I. HUNTING THE FIFTH COLUMN, 1970–1971

Though its most serious repercussions would be felt inside Guinea, it was an international incident that set off the single largest paroxysm of repression in the bloody period between 1969 and 1976. Early in the morning of 22 November 1970, a small force disembarked from several troop boats offshore at Conakry. Sékou Touré took to the airwaves the same morning to identify the source and goals of the invasion. Guineans heard him over Radio Conakry, known as the “Voice of the Revolution”: “Since 2 a.m. this Sunday 22 November, you have been the victim, in your capital of Conakry, of aggression from imperialist forces.… This aggression is part of the plan of foreign powers to re-conquer the revolutionary countries of Africa. Portuguese colonialism is the bridgehead for this aggression.”Footnote ⁸ Non-Guinean eyewitnesses confirmed the details and agreed that Portugal was likely behind the invasion. A U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer reported “being fired upon by nine black African men, only one of whom could communicate with him in French, and all of whom carried automatic weapons.” The U.S. ambassador, Albert W. Sherer, reported that he personally had seen and photographed “at least four large unmarked vessels” offshore. “The operation reflects beyond question the existence of command and control organization,” he told his superiors at the State Department; “…there is overwhelming evidence that Portugal has supported this raw aggression against an independent state.”Footnote ⁹

Twelve years after Guinea's independence from France, it was hardly unusual for Touré to invoke an imperialist plot to explain violence and turmoil in his country. This time, though, he was not crying wolf, and the latest instance of the “permanent plot” against Guinea clearly had its origins outside the country.Footnote ¹⁰ The same could not be said of several previous outbreaks, which obviously owed more to domestic dissent than to foreign manipulation. Meeting in New York on the day of the invasion, the United Nations Security Council decided to respond by sending a fact-finding mission to Conakry. The mission reported two weeks later, confirming Sherer's initial analysis. The Security Council's envoys determined that the invasion force numbered between three and four hundred men, and had three objectives. First, the invaders sought to free Portuguese prisoners captured in Guinea-Bissau by the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and held at Camp Boiro. Second, they were trying to weaken PAIGC by assassinating its leader, Amilcar Cabral, and by cutting off its rearguard and supply chain. Finally, the UN mission found enough evidence to support the Guinean government's contention that Portugal was trying to help Guinean dissidents to kill Sékou Touré and overthrow his regime. They largely succeeded in the first objective, but failed to harm either Cabral or Touré.Footnote ¹¹

The PDG moved quickly to demonstrate that it was still in control. Once the bulk of the invading force had returned to the Portuguese ships off Conakry's harbor, Guinean gendarmes began to arrest anyone left behind. The Guineans told the Security Council mission they had captured eighty Portuguese-speaking fighters. The mission interviewed eight of the captives, noting that all were black, spoke “Creole or a Portuguese patois,” and bore the “physical marks of ill-treatment.”Footnote ¹² But the government did not stop with the arrest and torture of armed foreigners. On 2 December, the Voice of the Revolution broadcast the confession of one João Lopez, who alleged that the 150 Guinean dissidents in the invading party wore green armbands “to enable them to make contact with collaborators in Conakry.”Footnote ¹³ Even at this stage, the confessions of Guinea's prisoners bore a closer resemblance to political theatre than to a legitimate step in a judicial process. The government's decision to broadcast Lopez's statement was a signal that Guinea was about to initiate a search for the alleged local collaborators.

There were two waves in the hunt for the “fifth column” that supposedly facilitated Portugal's invasion. The first began in mid-December with the arrest of Guinean citizens, including several members of Touré's own cabinet, plus a handful of naturalized Europeans and other foreign-born residents. On 18 January 1971, the Guinean National Assembly was convoked as a “Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal” to judge and sentence those in custody. After hearing from the president, who had already renounced his right of clemency, the tribunal received the report of a commission of inquiry headed by Sékou Touré's half-brother Ismaël. Ismaël Touré and his co-commissioner Mamadi Keita accused not only Portugal, but also France and West Germany of conducting elaborate operations to spy on and overthrow the government of Guinea. After two and a half hours of this, the commissioners announced that they had successfully dismantled the fifth column, “all the networks, all links in the chain.” They then listed the individuals whose guilt they had established. These fell into four categories: Portuguese soldiers; mercenaries of various nationalities; “principal actors” responsible for the conspiracy; and “accomplices” whose guilt was demonstrated by their “moral or material corruption,” their participation in the “propaganda of intoxication and of systematic denigration of the regime,” or their “traffic in currency or sabotage of the national economy.” They proposed to release a further thirty people and to expel the wives and children of sixteen of the foreign-born convicts. The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal delivered its verdict on 24 January: fifty-eight death sentences plus thirty-six sentenced to death in absentia; sixty-eight sentences of life imprisonment with hard labor; and all the proposed expulsions.Footnote ¹⁴

