For a study of similar predicaments facing Nigerian women performers in Yoruba popular theater, see Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi, “Either One or the Other: Images of Women in Nigerian Television,” in Karin Barber, ed., Readings in African Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 5. Construing and Constructing the Nation’s Margins 1. This scenario of transition from colonial to neocolonial domination was famously mapped out by Frantz Fanon in his essay “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), chap. 3. 2. This allure was perhaps most brilliantly captured in the special issue of Présence Africaine devoted to “Guinée Indépendante!” in 1958. See, in particular, Tamsir

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Djibril Niane’s analysis of emerging popular songs in “Chants Révolutionnaires Guinéens,” Présence Africaine 29 (1959): 89–103. The Présence founder Alioune Diop, the poets Aimé Césaire and Jacques Rabemenanjara, and the French historian Jean Suret-Canale also contributed enthusiastic descriptions of the new revolutionary republic. 3. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 1. 4. See chapter 2 for fuller analyses of these writings. 5. Considered as a whole, these forestier ethnic groups constitute approximately 15 percent of the national population. 6. Cited in Claude Rivière, Mutations sociales en Guinée (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1971), 254. 7. Ibid., 247. 8. Le Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. It was common in the early years of independence for Guineans, particularly in the interior, to consider the RDA—the most powerful late-colonial West African political organization promoting reform throughout the AOF—and the PDG as synonymous. Sékou Touré had been active in the inter-territorial RDA during the same time he was building up PDG power within his home country. For a detailed account of Touré’s late-colonial political career, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005). In the context of the informant’s narrative, however, it is equally possible that RDA stands in for the newly instituted youth wing of the PDG, the JRDA, or La Jeunesse du Rassamblement Démocratique Africain. 9. Afwi is the masked figure representing the spirit of the forest in Loma cosmology. Young male initiates were “eaten” by this spirit and only returned to their former villages after they had undergone required training and certain rituals such as tatouage; the incisions left by the latter represented the marks infl icted by the spirit’s teeth. Among the Kpelle, a spirit known as Nyamou performs a parallel role. Kpelle metaphors of initiation/tatouage are similar to those of the Loma as well as the Kissi. For further discussion of initiation symbolism in the region, see Jacques Germain, Peuples de la Forêt de Guinée (Paris: Académie des Sciences d’outre-mer, 1984); and James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 10. Rivière, Mutations, 247–249. 11. This core dramatic opposition largely ignored the experience and aspirations of girls and women. The movement launched by Macenta militants was driven by the presumption that most boys in the region could indeed begin attending school and pursuing their studies continuously if their parents truly desired it. Apparently no such assumption obtained for girls. Demystification certainly had immediate consequences for girls and women, such as their direct observation of specific ritual figures traditionally shrouded from all women. Generally, however, revolutionary change in the forest was almost always conceived as a young male throwing off the moral, intel-

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lectual, and material burdens of gerontocratic domination. For descriptions of girls’ and women’s experiences in the Poro/Sande-dominated regions of Liberia and Sierra Leone, see Caroline Bledsoe, Women and Marriage in Kpelle Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980); and Ruth Phillips, Representing Women: Sande Masquerades of the Mende of Sierra Leone (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995). 12. This viewpoint is further confi rmed by Alphonse Béavogui, a forestier whose interview appears at the end of the chapter. 13. The virulent revolutionary was accused of diverting public funds; see Rivière, Mutations, 248–249. 14. This temporary suspension of the initiation groves’ activities was not always respected. A former PDG education cadre with whom I spoke in Conakry told me of his shock at arriving one day to teach his regular classes at Macenta’s École Normale Rurale (see chapter 3). More than half his male students were absent. When asked, the students present explained that many of their peers had been summoned for initiation, and they did not know when their classmates would return. This episode occurred in the late 1960s. 15. For a discussion of ritual traffic across Guinea’s southeastern forested borders with Liberia and Sierra Leone during the Touré regime, see Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: Youth, War, and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: Heinemann, 1996), 82. 16. Rivière, Mutations, 249. 17. Ibid., 255. 18. A. Amadou Bano Barry, Les Violences Collectives en Afrique: Le Cas Guinéen (Paris: Harmattan, 2000), 90 (emphasis in original). 19. For an overview of these issues, see Michael McGovern, “Confl it régional et rhétorique de la contre-insurrection: Guinéens et réfugiés en septembre 2000,” Politique Africaine 88 (2002): 84–102. In relation to Barry’s anxieties, it is crucial to note that several of the ethnic communities most deeply embroiled in Liberia’s civil war— particularly the Loma, Kpelle, and Muslim Mandingos—have historically straddled the Guinéo-Liberian border. Substantial numbers of each of these groups have lived in both countries since their founding, and regularly crossed their borders for various reasons. 20. Fodé Lamine Touré, Une enfance africaine (Conakry: Bibliothèque FrancoGuinéenne, 1997), 2:72 (emphasis added). 21. Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the Landscape, 269–270. 22. Malinké and Maninka are synonymous in Guinea, although the former term is far more common in locally printed texts and popular speech. 23. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, religious references were rare in revolutionary discourse. In L’Action, however, Touré singles out the building of mosques as among the most noteworthy contributions properly dedicated youths had made to social development: “Our youth has supplied in its construction of schools, dispensaries, roads, town squares, mosques, infi nitely more than other so-

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cial categories” (Sékou Touré, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne [Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1962], 45). 24. Revolutionary and postrevolutionary texts typically cast the Guinean population as 85 percent Muslim, and the remainder as Christian or animist. Guinea’s forestier groups comprise about 15 percent of the national population and constitute the great majority of the non-Muslim population. 25. F. L. Touré, Une enfance africaine, 2:71 (emphasis added). 26. See Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1988). 27. Ivan Karp, “Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse,” in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 96. 28. The Foutah was the sole region not to solidly back the rejection of Guinea’s entry into the Communauté française. Overall, almost 95 percent of those casting ballots voted no. 29. As examined in the next chapter, Touré was quick to strive to subvert the Church’s regional influence, particularly in the domain of education. For more detailed accounts of the history of the growth of Catholicism in the forest during the colonial era, see two works by the French priest M. H. Lelong: Ces hommes qu’on appelle anthropages (Paris: Alsatia, 1946), and N’Zérékoré: L’Evangile en forêt guinéenne (Paris: Librarie missionaire, 1949). For a broader national history including the postcolonial era, see André Mamadouba Camara, Repères pour l’histoire de l’Eglise Catholique en Guinée, 1890–1986 (Conakry: Editions Imprimerie de la Mission Catholique, 1992). 30. Available prefectural enrollment rates from 1964 are telling in this regard. At this time, enrollment in the coastal region (outside Conakry), the Foutah, and Upper Guinea ranged from 13.9 percent to 21.7 percent. Meanwhile, in the forest prefectures of N’Zérékoré-Yomou and Kissidougou, 36.1 percent and 69.1 percent, respectively, of local youths were attending school. See Claude Rivière, “Les investissements éducatifs en République de Guinée,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 5, no. 4 (1965): 618–634, 632–633. 31. Pita, one of the principal prefectures and urban centers of the Foutah Djallon, voted more strongly in favor of Guinea deferring independence and joining the French Communauté than any other prefecture. It is not surprising, therefore, that Touré would single it out as a former bastion of feudalism. 32. Touré, L’Action, 64–65. 33. Touré’s hopes for the Foutah’s political integration would erode drastically over time. In 1976 the regime announced a “Peul Plot” against it. For fuller discussion of the causes and consequences of Touré’s attack on Peuls as political enemies, see Barry, Les Violences Collectives, 118; and Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses, chap. 6. 34. For the classic study of the politico-economic tensions shaping the emergence

