Sékou Touré

Ahmed Sékou Touré was born in Faranah, French Guinea, on the ninth of January 1922, the great-grandson of Samori Touré — the founder of the Wassoulou Empire, who had held off France for sixteen years a generation earlier. The genealogy was deliberate. Sékou Touré built his political identity on the inheritance.

He led the Democratic Party of Guinea from its founding in 1946. In 1958 Charles de Gaulle offered the French colonies a referendum: associate with France within a new Franco-African Community, or take immediate independence with no French aid, no French personnel, and no transitional support. Every French African colony voted to associate. Guinea, under Sékou Touré, voted no. He said: "We prefer poverty in liberty to wealth in servitude."

France retaliated. Civil servants were withdrawn, telephone exchanges destroyed, currency reserves emptied. Guinea took independence on the second of October 1958 as one of the poorest countries in Africa. Sékou Touré governed it for twenty-six years. He survived seventeen coup attempts, took aid from the Soviet Union and from the United States in alternation, and built the bauxite industry that remains Guinea's principal export.

His domestic record is contested. The Camp Boiro detention center, where political opponents were held, holds a place in West African political memory comparable to that of Robben Island in Southern Africa — but as a place of repression, not of resistance. The number of dead remains debated.

His symbolic importance, however, is uncontested. He was the African leader who, given the choice, refused. The decade following his refusal saw fifteen further African colonies vote for independence. The framework he established made that possible.

He died in Cleveland, Ohio, on the twenty-sixth of March 1984, age sixty-two, of heart-surgery complications.

He is honored here as the African statesman who, when offered association, said no.