On the day after he was overthrown by Ghana’s generals in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah sent a telegram from Beijing to his former secretary, Erica Powell, in London, saying, ‘Take heart. I am well and determined. You know how happy I am in such times and occasions.’ He remained confident that he would soon return to Ghana, blaming his downfall on the machinations of imperialism. ‘Don’t forget that world imperialism and neo-colonialism hate my guts and all I stand for. They know I am in the way.’
He was given refuge in Conakry by Guinea’s president, Sékou Touré, settling into an old French colonial-style residence, Villa Syli, on the seashore about a mile from the town centre. Many visitors came to see him, some to plot his return to power, some to pay their respects. Nkrumah liked to portray himself to them as ‘Africa’s prisoner’. But his wife and children were not among them for Nkrumah forbade them to come, insisting they should live without him in Cairo. For several months Sékou Touré allowed him to make broadcasts on Radio Guinea’s Voice of the Revolution. ‘Stand firm and organise,’ he told Ghanaians. ‘Continue your resistance wherever you are. I have faith in you.’ But there was no sign that anyone was listening.
As each year passed, Nkrumah still held on to the belief that an uprising in his favour would occur. He passed the time drawing up plans for Ghana after his return to power and devising schemes for ‘The African Revolution’. He wrote several books railing against the West, with titles such as The Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare and Class Struggle in Africa, convinced that his ideas continued to reach a wide audience. He played chess and table tennis, took driving lessons from a Guinean army instructor in an old Peugeot car and in the evenings watched propaganda films provided by the North Korean and Vietnamese embassies, never losing hope that one day the call would come.
But life at Villa Syli steadily deteriorated. The roof leaked; there were power cuts; visitors came less often; his health began to fail. One of his regular visitors, June Milne, an Australian editor who helped with his publications, noticed an air of melancholy about the place. In her memoir of Nkrumah she described how on her last visit to see him in Guinea in July 1970, he asked her to witness a clandestine meeting he was due to hold with two army men from Ghana, by peeping through the keyhole of his bedroom door.
Nkrumah was in considerable pain from what a Russian doctor had diagnosed as acute lumbago but was in fact cancer.
He could hardly walk. I had helped him to dress, holding his clothes for him and putting on his socks and shoes. He stood erect, but with the bearing not of the physically fit, but of the person who cannot bend without intense pain. He did not want the soldiers to see how incapacitated he was. But he knew he could not conceal from them the fact that he had difficulty walking. So he emerged from his room keeping very erect, but taking short steps . . .
They were tall, tough-looking men, one of them bearded. Nkrumah stood still, smiling and extending his hand to greet them . . . They shook hands. Then Nkrumah raised the stick he was carrying and said: ‘You see. I have a stick. I have some small trouble with lumbago!’ The men grinned nervously. Nkrumah pointed to the chairs. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
He painfully walked to the nearest chair and sat on the edge of it, his back unbending. They were some distance away at the far end of the long sitting room. I did not hear any more what was said. But the whole scene appeared so dreadful that I felt choked. The very chairs they sat on showed their deterioration since 1966. The stuffing was sticking out through the frayed and faded covers. There was only one electric light bulb which worked . . . It all lasted less than fifteen minutes. Nkrumah stood to see them leave. Then he returned to his room. He looked drained.
In August 1971 Nkrumah flew to Bucharest for medical treatment. He died in hospital there on 27 April 1972. The will that he had prepared began ‘I, Kwame Nkrumah of Africa’ and charged his executors to ‘cause my body to be embalmed and preserved’, like Lenin. If this was not possible, then he asked for his body to be cremated ‘and the ashes scattered throughout the African continent, in rivers, streams, deserts, savannas, etc’. His body was flown to Ghana in July 1972 and buried in his home village.
The triumphs that Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser enjoyed during his first years in power were followed by a catalogue of disappointments and disasters. All his Pan-Arab ambitions, his hopes for an ‘Arab socialist revolution’, turned sour. A merger he arranged with Syria to form a ‘United Arab Republic’ ended in rancour and recrimination – ‘three and a half years of endless troubles’, he subsequently described it. On the rebound, he despatched a military expedition to sort out the Yemeni civil war but his intervention resulted only in a ruinously costly adventure there, tying down a third of the Egyptian army for five years. He quarrelled constantly with other Arab governments, retreating more and more into isolation. Most disastrous of all was Egypt’s humiliating defeat in the Six Day War against Israel in 1967 which ended with Israel’s occupation of Sinai, the loss of the Sinai oilfields and the closure of the Suez Canal. After this debacle Nasser described himself like ‘a man walking in a desert surrounded by moving sands not knowing whether, if he moved, he would be swallowed up by the sands or would find the right path’. Anthony Nutting, who met him shortly after the war, found him a changed man. ‘Gone was much of the self assurance of bygone years, gone too any pretensions to be the leader of the Arab renaissance,’ Nutting wrote. ‘As he confided to me with a wan smile, with no army or air force to defend his own country, he could scarcely aspire to the leadership of any other.’ Along with all the setbacks, Nasser was dogged by ill-health. As a result of diabetes, he developed a painful arteriosclerosis condition in his upper legs which left him at times severely debilitated. In 1969 he suffered a heart attack. Much of his old drive and energy faded.
He also faced growing disaffection over the tight grip he insisted on maintaining over Egypt. Student demonstrations erupted in 1968 in protest against police interference in university affairs and the suffocating security apparatus that affected every aspect of Egyptian life. Nasser’s critics maintained that so much of his regime was designed to enhance his personal control, the rest was in fact hollow. While he expounded enthusiastically about socialism, for example, he never countenanced the presence of socialists nor did he set up institutions needed for the development of a socialist programme. His pronouncements on socialism and economic development were dismissed as muddled and banal. Added to such criticism was discontent over economic difficulties. Though industry’s share of national output rose by about 50 per cent, the price for Nasser’s over-ambitious economic plans was inflation, shortages of basic essential commodities, debt, an inflated public-sector payroll, stifling controls and urban overcrowding.