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and trajectory of Poro over the longue durée, see Warren D’Azevedo, “Some Historical Problems in the Delineation of a Central West Atlantic Region,” Annals, New York Academy of Sciences 96, no. 2: 512–538. For rich discussions of Poro dynamics in twentieth-century Liberia, see William Murphy, “Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders versus Youth,” Africa 50 (1980): 193–207; and Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For detailed studies of Poro in Sierra Leone, see Kenneth Little, “The Political Function of the Poro,” Africa 35, no. 4 (1965): 349–365; and Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest. 35. Jean-Marie Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer; Un instrument efficace: le theatre,” in Littérature Guinéenne (Saint Etienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1987), 88. 36. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Oxford University Press, 1986), 41–42 (emphasis in original). 37. For further insightful studies of the ways in which two other militant socialist regimes struggled with these dilemmas, see Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1997); and Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 38. Karp, “Development and Personhood,” 87 (emphasis added). 39. For a particularly provocative and influential study of the unfolding of “developmentalism” on a global scale, see Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). 40. Focused on Liberia, Murphy’s “Secret Knowledge” presents the strongest case for Poro as a conduit for both intergenerational and modern state administrative forms of oppression, showing how the two have dovetailed in specific instances. 41. D’Azevedo’s “Some Historical Problems,” Little’s “The Political Function,” and Richards’s Fighting each hail Poro’s moral and political roles in nurturing varying degrees of community and intercommunity stability, loyalty, and coordination in Upper Guinean forest settings repeatedly challenged by destructive external forces. 42. All the names are fictive to protect anonymity. The intricacies of Alphonse’s and Benoit’s lives as students and teachers are explored in detail in chapter 6. 43. The word choice is telling of the degree of Pépé’s devotion to the revolutionary regime. Anyone examining Sékou Touré’s writings or revolutionary prose more generally will be struck by the frequency with which the term épanouissement is enthusiastically employed. 44. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 7 June 2001. 45. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 4 June 2001. Notably the interview occurred before CÔte d’Ivoire’s descent into grave political crisis. Until very recently, the image of CÔte d’Ivoire as a rival to be admired for the relatively superior standard of living enjoyed by its citizens was quite prevalent in forestier criticisms of revolutionary misrule. Other instances of this viewpoint appear in the next chapter.

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This appraisal was certainly not unique to forestiers. For a poignant Guinean literary depiction of CÔte d’Ivoire as a land of superior entrepreneurial opportunity, development, and comfort, see Yacine Boubacar Diallo, Larmes de Joie (Conakry: Editions Ganndal, 2000). 46. These are multi-yard cuts of cloth, often richly colored with intricate designs, suitable for tailoring into any form of dress or accessory. The distinctive deep colaand-ebony pagne design, often seen to exemplify forest fashion, is known within and without the region as forêt sacrée. 47. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 9 June 2001. 48. The reasons for such sympathy emerge clearly in chapter 6. 49. For an informative tableau of the broader (in)security situation facing many Guinean communities at the time, see McGovern, “Confl it régional.” Alphonse had consulted a healer and had been treated with anti-bullet ointments himself. A longstanding Catholic (as described in the following chapter), Alphonse was disappointed in local forestier priests’ condemnation of local followers’ actual or merely contemplated return to fetishist ways, whatever the gravity of the security situation and personal yearning for invulnerability. His recently catechized daughter was, in turn, deeply critical of Alphonse for his openly professed loyalties to irreconcilable traditional and Christian belief systems. She categorically refused local treatments, declaring she “would die when God called her.”

6. Forestier Itineraries across Revolutionary Pedagogical Domains 1. At independence, Guinea’s primary school enrollment rates were less than 10 percent. By 1965 about one-third of all school-aged children were attending school, an impressive achievement crucial to the postcolonial regime’s aspirations for moralpolitical legitimacy. Enrollment rates in the forest prefectures were considerably higher than the national average during this period (see chapter 5). For a general overview of educational politics during the immediate post-independence juncture, see Claude Rivière, “Les investissements éducatifs en République de Guinée,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 5, no. 4: 618–634. 2. Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55. 3. For an excellent study of the historical semantics of these two terms, see Ivan Karp, “Development and Personhood: Tracing the Contours of a Moral Discourse,” in Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies, ed. Bruce Knauft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 4. Stacy Leigh Pigg, “Inventing Social Categories through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992): 491–513, 492. 5. Drawing on the work of Arjun Appadurai, Pigg argues that national pedagogical texts perpetuate “the idea that villagers are . . . ‘incarcerated’ in a way of thinking by being ‘natives’ of a kind of culture-territory” (ibid., 505). Cf. Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1: 36–49.

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6. Pigg, “Inventing Social Categories through Place,” 502. 7. Among the illuminating comparative studies yielding related insights are Sanjay Srivastava, Constructing Postcolonial India: National Character and the Doon School (London: Routledge, 1998); Laura Rival, “Formal Schooling and the Production of Modern Citizens in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” in The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice, ed. Bradley Levinson, Douglas Foley, and Dorothy Holland (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); and Karp, “Development and Personhood.” 8. Sékou Touré, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1962), 83–84. 9. Arif Dirlik, “Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism,” in Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought, ed. Arif Dirlik, Paul Healy, and Nick Knight (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1997), 72. 10. For further explorations of tensions operative in China, see William Joseph, Christine Wong, and David Zweig, eds., New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University, 1991). 11. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 12. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988). 13. Because of the violent nature of specific events Alphonse recounts, the name of his home village is fictive. 14. For an illuminating statement of motivation for analogous work on personal experiences of Nicaragua’s Sandinista revolution, see Roger Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 109–110. For an excellent theoretical and methodological overview of the values and potential pitfalls of such research, see Corinne Kratz, “Conversations and Lives,” in African Words, African Voices: Critical Practices in Oral History, ed. David William Cohen, Luise White, and Stephan Miescher (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 15. For a useful overview of returned soldiers’ extensive impacts on mid-century social and political transformations in Guinea, see Elizabeth Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939–1958 (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2005). 16. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 19 April 2001. 17. For an informative analysis of the key tensions and instances of violence shaping Guinean political experience during this period, see Schmidt, Mobilizing the Masses, chap. 6. 18. Emile Cissé, Faraloko: Roman d’un petit village africain (Rennes, France: Imprimerie Commerciale, 1958). See chapter 2 for more details on the novel. 19. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 24 April 2001. 20. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 27 April 2001.

