Description
Book SynopsisThis book is different from existing works on Ahmed Sékou Touré and the Guinean Democratic Party (PDG) and their struggle for national independence. Its uniqueness stems from the fact that all the chapters focus on the Guinean traditions of struggle over memories between the elites and the subordinates, highlighting the independent initiatives of the latter. Other books on Ahmed Sékou Touré are primarily based on their writers' political or social history perspectives. This is the first study that equally integrates political and social history to address the theoretical and methodological issues of identity and construction of identity as necessary for understanding the roles of the elites and the subordinates in their struggles for access to power and resources in colonial and postcolonial Guinea. In this book, Saidou Mohamed N'Daou provides equal space for the initiatives and interests of the elites and the subordinates. Ahmed Sékou Touré used the ideology of the PDG as a mirror
Trade Review
“Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and autobiographical analysis, Saidou Mohamed N’Daou offers unique insights by his rich descriptions of the struggles over memories in Guinea, from the precolonial to the postcolonial, socialist era. N’Daou convincingly shows that the elite and the rest of the population had competing nationalist agendas in which both mobilized images of great Mande empires.” —Jan Jansen, Leiden University, The Netherlands
“Saidou Mohamed N’Daou offers a unique and well-informed perspective on multiple aspects of the political and cultural history of Guinea, focused on the time of Ahmed Sékou Touré, who led the nation into independence and later dictatorship. He combines his autobiographical perspective, as a student inculcated with the ideology put forth by Ahmed Sékou Touré, with an analysis of that ideology. His record of that historical development leads to a sort of intellectual autobiography, illustrating the steps by which he cast off the indoctrination. The book crosses generic lines: it is documentary, philosophical, autobiographical, and in places speculative. In this amalgam lies its value. One might here offer a disquisition on how the political history of African states has been ignored. Saidou Mohamed N’Daou’s book is a corrective to that blindness.” —Stephen Belcher has taught at the University of Nouakchott (Mauritania), The Pennsylvania State University, and The Julius Nyerere University in Kankan (Guinea)
Table of Contents
From the Ideology of the PDG to Ahmed Sekou Toure’s First Order of Knowledge (Theoretical and Methodological Implications) – Ahmed Sekou Toure: Formative Years and the Issue of the First Order of Knowledge – Transforming Paradigms, Intellectual Immersion, Creativity, and Self- Individuation – Ahmed Sekou Toure: Numinous Selections (Metaphilosophy and Its Ideological Forms of Expression) – Critical Review of Theoretical, Contextual, and OrganizationalIssues – Ahmed Sekou Toure: History of Guinea or Histories of Guinea? (Illustrative Chapters of the Integrated Approach) – Subordinate Groups and Their Struggle over Memories: A History without the Griots (Professional Storytellers) – The Elite of Groups of Villages’ Struggle over the Memories of the 1871 Foton War in Precolonial Sangalan Federation – Urban Colonial Guinea: Competition over the Memories of the Strike of 72 Days (Ahmed Sekou Toure and Aissata Mafory Bangoura) – Postcolonial Socialist Guinea: Competition over the Memories of Sundiata Keita (Niane’s “Sundiata” as Ahmed Sekou Toure and Conrad’s “Sundiata” as Fakoli) – Postcolonial Socialist Guinea: Struggle over the Memories of Almamy Samory Toure’s History (“Almamy Samori Toure” as Ahmed Sekou Toure, “Karamoko Lamina” as Dialonka) – Histories of Dress and History of Guinea from 19th to 20th Century (Not Only of Ahmed Sekou Toure and the PDG) – Index.
