On 28 September 2009, in Conakry, the capital of Guinea, a peaceful protest calling for democratic elections came to a violent end when members of the military junta assaulted and killed over a hundred unarmed civilians. Those events trained international attention on Guinea and generated questions about the political roots of the regime that is today in power. Jay Straker's new book on youth in Guinea during the rule of Sekou Touré, Guinea's first president (1958–84), does not directly explain the Guinean crisis that is now being covered in newspapers the world over. However, it goes a long way towards unveiling the rich and troubled trajectory that Guinea followed in the decades following its independence from French colonial rule.
Straker's study constitutes a welcome contribution to a growing body of historically informed scholarship on society and politics in postcolonial West Africa. He rightly points out that analyses of independent Guinea often focus on Touré, a divisive figure who inspired awe and admiration in some and fear and abhorrence in others. But the obsession of academics and others with high politics has obscured the much more complicated effects of Touré's regime among Guinea's inhabitants. Straker seeks to rectify this disparity by exploring how youth from the forest region, located in the southeastern part of the country, understood and experienced Guinea's socialist revolutionary politics.
As Straker points out, forest youth embodied two very different categories of Guinean nationalist thought. Touré saw youth as allies and resources, faithful cadres who could be molded into loyal Guinean nationalists and who, through proper training and education, would advance the aims of the revolutionary agenda. The forest, by contrast, stood at the margins of the nationalist imaginary. The forest region was physically distant from the capital. Its ethnically heterogeneous population was associated with social practices and belief systems distinct from those that predominated elsewhere in the nation. Political elites specifically identified the forest region with masking ceremonies and initiation rites propagated by secret societies, or Poro, practices that the state singled out and sought to eliminate with its ‘demystification’ campaigns of 1959–61. Through his focus on youth from the forest, or forestiers, the author is able to investigate the limits and constraints of Touré's expansive nationalist vision and to explore the collision of socialist ideals with ethnic and regional prejudices.
Straker considers the ideologies and policies that emerged around youth, education, and pedagogy in the emerging nation in Part I. His readings of various texts, policies, and plays provide an outline of revolutionary politics and their inconsistencies. Part II delves into the experiences and reminiscences of a handful of educated forestiers whose lives were profoundly marked by Touré's revolutionary agenda. These personal histories reveal the myriad demands that state officials made on its youthful citizens, from dictating their educational and professional paths to imposing agricultural production quotas and requiring participation in theater and dance competitions. These narratives, based on interviews masterfully interwoven with other historical sources, make clear that the interventionist Guinean state often acted contrary to individual interests and ambitions. The ways in which Straker's subjects responded to Touré's regime – one young man fled to Liberia – furthermore reveal that Guinean peoples were not a mass of unquestioning adherents to Touré's revolutionary nationalism.
Straker's discussion of ‘militant theater’ is particularly illuminating. Officials conscripted young people into regionally organized theater and dance troops. Recruits were often forced to spend several months far from their families in grueling rehearsals that culminated with annual national competitions held in Conakry. The forestier troops fared tellingly in these events. Touré himself dismissed the didactic plays put on by the forestiers, noting that their lessons about the dangers of ‘fetish’ beliefs were appropriate to the region but not to the nation. But dance troops from the forest excelled on the national stage, often winning national titles. Their ballets put on public display and ‘demystified’ masks and other rituals that had previously been the secret domain of elderly male forestiers. These ballets thus served both to reinforce the cultural practices that distinguished forestiers from other Guineans and also to affirm the liberating power of youth performance to cast away traditions perceived as anachronistic and anti-national.
As Straker shows, however, the treatment of forest youth by the state did not result in their wholesale alienation from the national project. Although forestiers were often subject to blunt stereotyping, cultural denunciation, and the most extreme forms of state intervention, the men and women with whom the author worked advanced a subtle interpretation of Touré's revolution. While critical of the enormous time ‘wasted’ on state-mandated activities, they nonetheless acknowledge that the hardships and joys of revolutionary youth politics helped to forge a nation. Straker concludes that these ‘unchosen youthful ordeals’ created ‘meaningful knowledge and capacities’ (p. 214) that differentiate youth born during the revolutionary period from those who have been born since that time.
For all its assets, this reader does have some quibbles with the book: Straker's prose is often vivid and insightful but at times it can be quite turgid. More images would have been welcome, of militant theater performances as well as of the men and women who figure into the second half of the book. Finally, it would have been useful for the author to contend more specifically with the experiences of female youth. Touré has long been heralded for embracing a rhetoric and policy of female empowerment, but Straker's interviews provide numerous examples of how state officials targeted young women and made them suffer because of their gender. The author could have fruitfully expanded those particular cases into a more general analysis of the contradictory effects of Touré's regime on girls and women.
Those concerns aside, this book is an important one. It sheds light on the voices and perspectives of ‘common’ Guineans, and it brings the study of Guinea's history to a new and more nuanced level. It will be of general interest to those concerned with questions of nationalism, socialism, and youth in Africa and elsewhere, and it will also be of interest to those focusing on African cultural politics and postcolonial African states.