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21. Ibid. 22. The strike is discussed in chapters 2 and 3. 23. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 27 April 2001. 24. The envisioned dynamic of elite youth transformation through rural political initiation ordeals is explored in chapter 2. 25. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 27 April 2001. 26. See the discussion of Touré’s extended reflections on “the teaching function” in chapter 3. 27. Fodé Lamine Touré, Une enfance africaine (Conakry: Bibliothèque FrancoGuinéenne, 1997). The broader significance of this memoir in the historiography of Guinean education is discussed in chapter 3. 28. For a fascinating analysis of political and cultural processes of enframing, see Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), chap. 2. 29. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 18 April 2001. 30. The term can have the very literal meaning of lodger or landlord. But it can also have a broader meaning of surrogate parenthood, a local adult who watches over a youth whose mother and father live a considerable distance away. As was the case with Benoit in Macenta, relations between tuteur and student ward are often strained, at best, in Guinea and elsewhere. The tuteur is often seen as a menacing and ex ploitative taskmaster rather than the fostering and protective figure he or she should ideally— from the youth’s perspective—be. For some memorable portrayals of student-tutor relations in neighboring CÔte d’Ivoire, see Pierre André Krol, Avoir 20 ans en Afrique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). 31. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 18 April 2001. 32. The culminating exams for collège (junior high) students. 33. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 18 April 2001. 34. Ibid. 35. The highest point in Guinea at seventeen hundred meters, affording spectacular views of the surrounding area. The Mount is also extremely rich in iron and other mineralogical resources whose commercial potential has already provoked significant instability in the sub-region, and may provoke more in times to come. On the economic and political “career” of Mount Nimba, see the International Crisis Group, “Stopping Guinea’s Slide,” Africa Report No. 94, 2005; and Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1999), chap. 4. 36. A larger town northwest of N’Zo, later to become the seat of a newly established prefecture bearing the same name. Alphonse’s later professional stint in Lola is examined below. 37. The contemporary name for a large transport truck. 38. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 1 May 2001. 39. A large bush rodent once abundant through much of the forest, prized for its delicious meat. 40. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 1 May 2001.

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41. Guineans almost always refer to their former president’s books as “tomes.” It is still possible to come across piles of dilapidated tomes in different state offices, archives, and market stalls selling print materials. Many of them were probably never opened. Revolutionary-era students, however, were obliged to memorize many passages from them if they hoped to pass their social science and humanities classes. 42. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 4 June 2001. 43. See Touré’s essay, “La Morale Révolutionnaire et La Fonction Enseignante,” in his L’Afrique en Marche, 4th ed. (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1967). This essay is analyzed in some detail in chapter 3. 44. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 4 June 2001. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. This was an element of the Cultural Revolution’s heightened attack on the “foreignness” of schooling, discussed in chapter 3. 48. Most teachers working in the midst of the “national language” period continued to borrow substantially from French in their classroom practice. The scale of the national language rejuvenation scheme can be seen by perusing a three-hundredpage dictionary, organized by the country’s “Academy of Languages,” that translated terms from the “exact sciences” into six local languages: Malinké, Soussou, Pular, Kpelle, Kissi, and Loma; see Académie des Langues, République Populaire Révolutionnaire de Guinée, Lexique fondamental des sciences exactes (Paris: Hatier, 1980). Such examples of translation work were scattered across contemporary issues of HoroyaHebdo with the intention of convincing the readership (primarily teachers and students) of the capacity of local languages to serve as vehicles for the expression of any form of modern knowledge or experience. For an incisive critique of the national language policies, see République de Guinée, “Actes de la Conference de l’Education Nationale” (Conakry: Institut Pédagogique National, 1984). “Actes” consists of a series of impassioned critical speeches on contemporary educational affairs delivered by a range of educators and administrators just seven weeks after Sékou Touré’s death. 49. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 4 June 2001. 50. For an illuminating comparative study of a similar, though even more intense objectification of agricultural processes in Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 7. 51. For many forestiers old enough to remember, this imperious insistence on maximum palm oil production must have painfully recalled the French colonial regime’s analogous demands and tactics during the quota-crazed years of World War II. For a firsthand account of forestiers’ experience of that period, see M. H. Lelong: Ces hommes qu’on appelle anthropages (Paris: Alsatia, 1946); and N’Zérékoré: L’Evangile en forêt guinéenne (Paris: Librarie missionaire, 1949). 52. I was told by many contemporary residents of N’Zérékoré that there, too, considerable amounts of rice grown by students on the outskirts of town and villages

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throughout the prefecture rotted, also waiting for trucks to take them westward to Conakry or some other destination. 53. This is the common shorthand designation of the two-week regional and national arts competitions—quinzaines artistiques—held regularly during the revolution in regional capitals and in Conakry. The nationalist motivations and local meanings of the quinzaines are discussed later in this chapter, and more fully in chapters 4 and 7. 54. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 5 May 2001. 55. Ibid. 56. Some official and unofficial understandings of the meanings of youthful participation in milices populaires are examined in chapters 4 and 7. 57. These introductory acts, typically involving student declamations of revolutionary poetry, are discussed in chapter 7. 58. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 2 June 2001. 59. Under circumstances addressed below, Joachim spent six years in Liberia at the end of Sékou Touré’s rule and during the early postrevolutionary transition. He mastered English there and went on to teach it when he returned to Guinea. It was convenient and advantageous for Joachim and me to converse almost exclusively in English. The citations drawn from our interviews are direct transcriptions. Moments of French or Liberian vernacular “interference” are left intact. 60. The term is used frequently by Guineans in a great many communicative contexts to refer to a figure perceived to wield superior authority, or shoulder distinctive responsibility, in a given setting, whether school, a government office, or a place of business. 61. Interview conducted in Conakry, 2 April 2001. 62. The sudden acceleration of the journey’s progress stemmed from the presence of mostly paved road from Macenta to Conakry. 63. Interview conducted in Conakry, 2 April 2001. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. As discussed in the next chapter, ballets from forest prefectures fared extremely well at the time, with dramatic consequences for a wide swath of forestiers. 68. He considered this characterization a compliment but attributed it directly to the phonetic influence of his native Kpelle rather than a high degree of learning. Ivorians were thought to speak better French than Guineans, because President Houphouët-Boigny, radically unlike Sékou Touré, welcomed the continued presence and influence of French citizens and culture after the advent of his country’s independence. 69. Interview conducted in Conakry, 4 April 2001. 70. Guinean independence day. 71. Scott, Seeing like a State, 252. 72. Sékou Touré’s name has become so synonymous with endless, compulsive

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speaking that certain amphetamines circulating in neighboring countries have been nicknamed in his honor; see Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy, 170. 73. Interview conducted in Conakry, 4 April 2001. 74. In a very real sense, Joachim’s fl ight was far from solitary. Guinea’s internal population in the mid-1970s was estimated to be approximately 3 million, with the immigrant Guinean population in neighboring states rising close to 1 million. About half these expatriates were in Senegal and Sierra Leone; 300,000 in CÔte d’Ivoire; and another 100,000 in Liberia and Mali. See Jean-Paul Atala, “Problèmes culturels Guinéens depuis l’indépendance,” L’Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer 36, no. 3: 585– 601, 585. 75. Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance,” 53. 76. The phrase is drawn from David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 77. The number of private primary schools skyrocketed in N’Zérékoré, Conakry, and many other settings during the late 1990s. Many of the new schools have religious bearings. Research on enrollment patterns at these institutions—particularly along economic and ethnic lines—would be crucial for a study of ideologies of education and youth sociology in present-day Guinea. 78. In 1997, as many as 650,000 Liberian, Sierra Leonean, and Bissauian refugees were reportedly living in Guinea. At the time, Liberians were easily the most numerous of the three, soon to be matched by Sierra Leoneans. The majority of the Liberians settled in N’Zérékoré and the neighboring prefectures of Yomou and Macenta. 79. For the most eloquent pronouncements of the postrevolutionary regime’s official advocacy of international openness, see Chantalle Colle, ed., Guinéoscope: La Guinée à l’aube du IIIème millénaire (Paris: Sofra Presse, 1997). For countervailing views on the thinly veiled nationalism and xenophobia of Guinean nationalist politics at the turn of the century, see Michael McGovern, “Confl it régional et rhétorique de la contre-insurrection: Guinéens et refugiés en septembre 2000,” Politique africaine 88 (2002): 84–102; and Amnesty International, “Guinea: Maintaining Order with Contempt for the Right to Life,” 2002. 80. Pigg, “Inventing Social Categories through Place,” 499.