The signal for the second wave came in mid-May 1971 when Touré and several of his top officials began to allege that Portugal was planning another invasion. The arrests that followed cut even deeper into Guinean society. According to one prominent victim, Minister of State for Youth and Tourism Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, they followed a distinctive pattern. First, Touré himself would suggest an arrest. Before moving against an individual, the regime's seers would perform a set of occult rituals to paralyze the target and “kill” his or her will. Leaving nothing to chance, the regime would also pursue a more prosaic form of paralysis. Even as one member of an extended family was being arrested, another would be promoted so as to sap the family group's cohesion and its ability to act.Footnote ¹⁵ Diallo and other survivors provide remarkably consistent accounts of what happened next. Once arrested, each prisoner would be held in solitary confinement without food or water for several days—the diète noire—then invited to sign a confession. If the prisoner did not sign, he or she would be sent to the cabine technique and subjected to a variety of tortures, including the application of electrical current to the body. Torture sessions would be interspersed with further opportunities to confess. The confession itself took the form of a statement prepared for each individual and presented to him or her by the commission of inquiry, usually in the person of Ismaël Touré. The prisoner was often pressured to elaborate on the prepared confession by denouncing a specified number of additional people. Once the prisoner agreed to sign, he or she would be recorded reading the confession. The recording would then be broadcast on the Voice of the Revolution, and the cycle would begin again with the newly named victims. The U.S. chargé d'affaires in Conakry, Donald Norland, noted that the resulting mood in the capital “can only be described as a ‘Madame Lafarge’ syndrome,” which he defined as “watching for the tell-tale radio hint that new heads are about to roll.”Footnote ¹⁶

The broadcasts of second-wave confessions began on the evening of 29 July 1971 and dominated the Voice of the Revolution for the next three months. The PDG took no chances in ensuring that its broadcasts would reach the largest possible audience. In addition to promoting them with what the U.S. embassy called “unprecedented advance publicity,” the party instructed local organizers and militants to form “listening groups so that the people could pass judgment in full knowledge of the cases in hand.”Footnote ¹⁷ Those who confessed to playing some role in the permanent plot against Guinea's independence included figures in the military, government, administration, and trade, Guinea's own ambassadors to the USSR and the United States, and a host of people, mostly traders, whose connection to political power was tenuous at best. And the listeners were by no means confined to Guinea; the French language broadcasts were being heard and monitored from Dakar, Senegal to Kaduna, Nigeria, a distance of more than 2,700 kilometers.

In many cases, this audience heard statements that were both long and detailed. Most contained certain common elements. Each culprit identified which of several spy networks he had joined and when. For example, Karim Bangoura, who served as secretary of state for industry and mines and was Guinea's ambassador to Washington from 1963 to 1969, admitted to having been a member of France's secret service since 1958, as well as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since 1964 and the West German secret service since 1966. The next common element is amply illustrated by Karim Bangoura's confession: money. Most of the deponents admitted to being paid enormous sums by the networks alleged to be working to overthrow Guinea's revolution. Bangoura confessed he had received a salary of U.S.$2,000 per month from France, for a total of 79.5 million CFA francs plus 8.15 million CFA francs for “special services” rendered to the French. For its part the CIA was supposed to have paid him another $5,000 per month; with a membership allowance and bonuses for special services rendered, Bangoura confessed to having pocketed $657,000 from U.S. sources. Even this was not enough. The West Germans had supposedly paid him another $335,250 for his services to them. All told, he said, the three secret services had paid him “a total of $1,373,850, the equivalent of 343.5 million Guinean francs.”Footnote ¹⁸ The final common element was denunciation. The culprits were required to identify who had recruited them and to list all the individuals they knew to be part of each network.

Crucially, the parade of plotters and their astronomical wealth was never believable. The U.S. embassy's Donald Norland reported that although the accused fifth columnists spoke in “what appeared to be normal tones,” several factors “indicated prepared text”: “Pages could be heard being turned,” he noted, and the full text appeared the next day in the PDG newspaper, Horoya. Even from the first broadcasts, “the [popular] mood seems now to be one of apathy and, for the first time, of growing disbelief.… The substance of the accusations, the precise scenario outlined, the amounts paid are beyond the imagination of all but [the] most convinced Party militants.… No one swallows it all although most are willing to believe there have been cases of corruption, illegal money changing, etc.” Within Conakry's diplomatic corps across the geopolitical spectrum, “there is clear consensus that ‘someone’ behind the scenes is producing and coordinating these tales, with the East Germans and Chinese most frequently named.”Footnote ¹⁹ With time, some of these suspicions were confirmed, though not the diplomats' conviction that foreign elements were writing the scripts. Credible reports began to appear as early as the following year from people who had managed to smuggle letters out of Camp Boiro, confirming that the confessions were fictions and the admissions had been secured by torture.Footnote ²⁰ Even Sékou Touré showed signs of disbelief, or at least reluctance to assert their veracity. Togolese journalist Polycarpe Johnson interviewed Guinea's president at the height of the second wave. To the question, “But, Mr. President, do they really pay one all that money?” Touré responded by explaining how saddened and shocked he was that a specific individual had betrayed him. A question about allegations that Guinea had been the subject of economic sabotage drew a similar non sequitur response.Footnote ²¹

