The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971

THE CHALLENGE OF GUINEAN INDEPENDENCE, 1958-1971 by Mairi Stewart MacDonald A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of History University of Toronto © Copyright by Mairi Stewart MacDonald, 2009 THE CHALLENGE OF GUINEAN INDEPENDENCE, 1958-1971 Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Mairi Stewart MacDonald Graduate Department of History, University of Toronto Abstract Since the end of French colonial rule in Guinea, “independence” has held a central place in its political culture. Implying both dignity and self-determination for the sovereign people which possesses it, independence is a concept that has meaning only in relation to other nation-states and cultures. Yet the political elite that dominated Guinea’s First Republic constructed a new national culture around this concept. The Challenge of Guinean Independence, 1958-1971 examines Guinea’s assertion of its right to independence and the response of powerful Western players, especially the United States and France, as Guinea challenged their assumptions about the nature of African sovereignty. Considering the history of the international relations of a single African state that enjoyed limited international power and prestige challenges conventions in the historiography of both Africa and international relations. It illuminates and contextualizes expectations concerning the meaning of modernity, African sovereignty as a matter of international law, and the end of formal colonial rule coinciding with the tensions and competitions of the Cold War. The study demonstrates that the international context played a crucial role, both in conditioning the timing and form of decolonization and in shaping the international community’s adaptation of colonial patterns of economic and political interaction to the new reality of African nation-states. Focusing on the invention, development and ii reception of one country’s insistence on independence in turn illuminates significant issues and events: the end of French colonial rule; limitations on the sovereignty of non- European postcolonial states; the advent of neocolonialism and the failure of the nominally anti-colonial United States to oppose it; the ideological appeal of African unity as a means of safeguarding sovereignty and the compromises that its institutional form entailed; foreign aid and the notion that development for modernization could be stimulated from outside; and the implications of unlimited internal autonomy for a state’s people. Guinea’s independence ultimately challenged developing norms of Western economic and political interaction with new African states by complicating assumptions about the universality of Western notions of economic development, justice and morality. iii Acknowledgments It is a great pleasure to be able to acknowledge and express my gratitude to a wide range of institutions and individuals for their support of this project and of its author. I am grateful for general or research travel support received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan; the Marty Memorial Fellowship of Queen’s University; and the University of Toronto’s graduate travel funds, including the Allen and Patricia Marchment Travel Award. Though I benefited enormously from the help of archivists and staff in all the archives consulted, I am particularly grateful to William K. Wallach at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and to Holger Berwinkel at the German Auswärtiges Amt Politische Archiv, both of whom helped to make my very brief visits highly productive and comfortable. I am also grateful to Jens Boel and his staff at UNESCO’s archives. Though UNESCO does not play as prominent a role in this story as I initially believed it would, it was through its archives that I first realized how important a part the idea of independence played in Guinea’s relations with the larger world. I also wish to thank the late Donald R. Norland and his daughter, Kit Norland, who shared with me their impressions and recollections of their time in Guinea. I am grateful to those who organized and took part in the National History Center’s 2007 Decolonization Seminar. Not only did the seminar afford me the opportunity for yet another research trip to the US National Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington: it also provided intellectual stimulation, feedback and good fellowship from the Seminar’s director, Wm. Roger Louis, his fellow seminar leaders, and my fellow participants. It is an extraordinary achievement to create a sense of shared intellectual enterprise among historians whose geographic, temporal and methodological approaches range as broadly as they do in this seminar. It is also an extraordinary gift to the participant. Marc Frey of Jacobs University Bremen and Jost Dülffer of the University of Cologne deserve my sincere thanks for inviting me to participate in the conference they organized in Cologne in October, 2008. My contribution to the forthcoming volume of iv papers from the conference, Trajectories of Decolonization: Elites and the Transformation from the Colonial to the Postcolonial (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) is drawn in part from this thesis. The rewards of having an opportunity in such august company to refocus my thoughts on Guinea exceeded even the delights of a visit to Cologne. Likewise, I am grateful to the organizers and fellow-participants in a conference on “African Intellectuals and Decolonization” that took place at Ohio University in October 2008 and to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Annual Meetings in 2007 and 2009 for their comments, questions and suggestions on papers I gave which are also drawn from my thesis research. Elizabeth Schmidt, Daniel Byrne and Rob Rakove deserve particular mention in this regard. Throughout this project, I have been blessed with the steady support, encouragement and wise counsel of my supervisor, Ronald W. Pruessen, the other members of my dissertation committee, Eric Jennings and Stephen Rockel, and the unofficial fourth member, emeritus professor Martin Klein. It was not always easy to write a dissertation that would be credible and interesting to historians of fields as diverse as American foreign relations, French colonialism and modern Africa. Their guidance, reactions and suggestions have made it possible. I also benefited from a close and thoughtful reading of the manuscript by Carol Chin. Naturally, I am responsible for any errors or omissions in the end result. Friends and colleagues have also been enormously helpful in ways both obvious and subtle. Richard Blanchard and our colleagues in the loose affiliation still known in some circles as the Crown’s Lane Group have been great sources of challenging questions, essential distraction, and, not least, paying work over the past few years. Tariq Alvi has provided incisive political commentary and badly needed help with translations. Alex Keese and Allison Drew have become good friends and sounding boards since we met in Dakar in 2006. Christine Berkowitz, Erin Black, Chris Hagerman, Urs Obrist, Candace Sobers and David Stiles, to mention just a few current and past colleagues from the University of Toronto history department, have been invaluable friends and fellow- travellers, and my ideas are better for their input. Finally, my thanks to my parents, Nan and Jim, and my brother Ewen, who, though bemused by my mid-life career change, have been unfailingly supportive. Most v of all, my thanks go to my husband, Trevor Marshall, without whose editorial and culinary skills, patience and good humour this thesis would never have been completed, and without whose love and support it would never have been undertaken at all. vi Table of Contents Abstract..................................................................................................................................................................ii Acknowledgments ...............................................................................................................................................iv Table of Contents ...............................................................................................................................................vii Acronyms and Abbreviations......................................................................................................................... viii Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1. “Poverty in Freedom”: The Challenge to Colonialism ......................................................20 Chapter 2. “Africa, the great question mark”: The Challenge to the Transfer of Power................58 Chapter 3. A Change of Form and Field: The Challenge to Neocolonialism .....................................95 Chapter 4. Organizing African Unity: The Challenge to Pan-Africanism .......................................135 Chapter 5. “An Unfortunate Allergy to Economics”: The Challenge to Development ..................182 Chapter 6. “Le Complot permanent”: The Challenge to Justice ........................................................225 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................................................260 Bibliography......................................................................................................................................................272

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