7. Forestier Stories of Militant Theater 1. Quoted in Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 236. 2. For a memorable overview of these semantic struggles in Soviet Russia, see Mikhail Epstein’s essay “The Linguistic Games of Soviet Ideology,” in idem, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, trans. Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), chap. 4. 3. The work of V. N. Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin probably remains the most compelling body of inquiry into the nature of this seemingly eternal incapacity

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of governing structures to express these kinds of sentiments. For an overview of Bakhtinian thought, see The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994). 4. Horoya, 5–7 December 1961. 5. Sékou Touré, L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emancipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne (Conakry: Imprimerie Nationale Patrice Lumumba, 1962), 64–65. 6. Horoya-Hebdo, 21–27 March 1970, 16. 7. Troupes from Conakry won the first two “pre-campaign” top quinzaine prizes in 1960 and 1961. 8. See chapter 4 for an examination of the tone of such commentary. 9. Traditional Malinké praise-singer. For a particularly lyrical, favorable depiction of griot talents, see Camara Laye, L’Enfant noir (Paris: Plon, 1953), chap. 2. 10. UNESCO, Cultural Policy in Guinea (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), 79. 11. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 4 June 2001. 12. See chapter 4. 13. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 14. Jeunesse du Rassamblement Démocratique Africain, youth wing of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée. See chapter 4 for a discussion of its officially sanctioned ties to militant theater. 15. Guerzé and Toma are synonymous with Kpelle and Loma. The former terms are used only within Guinea as a result of French ethnographic and administrative practice. Within Guinea the two sets of ethnonyms are used interchangeably, with Kpelle and Loma seen as more fundamentally accurate. 16. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 17. Stephen N’Degwa, “Citizenship and Ethnicity: An Examination of Two Transition Moments in Kenyan Politics,” American Political Science Review 91, no. 3 (1997): 599–616, 601 (emphasis in original). 18. Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 55. 19. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 20. A condensed account of Loua’s youthful biography was presented and analyzed in chapter 6. 21. Personal notes, February 11, 2000. “Mandingo” is a Liberian translation of “Malinké.” 22. For discussions of revolutionary-era promulgations and firsthand experiences of national language teaching and education-through-production, see chapters 3 and 6. 23. Alphonse’s biography as student and young teacher, including his extensive pleasures, discoveries, and trials in Gama, was discussed in chapter 6. 24. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 1 May 2001. 25. See Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest: War, Youth, and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: Heinemann, 1996), 82. 26. Touré, L’Action, 74–75.

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27. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 28. The lyrics Hawa remembered were these: “L’Enemi trouvera sa tombe en Guinée . . . La victoire appartient à la Guinée. La Guinée a raison. La Guinée est un pays du paix. Les Guinéens ont raison” (The enemy will fi nd his grave in Guinea. Victory belongs to Guinea. Guinea is in the right. Guinea is a country of peace. Guineans are in the right” (ibid.). 29. Ibid. 30. For accounts of their very different initial impressions of the capital, see chapter 6. 31. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 32. Ibid. 33. Le Palais, which is located in central Conakry and has the capacity to hold six thousand, is easily Guinea’s most imposing cultural performance arena. Constructed with Chinese aid in 1965, it was still quite new in 1970. Its very architectural scale and interior design must surely have been stunning to youths arriving from the interior. 34. A region is synonymous with the administrative units now called prefectures. 35. Interview conducted in Conakry, 6 April 2001. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Hawa told me that the prefecture’s poor showing in Conakry factored into a decision to transfer its standing governor to another region. 39. See Jean-Marie Touré, “Mobiliser, informer, éduquer; Un instrument efficace: le théâtre,” in Littérature Guinéenne (Saint Etienne: Imprimerie Dumas, 1987), 80. The web metaphor is discussed in some detail in chapter 4. 40. République de Guinée, Guinée Festival, 1977, 31. 41. See Hawa’s and Joachim’s comments on griots and other Malinké cultural customs above. 42. “La Complainte” has been published, among other places, in Sékou Touré’s “Poèmes Militants,” Révolution Démocratique Africaine, no. 21 (August 1977): 99–110. 43. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 5 May 2001. 44. For broader insight into the revolutionary leader’s rhetorical powers, see Alpha Ousmane Barry, Pouvoir du discours & discours du pouvoir: l’art oratoire chez Sékou Touré de 1958 à 1984 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). 45. Interview conducted in N’Zérékoré, 3 June 2001. 46. Interview conducted in Conakry, 24 May 2001.

8. Conclusion The first epigraph is from Ibrahima Cissé, “J’ai visité ‘Boiro,’ ” Horoya, 12 April 1984. The second epigraph is from The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), 94. 1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread

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of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Oxford University Press, 1986); and The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). My choice of the term “literary-historical” is meant to describe, in a general way, works that draw almost exclusively on primary and secondary print media for their expository and analytical momentum. I contrast this approach with a more ethnographic orientation that stresses direct oral communication and participant observation as optimal sources of data. It is possible, of course, for scholars to shift back and forth between the two approaches over the course of their careers, and even within a single text. 2. For penetrating studies, see David Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Dru Gladney, Ethnic Identity in China: The Making of a Muslim Minority Nationality (Fort Worth, Tex.: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Sanjay Srivastava, Constructing Postcolonial India: National Character and the Doon School (London: Routledge, 1998); Charles Hale, Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994); Roger Lancaster, Life Is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 3. See, for example, Srirupa Roy, “Seeing a State: National Commemorations and the Public Sphere in India and Turkey,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 1 (2006): 200–232; and Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997). 4. For particularly notable examples, see James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 2 (1995): 375–402; and Lila AbuLughod, “The Objects of Soap Opera: Egyptian Television and the Cultural Politics of Modernity,” in Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995). 5. Achille Mbembe, “Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,” Africa 62, no. 1 (1992): 3–37; for a fuller elaboration, see idem, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). For other highly influential studies reaching similarly bleak conclusions, see Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher Harrison, and Elizabeth Harrison (London: Longman, 1993); and Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 6. See Francesca Castaldi, Choreographies of African Identities: Négritude, Dance, and the National Ballet of Senegal (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Cati