The results of the procès des ondes (trial by radio) were ultimately ratified by a series of party meetings in late September and early October. Many of the detainees were shot on the night of 17 October 1971; others remained in prison with the survivors of the first wave. Prisoners who did not die of torture, starvation, disease, or other maltreatment were held indefinitely. They were often deprived of contact, not only with the outside world but also, more remarkably in extremely over-crowded conditions, with their fellow-prisoners. When it did come, release was timed to contribute to the government's propaganda or political objectives, rather than coinciding with the end of specified time served. For example, Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo was released on the tenth anniversary of the Portuguese invasion, 22 November 1980. Jean-Paul Alata, who had renounced his French citizenship in the early 1960s to serve Touré's revolution, was released on 14 July 1975 to celebrate the resumption of diplomatic relations with France after a ten-year hiatus. Another European prisoner, Adolf Marx, was freed in 1974 when Guinea resumed relations with West Germany, whose ambassador it had expelled in January 1971.Footnote ²²

II. “FRANCE HAD THE GUILLOTINE”

The Touré regime's 1971 purge of Guinea's so-called fifth column was undeniably both a tragedy and a travesty of justice. Even the most generous or results-oriented commentator could not characterize as a fair trial of fact the process of denunciation, arrest, torture, and then forced signature of incredible scripted confessions. The accused was not only unrepresented: if Diallo is to be believed, in many cases his own family was turned against him, so that the prisoner was completely isolated, with nobody to testify on his behalf even if given the opportunity. Nor was a consistent code of law or practice employed. In its insistence on “popular” trials, including trial by radio, and its use of the government rather than a duly constituted court as the tribunal charged with ratifying trial results, Guinea's postcolonial state ensured that the only interpretation of treason that mattered was disloyalty to the ruling elite. If it is possible, the process was even less legitimate than Lon Fuller's classic description of law divorced from morality:

Even if the PDG's objective was not to govern but to paralyze, however, it is analytically unsatisfactory simply to dismiss its selection of judicial procedures as the natural outcome of a generic totalitarianism. The regime's selection of the instruments of injustice was made in a historical context that included among its political and cultural influences nearly seventy years of formal French colonial rule. In order to gauge whether postcolonial theory is helpful in understanding postcolonial Guinea we must explore both French and non-French influences on the country's legal system.

Long before the advent of postcolonial theory, Guinea's political behavior called aspects of its French heritage to mind. U.S. chargé d'affaires Donald Norland was neither the first nor the last to invoke the analogy of French Revolutionary terror in his efforts to describe and understand events in Guinea. French diplomats posted to Conakry before 1965 also spoke of la terreur, invoking French history to convey the local atmosphere in the wake of a wave of repression in 1960.Footnote ²⁴ The analogy reflected the regime's own rhetoric. Within weeks of independence, Touré began describing Guinea's path as a revolution and citing the French precedent. In a speech to his party on 5 November 1958, Touré threatened to place “counter-revolutionaries” in front of a firing squad, if necessary: “France had the guillotine, Guinea will have the stake,” he announced.Footnote ²⁵ Academic assessments have also picked up the trope of Guinea as a revolutionary state on the French model. Writing in 1977, historian Lansiné Kaba noted, “The Guinean context is reminiscent of the 1792–93 virtue-loving Jacobin regime in France, with its mass arrests, confiscatory policies, and self-righteousness.” Touré's pronouncements resembled those of Marat, he thought, and both reflected common roots in the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.Footnote ²⁶