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Coe, Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 7. Turino offers a concise defi nition: “The use of art and other cultural practices to develop or maintain national sentiment for political purposes is termed cultural nationalism”; see Turino, Nationalists, 14. 8. Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55. 9. For a succinct synopsis, see Elimane Fall, “Instaurer un Cercle Vertueux,” Jeune Afrique: L’Etat de l’Afrique 2006, 258. 10. See Michael McGovern, “Confl it régional et rhétorique de la contre-insurrection: Guinéens et réfugiés en septembre 2000,” Politique Africaine 88 (2002): 84– 102; and Amnesty International, “Guinea: Maintaining Order with Contempt for the Right to Life,” 2002. 11. The Guinean-American director David Achkar’s Allah Tantou, a film that hauntingly evokes his own father’s detention and death in Boiro, is perhaps the most memorable study of the prison. He has commented thoughtfully on the motivations and formal qualities of his work in Patricia Aufderheide, “Memory and History in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Interview with David Achkar,” Visual Anthropology Review 9, no. 2 (1993): 107–113. The most influential book on Boiro is probably former detainee Jean-Paul Atala’s Prison d’Afrique (Paris: Seuil, 1983). 12. For an illuminating overview of Lansana Conté’s and other politicians’ contributions to this counterrevolutionary imagery, see Chantalle Colle, ed., Guinéoscope: La Guinée à l’aube du IIIème millénaire (Paris: Sofra Presse, 1997). The volume also provides rich insights into the roles played by real and imagined transnational capitalist forces and operators in projections of a more prosperous national future. The most fervent artistic portrayal of a thoroughly favorable overturn of revolutionary stagnation is Yacine Boubacar Diallo’s novel Larmes de joie (Conakry: Editions Ganndal, 2000). 13. Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, Les conférences nationales en Afrique noire: Une affaire à suivre (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 171. For a broader comparative discussion of transitional states and societies and their reconciliatory efforts, see Dominic Thomas, Nation-Building, Propaganda, and Literature in Francophone Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), chaps. 5–6. 14. For illuminating discussions on popular responses to the deaths of leading dictators around the world, see John Borneman, ed., Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority (New York: Berghan Books, 2004). 15. See Mbembe, On the Postcolony; and idem, “Provisional Notes.” 16. For a particularly well-argued theoretical and ethnographic critique of Mbembe, see Mikael Karlstrom, “On the Esthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony,” Africa 73, no. 1 (2003): 57–76.

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17. Diawara’s interview with Sassine and the reflections it stimulates are among the richest moments of his 1996 return trip to Guinea recounted in his book In Search of Africa (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 2. The interview turns around Sassine’s interrogation of the yearnings, motives, and final disillusionment of Guinean expatriates who returned home expecting reverence and power in the wake of Touré’s death. The focal text of the discussion, which is Sassine’s most famous, is the novel Le Zéhéros n’est pas n’importe qui (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1985). Diawara’s 2003 documentary, Conakry Kas, revisits some of the core themes of In Search of Africa. For a broader sample of perspectives on Afro-pessimism, see David Rieff, “In Defense of Afro-pessimism,” World Policy Journal 15, no. 4 (1998/99): 10–22; Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford, England, and Bloomington: James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1999); and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, “The Cultural Dimensions of Development in Africa,” African Studies Review 45, no. 3 (2002): 1–16. 18. Filip de Boeck, “Beyond the Grave: History, Memory, and Death in Postcolonial Congo/Zaire,” in Memory and the Postcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power, ed. Richard Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1998), 25. 19. For a detailed examination of Diawara’s work, particularly In Search of Africa, see Adebayo Williams, “The Postcolony as Trope: Searching for a Lost Continent in a Boundless World,” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 2 (2000): 179–193. 20. For an insightful discussion of the salience of this theme in the context of post-confl ict Sierra Leone, see Susan Shepler, “Globalizing Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone,” in Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global, ed. Sunaina Maira and Elisabeth Soep (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 21. For an illuminating overview of these real and imagined horizons of possibility, see Colle, Guinéoscope. 22. For a broader discussion of the harms wrought by “the compulsion to theorize” at the expense of more fi nely textured socio-historical analysis, see Albert O. Hirschman, “The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Human Understanding,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press), 184. For a more recent like-minded statement focused on Africa, see John M. Chernoff, Hustling Is Not Stealing: Stories of an African Bar Girl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 12–26. 23. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121 (emphasis added). 24. Donald Donham, Marxist Modern: An Ethnographic History of the Ethiopian Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 2. 25. Ibid., 12. 26. David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4 (emphasis in original). 27. Diawara, In Search of Africa, 50–51. 28. Ibid., 53. 29. For the most thorough study of the genealogy of the Liberian war, see Stephen

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Notes to pages 213–214

Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War (New York: New York University Press, 1999). For a poignant study of Liberian youth perspectives, see Mats Utas, “Agency of Victims: Young Women in the Liberian Civil War,” in Makers & Breakers: Children & Youth in Postcolonial Africa, ed. Alcinda Honwana and Filip de Boeck (Trenton, N.J.: African World Press, 2005). In relation to Sassine’s views, the most haunting depiction of Sierra Leone on the cusp of war is Paul Richards and Koen Vlassenroot, “Les Guerres Africaines du Type Fleuve Mano: Pour une analyse sociale,” Politique Africaine 88 (2002): 13–26; see also Richards’s pioneering Fighting for the Rain Forest: Youth, War, and Resources in Sierra Leone (Oxford: Heinemann, 1996). For a broader regional view of potential connections between these two wars and the potential for one in Guinea, see McGovern, “Confl it régional.” 30. See Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 77. 31. Guha writes that “history as the verbal representation by man of his own past is by its very nature so full of hazard, so replete indeed with the verisimilitude of sharply differentiated choices, that it never ceases to excite. The historical discourse is the world’s oldest thriller” (ibid., 55). 32. See Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 33. The study of postrevolutionary intergenerational dynamics merits a book in itself. Most local adults were sternly critical of the cultural preferences, social comportments, and moral character of young forestiers, and particularly forestières, who had come of age since Touré’s death, citing an unprecedented spike in “delinquency.” Three broad factors had combined to contort present-day youth: the abruptness of the country’s transition from socialism to liberal “openness” and an influx of previously unknown cultural goods; the weakness or insincerity, or both, of the postrevolutionary government’s commitment to educational development; and the massive arrival of young Liberian “Anglophone” refugees to the area that began at the end of 1989. Some spoke of the latter as triggering a kind of unplanned and unwanted “cultural revolution” of youth sociology in the region, provoked by local youths’ misguided emulation of their Liberian peers, who seemed, from their own provincial perspective, to embody an exciting modernity and cosmopolitanism. For an overview of local adult and youthful perspectives on cultural changes and political possibilities since the revolution, see Jay Straker, “Youth, Globalization, and Millennial Reflection in a Guinean Forest Town,” Journal of Modern African Studies 45, no. 2 (2007): 299–319. 34. For a broader view of these representational dynamics, see McGovern, “Confl it régional.”

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Index

Abu-Lughod, Lila, 134, 173 Achkar, David, 215n5 Afrique Occidental Française (AOF), 88, 98, 233n8 Afro-pessimism, 5, 15, 209, 212, 216n15 agriculture, 69–72, 134, 153, 156–57, 174; commissaire de production, 161; and production by students, 78–79, 80, 159–61, 166, 173, 200 Anderson, Benedict, 205 anticolonialism, 6, 19, 21, 29, 35, 43, 58, 64, 75, 108, 136, 163, 191, 202, 206. See also France, colonialism Askew, Kelly, 206 authenticity, cultural, 2, 169, 173, 177, 200– 201, 226n1; and ballet, 96–98, 181 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9, 204, 217n17 ballet, 80, 88, 92, 95, 96, 98–99, 102–103, 157, 163, 164–65, 168, 184, 188, 191–92, 194–95, 197, 231n49; forestier, 156, 178–79, 181–82, 230n40, 241n67; and mystification, 100– 101, 104 Ballet de Kéita Fodéba, 97. See also Kéita, Fodéba Ballets-Africains, 96, 98, 99–100, 231n49, 232n54. See also Kéita, Fodéba Béavogui, Alphonse, 1–2, 127, 130–31, 138– 40, 142–46, 149–51, 156–59, 168, 174, 175, 188–89, 193, 237n49 “Belle était la peau du caiman” (“Beautiful Was the Crocodile’s Skin”), 201–202 Bingo, 96, 231n49, 232n54 Bloc Africain de Guinée, 140 Boeck, Filip de, 209 Boigny, Félix Houphouët, 39

Boké, 33, 34–35, 101–102 Boulaga, Fabien Eboussi, 208 brevet exam, 149, 163, 165 Burkina Faso, 139, 141, 143, 144, 158 Cabral, Amilcar, 229n35 Camp Boiro, 3, 7, 215n5 Castaldi, Francesca, 206 Catholic Church, 109, 111, 112, 120, 237n49; priests, 111, 139, 141, 167, 237n49; schools, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143 Centre d’Animation Pédagogique, 174 Centres d’Etudes Révolutionnaires (CER) (Centers of Revolutionary Studies), 76–79, 156–58, 160–63, 166; CER Félix Roland Mamoue, 161 Certeau, Michel de, 137 Certificat d’Études Primaires (CEP), 60, 73, 146–47, 160 Certificat d’Études Primaires Elementaires (CEPE), 139 Césaire, Aimé, 6 Chatterjee, Partha, 9, 19–21, 37, 124, 205, 219n4 Cheah, Pheng, 48 chiefs and (customary) chieftaincy, 24, 25, 61, 128, 184, 201 China, 4, 9, 15, 136–37, 244n33; Mao Zedong, 136 choral works, 80, 157, 192 Christianity, 201–202, 235n24 Cissé, Emile, 222n50; “Et la nuit s’illumine” (“And the Night Comes Alight”), 222n50, 229n34; Faraloko, 38–39, 47, 140, 229n34 Coe, Cati, 206 Cohen, David William, 211

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collèges. See schools Collèges d’Enfants Ratés (schools for “ruined” students), 74 Collèges d’Enseignement Général (CEG), 73–74 Collèges d’Enseignement Rural (CER) ( Junior Highs of Rural Teaching), 73–75 colonialism. See France, colonialism Comité Militaire de Redressement National (Military Committee of National Recovery) (CMRN), 204 Communauté française, 2, 6, 36, 120, 235nn28,31. See also de Gaulle, Charles Conakry, 1, 32, 48, 61, 62, 99, 107, 115, 117, 142, 194, 201, 208, 211, 226n40, 229n35, 240n52, 244n33; intelligentsia, 12, 207; media, 1, 22; migration to, 108, 166, 167; revolutionary leadership, 125, 146, 149, 156; schools, 49, 52, 53, 55, 74, 77, 89, 145, 147, 165, 168, 169, 172, 173, 242n77; students, 7, 26, 42, 44, 45, 49, 59–60, 123, 144, 158; teachers, 7, 64, 143; and theater, 91, 103, 182, 184; University of, 133, 164; youth, 33–34, 41, 43, 46, 63. See also Quinzaine artistique nationale, La, Conakry Congo, 96, 208, 209 Conté, Lansana, 15, 204–208 Cooper, Frederick, 24 Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), 3, 128, 139, 144, 158, 169, 189, 236n45, 241n58, 242n74 Cultural Revolution. See Socialist Cultural Revolution

École Normale William Ponty, 88, 91 École Primaire Supérieure, 62, 89, 92 educational reforms, 11, 12, 39–40, 58, 67, 74–75, 80, 159, 172. See also schooling El Hadj Millions, 93, 95, 100, 101, 103, 230nn35,37 elders, 13, 24, 100, 110, 111, 141, 185–86 elites, 4, 6, 25, 27–28, 31, 42, 43, 45, 91, 98, 99, 131; Muslim/Malinké, 14, 198; and schooling, 11, 25, 30, 37, 47, 88; urban, 34, 107, 120. See also évolués; youth, urban vs. rural évolués, 22, 28, 44, 45

Dakar, 7, 42, 96, 231n52 dance. See ballet D’Azevedo, Warren, 126 de Gaulle, Charles, 40. See also Communauté française demystification campaign, 13, 87, 90, 101– 102, 109–16, 119, 120, 124–30, 140, 155, 175, 178–79, 181, 185, 188–89, 202, 233n11. See also fetishism Diawara, Manthia, 209, 212, 247n17; Conakry Kas, 224n72, 247n17; In Search of Africa, 247n17 Diop, Alioune, 6 Dirlik, Arif, 136–37 Dyéké, 60, 61, 62, 66, 78–79, 172, 224n9

Fabian, Johannes, 26 Fairhead, James, 117 Fanon, Frantz, 8, 19, 21, 230n41; “On National Culture,” 95; The Wretched of the Earth, 95 Fantouré, Alioum, 7 Farannah, 5, 148, 149, 152, 154 fetishism, 13, 89–90, 100–101, 110–16, 120–26, 130–32, 141, 176, 178, 181, 188, 237n49. See also demystification campaign; masks The Fetishist, 89–90, 123 fi lms, 87, 195 folklore, 157, 168, 226n1 forestiers, 2, 3–5, 13, 14, 15, 110, 123, 175, 186–87, 209, 211, 212, 213–24, 235n24, 236n45, 240n51; and demystification campaign, 111, 117, 126, 128, 130; and marginality, 117–20, 124, 172, 190. See also ballet, forestier; students, forestier; youth, forestier forêt sacrée, 128, 129, 141, 142, 179, 181, 182, 237n46. See also initiation rituals Foutah Djallon, 6, 119, 120, 121, 127, 139, 152, 162, 229n33, 235nn28,30,31,33 France, 43, 50, 88, 97, 138, 201, 232n53; colonialism, 3, 10, 24, 29, 30, 51, 61, 81–82, 107, 199, 201, 202, 240n51; education, 11, 39, 59, 69, 77, 84; empire, 5, 21, 57, 62; Paris, 38, 42, 91, 97, 99 Franco-Algerian war, 219n4 French language, 6, 32, 44, 46, 69, 98, 147, 148, 155, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173, 188, 192, 197, 223n63, 228n11, 240n48, 241n68 French West Africa, 29, 36, 39, 59, 62, 97, 139, 143, 227n9

École Normale Pédagogique (ENP), 148–49, 152–53, 172 École Normale Rurale (ENR) (Rural Teacher’s Training School), 70–72, 234n14

Gama, 150, 151, 156–58, 188, 189 Gampara, 159–60, 162 Ghana, 206 Gorovogui, Benoit, 127–30, 138, 145–48, 151–56, 158, 159, 181–82, 239n30