But sorting out whether Guinea borrowed techniques for punishing traitors from revolutionary regimes, either contemporary or eighteenth-century, requires a more concerted attempt to trace connections and establish either the need or the advantage of such borrowings for the Guinean state. Although Touré's rhetoric had obvious Marxist inflections and his state maintained more cordial ties with both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China than it ever did with the former colonial power, there are good reasons to doubt that justice in postcolonial Guinea owed much in conception or in practice to the direct influence of either revolutionary state. The PDG's actions do bear a resemblance to Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–1938, especially the Moscow show trials of former oppositionists and other prominent individuals in the Soviet Union.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, to the East German embassy in Conakry, in 1971 Touré was engaged in the similar work of limiting the impact of an international conspiracy to “prepare the ground for the counter-revolution.”Footnote ²⁸ However, if the PDG was indeed seeking to replicate Soviet revolutionary tactics, it seems more likely that its knowledge of Stalin's terror came from the wide-ranging reading of its autodidact president than from explicit or implicit instruction from Soviet diplomats. The period of closest contact between Guinea and the Soviet Union began shortly after Guinea's independence in October 1958 and ended abruptly with the expulsion of Soviet ambassador Daniil Solod in December 1961. Two aspects of the Soviet-Guinean relationship suggest that it is unlikely to have included a direct transfer of “how to” information about the 1937–1938 terror. First, the period 1958–1961 coincided with Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalinism and its tactics, exemplified by his February 1956 secret report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, in which he denounced Stalin's crimes. Touré was likely well aware of this: Khrushchev's report was published in Le Monde beginning in March of that year, at a time when the Guinean was in Paris as a newly elected deputy in the National Assembly.Footnote ²⁹ Second, and more significant, the Guinean political elite justified Solod's expulsion on the grounds that he had been trying to “educate” Guineans, including several intellectuals whom the regime convicted of leading the so-called Teachers' Plot against it in November 1961. Guinea's prickly reaction to the threat of overt influence extended well beyond the Soviet Union. Diplomatic observers frequently noted Touré's resistance to being told what to do by foreigners of any ideological conviction. Unlike others, however, the Soviets got the message. When they returned to Conakry early in 1962, they scaled back their aid and propaganda efforts so as to avoid Guinean reprisals for supposedly patronizing behavior.Footnote ³⁰

If the PDG was emulating a judicial model from the communist world in 1971, it is more plausible that the influence was Chinese. U.S. diplomatic sources suggest that Guinea's attitude toward the People's Republic of China began to change in 1966. In a report from March of that year U.S. diplomats in Conakry dismissed allegations that Guinea was a “Chicom stronghold” in West Africa on the grounds, among others, that China's political influence was “at best negligible at lower levels and has been ineffectual at policy levels” due to Touré's “deep distrust [of its] political objective.”Footnote ³¹ By the end of the year, the same source was reporting a significant increase in Chinese aid to Guinea. In August 1968 Touré initiated Guinea's own “Cultural Revolution.” In effect this was an attempt to reorganize Guinea's education system, but the choice of label suggests admiration of Mao's more far-reaching efforts in China.Footnote ³² Even here, though, there is no evidence that the PDG sought or received pointers on how to operate a revolutionary judicial system from China, or that any such instruction was required.

It is surely telling that no U.S. observer attributed the Touré regime's efforts to punish its enemies to Soviet or Chinese influence—not in 1961, 1965, or 1971—despite the embassy's minute attention to shifts in the regime's ideology and that of its leading members. The West German embassy believed that the regime's fantastic construction of French, American, and West German so-called “Nazi SS” spy networks was based on information provided by East German representatives in Conakry, but there seems to be no suggestion that the procedures used were borrowed from any other state, revolutionary or otherwise.Footnote ³³ The lack of any such observations or interpretations does not disprove that the Soviets, the Chinese, or the East Germans transferred the techniques or materials used to torture and convict Guinea's victims. Nor does it eliminate the possibility that Guinea was in some way trying to emulate these revolutionary regimes. But it does suggest that we, like contemporary observers, should consider the possibility that PDG injustice reflected Guinea's own history and political culture more than recent foreign imports.

Although the legacy of French colonial rule was necessarily part of Guinean political culture, the postcolonial state did not simply perpetuate the French legal system any more than it did the Soviet or Chinese model. The break was a matter of both circumstance and choice. After it declared itself a Republic on 2 October 1958, Guinea became independent of its former colonizer, and of its legal system, to a degree that was unique in postcolonial Africa. French president Charles de Gaulle personally ordered a response to Guinea's “non” to his offer of membership in the new French Community that combined a brutally direct withdrawal of French administrative and financial support with a rather more passive-aggressive refusal to engage diplomatically with the new state. Although France protested that its treatment of Guinea was necessary to support the legitimacy and function of the French Community to which all its other African colonies now belonged, the metropole did little to disguise its hope that dire material conditions and isolation would inspire Guineans to overthrow their new president. Not surprisingly, the combination of tactics poisoned Franco-Guinean relations for most of Sékou Touré's twenty-six-year rule. Though the two countries maintained diplomatic relations from early 1959 until November 1965, and then again after 1975, the relationship was rarely congenial. The French were quick to take offence, and the Guineans were rarely reluctant to give it. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the PDG blamed most outbreaks of instability upon interference by France and those of its client states with which Guinea shared borders, especially Côte d'Ivoire. Unlike the United States and the Soviet Union, France did not establish a significant aid relationship with Guinea before the mid-1970s, and its trading links were attenuated at best. Economic relations could not, therefore, help smooth diplomatic disputes. Nor, in the absence of significant ongoing French commercial interest in independent Guinea, was there much pressure on France to try to preserve a French-style justice system to resolve disputes in Guinea.Footnote ³⁴

The justice system was unequivocally a victim of France's rapid withdrawal from Guinea. Within a month of Guinea's declaration of independence on 2 October 1958, France's high commissioner in Dakar, Pierre Messmer, reported that twenty-one out of a total of twenty-three magistrates had already left the new country. Of twenty-nine judicial clerks, only one opted to stay in Guinea after the end of October. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight civil servants who managed Guinea's police force were gone; the remaining two were assigned to work exclusively with the mission of liquidating and protecting French assets in Conakry. Guinea's judicial records, including records on all prisoners, were withdrawn and stored in Dakar. The records were returned to Conakry fourteen months later, but not without a bit of a fight. The question of Guinea's access to its own court records was rolled into negotiations on the broader issues of settling economic claims and counter-claims between the former colony and its metropole. Even after France had agreed to return the records, officials deliberately delayed the transfer, citing “recent incidents … [that] have marked a fairly notable tension” in Guinea.Footnote ³⁵

The PDG moved quickly to fill the gap. At the end of October 1958, Messmer reported that Sékou Touré's government was already focusing its attention on internal security and “control of the masses” at the expense of managing the new economic realities it faced. “Severe measures” had been taken, including the reallocation of significant budgetary resources towards the police and a new national army. Although Messmer acknowledged that the PDG had acted in haste to “maintain a certain standing,” he also saw a “new slide towards totalitarian methods,” one he considered to be irreversible. By the following September, French foreign affairs department analysts were pointing to Sékou Touré's “reversion” of the judicial services as evidence of increasing centralization of all power in the PDG's political bureau. Outside of Conakry, they opined, the PDG was “practically the only authority in existence.”Footnote ³⁶

French allegations of Guinean totalitarianism were, of course, self-serving. Not only did they appeal to the amour-propre of a political class forced to acknowledge that despite its “civilizing mission” French colonial authority was increasingly being rejected by Africans both north and south of the Sahara, but they also played a useful part in demonizing Guinea as a Cold War enemy. Nevertheless, the French were correct that Guinea's new government seemed intent on repudiating the more liberal elements of its colonial legal heritage. The histories of France's second colonial expansion stress the centrality to its mission civilisatrice of the project of introducing a European-style legal and judicial system to its colonies.Footnote ³⁷ French colonial archives are replete with correspondence from the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme (LDH) and other organizations that took equally seriously their project of ensuring that the Republic, having established the law in its colonies, act in conformity with both rules and principles.Footnote ³⁸ Naturally, colonized Guineans took a dimmer view of the effects of the justice enacted in the name of French civilization and principle. In the specific matter of how political prisoners were treated, however, postcolonial Guinea's repudiation of French models was particularly extreme. One of the French Republic's proudest penal traditions is the separate and relatively privileged treatment of political prisoners, a set of rights that was hard-won over the politically turbulent nineteenth century. In Guinea's jails and military camps, however, political prisoners were treated worse, not better, than ordinary prisoners. Touré also aggressively sought the extradition of dissidents and political opponents who had somehow escaped to neighboring countries, flouting the tradition which originated in France in the 1830s of treating political offences as an exception to extradition treaties. Failure to comply with his extradition requests tended to result in the neighbor in question being excoriated with the full strength of the Guinean president's considerable rhetorical skills.Footnote ³⁹

Despite France's abrupt exit and Guinea's apparent determination to eliminate its influence, there are echoes of three French judicial innovations in the postcolonial administration of justice in Guinea: pluralism; swift and arbitrary punishment of opponents of the regime; and the institution of the prison itself.

The French colonial state introduced to Guinean practice the notion of a plurality of overlapping legal systems that could be used according to the status of the litigants and the nature of their alleged infractions. This plurality is echoed in Guinea's resort to special-purpose tribunals applying new laws to suspected traitors. As Lauren Benton has argued, colonial legal systems were distinctive, “not … because they contained plural legal orders but because struggles within them made the structure of the plural legal order more explicit.… [The resulting] ascendance of state law appears as the product of history, and of widely reproduced conflicts.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This was no less true in French West Africa than in British India. The French federation of West Africa, of which Guinea was part, operated no fewer than three legal orders. French tribunals applied French civil and penal law to matters that involved Europeans or those assimilated to them, including traders, many of them of Syrian or Lebanese origin. A second system of tribunals sought to apply “customary” law to private matters among indigenous people, unless such customs “conflicted with the spirit of French civilization.” Both of these judicial systems were structured on the basis of the administrative hierarchy of the colony. The indigenous tribunals were subject to supervision at the territorial level (by the chambre d'homologation) and from the center of AOF (by the chambre d'annulation in Dakar). The third system was the Code de l'indigénat, which authorized French officers to discipline indigenous persons as required in the interests of maintaining order.