Index grandes vacances (long vacations), 44, 74, 159–60 griots, 179, 187, 197 Guekédou, 72, 140, 178, 179 Guerzé, 184, 243n15. See also Kpelle Guha, Ranajit, 3, 9, 119, 137, 213 Guilavogui, Hawa, 181–87, 189, 190, 193–96, 200–203 Guinée Festival, 179 Guineé française, 10, 11, 22, 25, 38, 60, 77, 209 Haute Volta. See Burkina Faso Horoya-Hebdo, 49–52, 78–79, 87, 93–94, 103, 177, 204, 223n69, 226n36, 240n48 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix, 241n68 human sacrifice, 114, 116 initiation rituals, 116, 127, 129, 186, 234n14; Poro, 13, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 122, 124, 125–26, 129, 148, 179, 185, 190; Sande, 13, 110, 179; tatouage, 111–14, 125, 129, 141 Institut Polytechnique de Kankan (IPK), 201 Ivory Coast. See Côte d’Ivoire Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (JRDA), 49, 85, 92–93, 102–104, 121, 179, 183–87, 203, 233n8 Kaba, Lansiné, 7 Kankan, 119, 144, 152, 153–54, 193, 201 Karamakho All Akhbar, 89–90, 123 Karp, Ivan, 119, 125 Kéita, Fodéba, 91–92, 95–97, 98–100, 181, 222n50, 230n41, 231nn49,51; L’Aube africain (African Dawn), 230n41. See also Ballet de Kéita Fodéba; Ballets-Africains; Théâtre Africain Kéita, Modibo, 39 Kéita, Sidiki Kobélé, 8 Kéita, Soundiata, 192 Kerouané, 191, 192, 193–94, 195, 196 Kindia, 52, 89, 198 King, Adèle, 232n53 Kissi, 13, 109–10, 117, 131, 140, 168, 225n36, 233n9, 240n48 Kissidougou, 117, 154, 235n30 Kono, 13, 109–10, 117, 131 Koundia, Kouyaté, 232n54 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 231n51 Kouroussa, 59 Koyama, 181, 184, 191 Kpelle, 13, 44, 109–10, 111, 117, 127, 131, 139,

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159, 160, 171, 174, 188, 189, 225n36, 233n9, 240n48, 241n58, 243n15 Labé, 229n33 Lamah, Joachim, 137–38, 151, 158, 164–70, 173, 174, 187, 193, 241n59 language, African, 35. See also names of individual languages Laye, Camara, 7, 222n50, 223n59, 231n51, 232n53; Dramouss, 7; L’Enfant noir (The Dark Child), 59, 60, 62, 99 “Le meilleur citoyen de la Révolution” (“The Best Citizen of the Revolution”), 169 Leach, Melissa, 117 Lee, Sonia, 232n53 Lelong, M. H., 111 Leunda, Xavier, 74 Liberia, 3, 117, 122, 130, 131, 149, 164, 172, 174, 175, 184, 187, 207, 212, 214, 241n59, 242nn74,78, 248n33 Little, Kenneth, 126 Lola, 1, 150, 158 Loma, 13, 109–10, 111, 113, 115, 117, 119, 127, 131, 138, 139, 146, 155, 181, 225n36, 233n9, 240n48, 243n15 Loua, Cécé, 138, 151, 158–64, 166, 174, 198– 200 Lower Guinea, 181 Lumumba, Patrice, 150 L’Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée (UAJG) (Organization for the Action of Guinean Youths), 30, 31, 33 Lycée Château d’Eau, 168 lycée. See schools Macenta, 70, 71, 72, 109, 111, 112, 113–14, 115, 117, 119, 127, 138, 140, 142, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154, 155, 167, 178, 179, 181, 184, 187, 188, 191, 193, 195, 196, 233n11, 242n78 Maison du Parti, 163 Maisons des Jeunes (Houses of Youth), 30, 31, 33–35, 89, 91 Mali, 144, 242n74 Malinké, 13, 14, 44, 119, 120, 121, 152, 155, 168, 179, 184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 192, 200, 201–202, 223n69, 225n36, 227n9, 229n31, 230n41, 231n51, 240n48 Mamdani, Mahmood, 48 Mamou, 52, 139, 193, 228n11 Mandingue, 201–202, 231n51 Manichean categories, 51; ethics, 4; logic, 96; oppositions, 6; paradigms, 30 manifestations antinationales scolaires. See teachers’ strike

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Mao Zedong. See China masks, 101–102, 110, 114, 129, 141, 189, 233n9. See also demystification campaign; fetishism; initiation rituals Matoto, 193 Mbembe, Achille, 206, 209, 216n15 Meeting of Capitaine Péroz and Samory, 88, 91 Miller, Christopher, 8, 95, 231n51; Theories of Africans, 230n41 Ministry of National Education, 50 Ministry of Telecommunications, 167 Ministry of Youth, Arts, and Culture, 120, 178 modernity, 35, 87, 97, 118, 122–24, 134, 136–37, 153, 248n33 modernization, 27, 82, 131 Mount Nimba, 150, 239n35 mouvements d’ensemble (mass movements), 168–71, 197 Mozambique, 187 music. See choral works; songs Muslims, 13, 118, 120, 152, 188, 215n3, 235n24 mystification. See fetishism nation building, 19, 41, 43, 46–47, 54, 58, 64, 67, 81, 82, 115, 132, 206, 214 National Education Conference, 226n40 National Institute of Research and Documentation, 7 nationalism, 2, 4, 11, 12, 15, 21, 22, 31, 36, 191, 205, 206–207, 214, 222n56 N’Degwa, Stephen, 186 Nepal, 134–36 newspapers, 9, 208. See also Bingo; HoroyaHebdo Niane, Tamsir Djibril, 6, 224n72 Nkrumah, Kwame, 230n37 N’Zérékoré, 53, 55, 111, 114, 115, 117, 121, 122, 127, 138, 139, 142, 147, 149, 150, 151, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 171, 172, 174, 187– 88, 191, 198, 200, 224n9, 231n49, 235n30, 240n52, 242nn77,78 N’Zo, 150, 189 Ousmen, 227n11 Palais du Peuple, 194, 196, 197, 244n33 Pan-African Arts Festival, 93 parents, 53, 68, 103, 147, 155, 172. See also theater, and effect on parents Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), 5, 30, 36, 49, 50, 52, 75, 83, 85, 93, 103, 127, 145, 191, 205, 229n25, 231n51, 233n8; and demystification campaign, 110, 111, 112, 114,

123–25, 130, 234n14; and theater, 177, 184, 190, 197 pays natal, 81, 131, 140, 142, 154 Permanence du Parti, 192, 197 Peulh, 149, 168, 181, 228n11, 229n31 Pigg, Stacy Leigh, 134, 136–37 Pioneer Movement, 83, 197, 227n7 Pita, 235n30 plays, 9, 80, 88–89, 92, 94, 103, 157, 169, 179, 192, 228n11. See also individual titles; theater poetry, 9, 197 Popular Revolutionary Republic, 10, 57 Poro/Sande initiation. See initiation rituals, Poro; initiation rituals, Sande postcolonialism, 2, 5, 9, 11, 14, 15, 26, 48, 54, 75, 173, 186, 206, 209, 211, 213, 216n15, 229n28, 232n54 Pré, Roland, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 35, 42, 44, 85, 89; L’Avenir de la Guinée française, 27; and rural Guinea, 23–25, 32, 33, 34, 37, 41; and schooling, 28–29; “Un Programme pour le développement social de la Guinée française,” 22–24, 29, 31, 34, 42, 43; and urban Guinea, 23–27, 32, 34, 41 Présence Africaine, 6 priests. See Catholic Church propaganda, 4, 7 Protestants, 112, 201 Pular, 225n36, 240n48 Quinzaine artistique nationale, La, 58, 84, 104, 163, 166, 168–69, 179, 228n11, 241n53; Conakry, 80, 83, 171–72, 178, 191–96, 200; Macenta, 181; N’Zérékoré, 164, 198–99 Rabemananjara, Jaques, 6 Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, Le (RDA), 38–39, 90, 112, 140, 141, 233n8 récital (recitation), 197–98 Regional Inspection of Education, 174 religion, 188, 234n23. See also Catholic Church; Muslims; Protestants responsables, 164–65, 183–85, 196 Revue de l’Education Nationale de la Jeunesse, des Arts, et de la Culture (Review of the National Education of Youth, Arts, and Culture) (also known as Revue du Travailleur de l’Education Nationale), 67–72, 75 Richards, Paul, 126 Riesz, Janòs, 23, 24 Rivière, Claude, 49, 111, 112, 113, 114, 125–26, 131, 223n63, 229n35, 230n37 Romania, 15, 186

Index Samoe, 139, 142–43, 150, 159–60, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172 Sassine, Williams, 209, 212, 247n17 Saudi Arabia, 94 savannah, 118–19 schooling: access to, 63, 74, 133; colonial, 43, 48, 58–59, 71, 111, 123, 143, 146; enrollment, 63, 133, 237n1, 242n77; as path to social achievement, 113, 135, 220n19; postcolonial, 70, 143, 146, 211, 227n7, 248n33 schools: collège, 53, 55, 139, 140, 142, 147, 152, 156, 160, 164, 165, 168, 188; forest, 72, 138; lycée, 53, 148, 149, 163, 168, 171, 172; primary, 28, 33, 139, 142, 152, 155, 164, 174, 237n1, 242n77; rural, 63, 77–78, 151; secondary, 26–27, 42, 43, 45, 48, 78. See also individual school names Scott, James, 170 Sékou Touré, Ahmed, 1–2, 7, 8, 9, 39, 70, 73, 75, 96, 109, 119, 149, 198, 204, 207, 211–12, 222n50, 226n40, 227n10, 229n25, 235n29, 236n43, 241nn59,68,72; ascent to power, 4, 6, 25, 93; and ballet, 99, 179, 230n41; and decolonization, 21, 200, 210; and demystification campaign, 175, 181; “Discours aux élèves à la fermeture des lycées et colleges” (“Speech to Students at the Final Day of High Schools and Junior Highs”), 43–49; and educational reform, 7, 39–40, 50–51, 67, 146; and elites, 13, 14, 149; “La Complainte de la femme africaine,” 198–200; “La Morale Révolutionnaire et La Fonction Enseignante” (“Revolutionary Morality and the Teaching Function”), 63, 66, 68, 69, 76, 83; L’Action du Parti démocratique de Guinée en faveur de l’Emanicipation de la Jeunesse guinéenne, 36–38, 40, 42–43, 49, 51, 54, 108, 123, 136, 143, 234n23; L’Afrique en Marche, 63; as Malinké, 118, 202; as Muslim, 118; regime, 5, 37–38, 52, 53, 103, 173, 222n56, 229n35; and role of teachers, 62, 64–66, 68, 79, 152; and role of youth, 10, 16, 29–30, 33–34, 41, 43, 54, 84, 92, 196, 219n37, 223n59, 229n31; speeches, 149, 169; “The Teacher and the Guinean School,” 56–57; and theater, 82, 84, 93, 95, 100, 103– 104, 121–22, 165, 178, 183, 187, 194–96; and urban/rural differences, 29, 73, 145 Senegal, 3, 88, 91, 96, 206, 242n74 Senghor, Léopold, 39 Sérédou, 142–43, 150, 155, 184 Sierra Leone, 3, 117, 122, 130, 131, 207, 212, 214, 242nn74,78 Siguiri, 91, 98

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Socialist Cultural Revolution (SCR), 5, 7, 14, 57–58, 74–75, 77, 152, 153, 155, 156, 158, 165, 200 sofas, 229n28 soirée artistique, 192 soirée dansante (evening of dance), 89, 148, 193, 195 songs, 6, 163. See also choral works Soussou, 44, 121, 145, 168, 196, 223n69, 225n36, 229n31, 240n48 state power, 2, 12, 13, 47, 54, 81, 144, 148, 207 stereotypes, cultural, 23, 118 students, 11, 144; collégiens, 74, 78, 144, 148, 161, 223n63; forestier, 14, 146, 200; lycéens, 144, 148. See also schooling; schools; youth Sudan, 96 Suret-Canale, Jean, 6, 117 Tanzania, 206 tatouage. See initiation rituals teachers, 11, 14, 57, 63, 64, 70–71, 83, 140, 145; authority of, 58–59, 66, 144 teachers’ strike, 45, 48–55, 57, 62–63, 69, 120, 143, 146, 220n19, 224n72 theater, 11, 80, 85, 86–87, 90, 122, 147, 195, 227n7, 228n17; and effect on parents, 83, 86, 158, 177, 187, 193, 195; and effect on youth, 103, 168, 177, 186; and females, 104, 183–86; militant, 11–12, 13, 78, 79, 80–81, 88, 90, 93, 95, 102, 116, 121, 162, 164, 174, 175, 183, 185, 190–91, 195–97, 198, 200, 201– 203, 211, 213, 219n37, 228n17; recruitment for, 14, 166, 182, 184; and school, 83, 85, 134. See also ballet; Jeunesse du Rassemblement Démocratique Africain; plays; Quinzaine artistique nationale, La; responsables Théâtre Africain, 96–98. See also Kéita, Fodéba Third World, 3, 19, 81, 135, 205 Toma, 184, 187, 243n15. See also Loma tomes, 152, 240n41 Touré, Almany Samori, 84, 88, 227nn9,10, 229n28 Touré, Fodé Lamine, 69, 117–19; The Nomination of a Canton Chief, 89–91, 99; Une enfance africaine (An African Childhood), 59–62, 66, 78, 118, 146 Touré, Jean-Marie, 81, 88, 99, 228nn11,17, 229n34, 232n59 Toussiana, 139–40, 142, 158 Turino, Thomas, 206 tuteur, 147, 167, 239n30 Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée (Organ of Action for the Youth of Guinea), 231n52

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United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 68, 85, 179, 182 United States, 174 Upper Guinea, 6, 114, 122, 127, 152, 154, 156, 181, 200, 235n30 urban/rural differences, 107–108, 124, 136. See also youth, urban vs. rural Verdery, Katherine, 186 Voix des Jeunes, La (The Voice of Youth), 29, 31, 32–37, 42, 43, 45, 99, 108, 231n52. See also L’Unité de l’Action des Jeunes de Guinée (UAJG) (Organization for the Action of Guinean Youths) Voloshinov, V. N., 177

Williams, Raymond, 9, 108–109, 210; The Country and the City, 135 women, African, 14, 103, 163, 198–200, 233n11. See also theater, and females World War II, 119, 125, 138 Yomou, 142–43, 144, 150, 178, 235n30, 242n78 youth, 10, 11, 14, 26–27, 36, 37, 40, 41, 54, 133; forestier, 113, 131, 133, 136, 154, 173, 179, 191, 197, 202, 229n31, 248n33; rural, 21, 35, 42, 44, 49, 65, 108; urban, 42, 46–47; urban vs. rural, 11, 32–33, 37, 43–46, 48, 63, 74, 155, 173, 192, 193, 195–96, 223n63. See also students Zaire, 209 Zimbabwe, 206

JAMES D. ( JAY) STRAKER is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Literature and Cultures at the Colorado School of Mines. He has published several articles on Guinean youth and popular culture in Africa. This is his first book.