Guinea's postcolonial judicial violence resembles two aspects of the indigénat in particular. First, the offence for which the victim of the indigénat was being punished need not have been specified in any penal code, whether French or customary. If an official believed he needed to impose a sentence to discipline an African, he was not put to the trouble of having to define why the action offended against the standards of the colony or community. Second, the official could apply the sanction he thought fit without having to prove either fact or law at trial. The essence of the indigénat, therefore, was its arbitrary nature.Footnote ⁴¹

The final colonial legacy was the idea that social transgression could and should be punished by incarceration. Mamadou Dian Chérif Diallo argues that the very notion of imprisonment was unknown in precolonial Guinea, as it was throughout sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ⁴² Under each of the plural legal systems that France administered in AOF, the penalty for breach of both civil and criminal laws was often to be deprived of one's freedom of movement, prevented from engaging in the work with which one supported one's family, and even being forced to work, without pay, for the very authority that had so threatened one's livelihood. Diallo also suggests that the fact of incarceration brought great shame onto the prisoner, leading, in some cases, to suicide.Footnote ⁴³

This is not to say that colonial legal influence was direct or straightforward in Guinea. For one thing, the indigénat was abolished, thanks to the efforts of African politicians sitting as deputies in France's National Assembly, in December 1945. The generation of labor and political activists that led Guinea into independence, including Touré, came of age when their treatment as political opponents of the colonial regime far more closely approached the French ideal than it had before the end of the Second World War. They were also close observers of the gap between that ideal and the practices of the late colonial state as it sought to hang on to power in the face of Algeria's war of independence.Footnote ⁴⁴ Yet the connections remain enticing. To understand them, we must delve into the political culture that Touré constructed in his revolutionary state.

III. THE NATURE OF THE COLONIAL LEGACY

Florence Bernault has argued, “The penal system was successfully ‘grafted’ onto Africa, but … this transplant gave birth to specific, highly original models of penal incarceration.”Footnote ⁴⁵ There is no question that postcolonial Guinea's approach to incarceration, and to the quasi-judicial process that purported to justify it, was original. But the metaphor of giving birth, while powerful, does not fully illuminate the process by which the penal and judicial legacy of the colonial era affected the postcolonial state. As noted, there is little evidence for, and several strong considerations against, a direct transmission of technique to Guinea either from the French colonial apparatus or from other revolutionary regimes. Yet the specific colonial innovations of pluralism, arbitrary punishment under the indigénat, and penal incarceration suggest a link with postcolonial practice. The question, therefore, is what is the nature of any such connection?

Some rather promising possibilities open up if we consider the colonial legacy not as a matter of establishing a linear precedent but, instead, as having set a benchmark for what was, if not acceptable to Guinea's population, then at least conceivable as part of its governance. This shifts the field of inquiry from direct connections of behavior to the more diffuse issue of representation. The question becomes, how did France's successor in government use the legacy in its own construction of what governance was appropriate to a revolutionary regime? To answer this question of representation, the most useful analytical tool is to ask what Touré needed of the French legacy in order to legitimize both his new state and his own control over it.

Twelve years after independence, it is reasonable to assume that most Guineans would believe the range of acceptable governance, including judicial practice, to be what they had been told to believe about their recent experience, complemented by what they remembered, or were encouraged to remember, of the previous regime. Those who had contacts across Guinea's porous borders with Côte d'Ivoire, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, or Liberia might be exposed to somewhat more liberal economic models, but would not encounter significantly more contestable or democratic political regimes. Some may also have had memories of precolonial governance in the form of oral traditions, but to the extent that these conflicted with PDG practice, self-preservation would likely dictate that they be kept quiet.Footnote ⁴⁶

Sékou Touré constructed the PDG's form of revolutionary governance through ruthless control both of government and of the means of communicating with Guineans. The PDG was not only Guinea's sole political party; its structure extended down to the level of the village and the neighborhood, making its influence ubiquitous.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even though Guineans enjoyed a theoretical right to form competing parties, at least until 1965, in reality even the rumor of alternative political organization was enough to trigger the repressive apparatus of the state. The crisis of November 1965, which claimed as one victim Guinea's always-fragile relations with France, stemmed in part from the efforts of one Mamadou “Petit” Touré—a distant relation of the president—to exercise that right. The official investigation of that iteration of the permanent plot accused Petit Touré of creating the new Parti de l'Unité Nationale de Guinée to “give [the] appearance of legality to this group of plotters while they made [their] plans for [the] October 17 attack against government.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The PDG's monopoly of power, in turn, gave it control of the communications media. The only newspaper available to the literate few was the party organ Horoya. More importantly, the only radio station was the Voice of the Revolution. In the Guinea of the 1960s and early 1970s, as in most of Africa, the medium with the greatest reach and influence was the radio. When transistor radios reached African markets in 1959, they drove exponential increases in the number of radio sets in African ownership. Between 1955 and 1965, the number of radios in sub-Saharan Africa, excluding the Republic of South Africa, increased tenfold from about 460,000 to 4.8 million. Over the next decade, it quadrupled again to 18.5 million.Footnote ⁴⁹ Because of the common practice of sharing radios in poorer countries, each set was likely to be heard by many listeners, especially in rural areas.Footnote ⁵⁰ Both technology and content drove this expansion. The transistor represented a relatively small, cheap technology that was not dependent upon a central power supply or cumbersome batteries. Moreover, its advent in sub-Saharan Africa coincided in most parts of the continent with independence and profound political, social, and economic change. New African governments quickly recognized the potential of this technology for information, education, and other aspects of the urgent business of building nations and nationalism. A document prepared by UNESCO's secretariat in December 1961 spelled out the advantages:

The coincidence of the invention of the transistor radio with the independence of Africa gave this medium an inordinate importance in the efforts of new governments to create “popular commitment to new political structures.” The rapid rate at which the technology was adopted suggests that Africans, too, were quick to identify the potential of radios as means of keeping themselves informed about the rapid changes going on around them as well as a welcome source of entertainment and diversion.Footnote ⁵²

Radio also tapped into patterns of meaning that were especially important in the largely oral cultures of West Africa. As one analyst puts it, “Radio is the ideal medium in which to exploit established patterns of communication in an oral culture.… But a genuine dialogue is established only if radio also takes into account those things that remain unsaid: taboos, prejudices and deeply rooted misconceptions. If radio does not incorporate them, it does not enter into the world of real dialogue with the listener.”Footnote ⁵³ In West African cultures that have permitted diverse voices access to the radio, the unsaid, as well as “verbal disguises” such as circumlocution, metaphor, and culturally specific proverbs and folk tales have been a crucial part of protests against political authority. They permit the speaker to communicate subversive meanings to the audience while retaining the equally important ability to deny any disloyalty.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even in univocal revolutionary Guinea, however, the ruling party's speakers conveyed both obvious and unspoken messages when they took to the airwaves.

Many of the PDG's messages relied just as heavily on its representation of Guinea's colonial past as on its revolutionary present and future. The explicit message was that Touré's regime alone had delivered Guinea's independence from France, and it alone could protect the new country from the ongoing threat of re-conquest. Alpha Ousmane Barry has analyzed the rhetorical technique underlying Touré's speech, which he concludes was an “effective tool for the domination of the masses.” Barry outlines a three-stage process. First, Touré set the scene—Guinea's revolution, permanently under threat from beyond its borders—and established himself as its beleaguered hero. Second, he identified himself with his people as a “collective individual” confronting the foreign adversary. The third step was to found a society with a single consciousness: that of the Guinean revolution. “In this situation,” argues Barry, “the orator is the incarnation of the people. He is no longer an ordinary man but a mythical individual who transcends society and becomes the supreme leader of the revolution.” Touré “cultivated the illusion among Guineans” that their president could see, foresee, and control everything.Footnote ⁵⁵

Barry properly emphasizes the rhetoric of the complot permanent as a tool of power. However, power was not the sole purpose of the rhetoric of independence of which the complot was a part. It was also a tool to create legitimacy for the regime governing a state that could not guarantee other crucial indicia of sovereignty, such as control over its borders or the security of its people from foreign incursion.Footnote ⁵⁶ Touré established the centrality of independence—and, not incidentally, his own status as the only leader to have insisted on it—by linking it to an attribute that had profound resonance in most of the precolonial cultures that made up Guinea's people: dignity.Footnote ⁵⁷ He established this theme even before independence. His famous “poverty in freedom” speech, delivered before an austere de Gaulle on 25 August 1958, identified the right to independence as an essential component of Africans' “first and indispensable need” for dignity. A few months later he explained to a Conakry audience that the new national anthem, “Liberté,” signified more than the political freedom of Guinea, even more than the liberty of all of Africa. “It is the triumphant song of Dignity re-conquered and of a new, victorious future,” he said. In the Liberté speech he invoked the heroes of Guinea's resistance to colonial rule: “If at the time of the colonial conquest all Africans had had the courage and the pride of Alpha Yaya, Africa would never have been conquered,” he argued.Footnote ⁵⁸ On another occasion, Touré accused those in neighboring territories who had voted to accept the new French Community of suffering from an “awful dependency complex.” The African peasant, he argued, had “nothing to lose, except a part of his misery and his humiliation, in acceding to independence.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Touré's identification of political independence with personal and collective dignity struck a chord with his people, even as they suffered under his autocratic rule. As Jay Straker demonstrates, even people of the Forest region, who experienced at first hand the violence and brutality of the PDG's efforts to eliminate vestiges of precolonial culture as threats to its political monopoly, expressed strong feelings of identification with their new nation. Straker argues that the forestiers believed that their “struggles and sufferings” under the Touré regime “had forged degrees of dignity and moral integrity absent in both neighboring states, particularly Liberia, and in their own children's generation,” and observes that these beliefs challenge and complicate simplistic efforts to portray their “revolutionary travails” as suffering and resistance.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whether it was independence or suffering that restored it, dignity ranked among the highest values for Guineans.

Equally important to the legitimization of Guinea's postcolonial regime was its self-characterization as a modern, albeit revolutionary, state. Here, the role of France was unspoken. Though Touré never thanked the colonial regime for its contribution, its legacy of a multi-ethnic, bounded territory was essential for two reasons. First, it permitted independent Guinea to take the modern form of a sovereign state and member of the United Nations. Second, the unity of that state depended, in part, on its citizens' loyalty to the modern construction of Guinea above the ties of language, culture, or religion—a construction that was, after all, a colonial artifact.Footnote ⁶¹ The inherited structure, including those elements of the colonial justice system that Touré found useful, was also an important part of his regime's legitimacy. Touré made such a convincing case for the modernity of his state that in January 1966 the U.S. embassy in Conakry advised Washington that Guinea's experiment in independence and in the construction of a “modern” economy was important, not just for the sake of Guineans, but also as a beacon for the “evolution of other African states.”Footnote ⁶²

Both tropes—the modernity of Guinea's methods and Touré's identification of independence with dignity—help to explain the connections between the PDG's treatment of its political prisoners in 1971 and Guinea's French colonial legacy. It was important for the PDG's legitimacy that Guinea's revolutionary justice system be seen to be moving forward. In effect, this meant building on the colonial legacy of centralized power, guaranteed by plural legal systems, swift and arbitrary justice, and the decisive removal of dissident elements from positions where they might influence others. Using newly available technologies such as radio and electricity-based tortures was also a way of signaling that Guinea was continuing to modernize from the baseline established by the French.

The regime's representation of its colonial legacy also helps to explain the content of the political prisoners' confessions. If the hallmark of independent Guineans was their dignity, then forcing political prisoners to broadcast their unbelievable confessions was an act intended to strip them of their dignity and thereby put them outside the community of independent Guineans. Humiliation operated at two levels. On a material level, the PDG was signaling that it could reduce even its wealthiest enemies to destitution and isolation. Even if death sentences were commuted, which was the case for most of the foreigners and a number of Guineans, orders to confiscate the prisoner's property were usually carried out. The implications of confiscation for the victim's dependents were obvious. Prisoners required to denounce friends, family members, and colleagues as members of the various spy networks were also, in effect, being forced to commit social suicide. Their tales of unimaginable wealth contributed to alienating the PDG's victims from their families and their neighbors: who, after all, had benefited from all that money?

On a more conceptual level, denying political prisoners their dignity may also have been intended as a signal that they had lost any civil rights to which they were entitled as members of the Guinean national community. In Guinea in the 1960s and 1970s, of course, it would avail one little to insist on one's right to participate in the country's affairs, to equal treatment before its courts or tribunals, or to freedom from torture and other inhumane treatment once imprisoned—all rights guaranteed by the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, which Guinea signed in February 1967.Footnote ⁶³ Nevertheless, Touré was frequently at pains to defend the existence of formal rights, even if they were never intended to be enforceable against his revolutionary state. By denying their dignity, and thereby their membership of the independent nation of Guinea, Touré may have been signaling that his political prisoners were also excluded from the ambit of the formalities of the modern state, including its civil rights.

Sékou Touré and the PDG chose the instruments of their repression carefully, calculating how they would resonate among Guineans as signs of power exercised within the realm of what a modern state might conceivably deploy. Guineans and expatriates in neighboring countries were being sent a signal that any efforts to improve the situation by overthrowing Touré's government would be thwarted, and anyone displaying even the slightest disloyalty to the regime would be punished to the limits of its considerable powers. Nothing could save those whom the regime had targeted. Past service and loyalty to the Party were immaterial. There was no question of an impartial judicial proceeding, or indeed any opportunity to present one's own version of the facts. The fate of Guineans rested solely with the Party's leadership: what mattered was not what had really happened, but the “truth of the minister.”Footnote ⁶⁴

For their part, foreign listeners were being warned not to intervene in matters that were well within the purview of a sovereign state. They got the message. At least among the few Western countries still represented in Conakry, there was little enough appetite for intervention, and it was easily discouraged. West Germany was most active, backing up the pleas of its diplomats on behalf of its nationals being held prisoner in Camp Boiro (Hermann Seibold and Adolf Marx) with efforts to influence Guinea through other channels, such as personal contacts, its French neighbor, NATO, and the United Nations.Footnote ⁶⁵ Italy supported West Germany's unsuccessful efforts to get NATO to consider taking action, and relayed pressure from the Vatican to secure the release of Conakry's Roman Catholic archbishop, Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo.Footnote ⁶⁶ The U.S. ambassador joined others, including Italy's representative in Washington and three former American ambassadors to Guinea, in pushing his government to protest the fate not only of foreigners but also of Guineans. The U.S. government would not budge, citing minuscule prospects for being able to affect the course of events in Guinea and the possible threat to the interests of private American investors there.Footnote ⁶⁷