Yet whatever disasters befell Egypt, Nasser never lost his popularity with the masses. When, after the 1967 defeat, he announced his resignation, popular protests propelled him back to office. His reputation as the man who had stripped the old ruling class of their power, nationalised their wealth, booted out foreigners, restored to Egypt a sense of dignity and self-respect and led the country towards national regeneration – all of this counted for far more than the setbacks. Nasser skilfully played the populist card at every opportunity, presenting himself as the spokesman for the people, denouncing the foreign imperialists, bourgeois intellectuals, bureaucrats and money-grabbers whom they regarded as the enemy.
His lifestyle was suitably modest. He continued to live in the middle-class house in Manshiet el-Bakri that he had acquired as a young lieutenant-colonel, adding extra rooms and annexes from time to time. He enjoyed a happy family life with his wife Tahia and their five children, preferring to return home for lunch whenever possible. His tastes in food were simple. He devoured newspapers, but took little interest in highbrow literature or the arts. His favourite form of entertainment was the cinema – either Hollywood films or long Egyptian sagas of unrequited love. He listened endlessly to song-poems sung by Um Kulthum, but little else. He liked ties, owned about 250 of them, most of them gifts; he possessed a large number of cameras; but he showed little interest in money-making or acquiring valuable possessions. Nor did he give lavish parties.
There were many paradoxes about Nasser’s regime. He was the man who overthrew the Egyptian monarchy but became in effect the uncrowned monarch of Egypt. His form of socialism brought little benefit to the poor whom he championed but allowed the bourgeoisie, whom he despised, to play a greatly expanded role in running industry and commerce that he nationalised.
Yet to the masses he remained an idol. And when he died of a heart attack on 28 September 1970 at the age of fifty-two, there were genuine outpourings of grief. Four million people attended his funeral, many feeling that Egypt had been left an orphaned nation.
In the fifteen years that he presided over Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta enjoyed massive authority. Even critics of his government accorded him due respect. In his old age he ruled not so much by exercising direct control over the government as by holding court with an inner circle of loyal ministers and officials, predominantly Kikuyu from his home district of Kiambu, whom he entrusted with the administration of the country. Kenyatta’s court moved with him wherever he chose to stay. His favourite residence was his country home at Gatundu in the hills above Nairobi, where he was born; but he was also to be found at State House in Nairobi or at lodges in Mombasa on the coast and at Nakuru in the Rift Valley. Wherever he was resident, he held regular audiences. His court was open to delegations, petitioners and visitors of all kinds. Sometimes they arrived in huge numbers, accompanied by teams of dancers. For Kenyatta delighted in displays of dancing, and many evenings were spent watching them. He himself performed expertly as a dancer until he suffered from a heart attack in 1972, six years before his death.
In contrast to the socialist programmes fashionable in Africa at the time, Kenyatta adhered to capitalist policies, encouraging both indigenous private enterprise and foreign investment. With government assistance, an expanding African middle class grasped opportunities in the civil service, agriculture, commerce and industry. Senior civil servants were permitted to run their own business ventures. The African share of new companies formed after independence rose from 19 per cent of the total in 1964 to 46 per cent in 1973. Kenyatta’s government was also vigorous in promoting local self-help development organisations known as Harambee – a KiSwahili word meaning ‘pull together’ – that were responsible for the construction and operation of schools, health clinics and water provision. ‘God’, Kenyatta liked to remind his audiences, ‘helps those who help themselves.’
With the aid of British funds, the former White Highlands were transferred to African owners, defusing the issue of land hunger that had propelled the Mau Mau rebellion. White farmers were bought out both by smallholders and by other African owners, often members of the Kenyan elite. By 1971 a total of 1.5 million acres had been acquired for settlement schemes involving some 500,000 people; a further 1.6 million acres were sold privately to African owners. By 1977 only about 5 per cent of the mixed-farm area within the former White Highlands remained in expatriate hands. Africans also gained increasing ownership of corporate ranches and coffee plantations. The growth of agricultural incomes resulting from these changes was remarkable. Between 1958 and 1968 the gross farm revenues of smallholders grew by 435 per cent. Within a decade of independence the marketed output of Kenya’s smallholder and peasant sector – including cash crops like coffee, tea, pyrethrum and horticultural produce – equalled that of large farms. In the 1970s the annual growth rate of agriculture was 5.4 per cent. The capital, Nairobi, reflected Kenya’s growing prosperity. It flourished as an international business and conference centre, its skyline constantly changing with the construction of new hotels and office blocks. Foreign tourists flocked to the country’s spectacular wildlife parks and coastal resorts, providing a major source of revenue. Overall, the economic record of the Kenyatta years was impressive. Gross domestic product rose on average by 6 per cent a year in the 1960s and by 6.5 per cent in the 1970s. The annual average growth rate of per capita incomes between 1960 and 1979 was 2.7 per cent.
Yet these figures disguised a wide disparity: while the rich got richer, the level of rural poverty increased. Despite the land transfer programme, the problem of land hunger continued. Less than 20 per cent of Kenya’s land was arable, and the large proportion of the population packed into that area grew at one of the fastest rates in the world. In 1962 the population stood at 8 million; by 1978 it had reached 15 million.
Kenyatta’s capitalist strategy aroused fierce dissension within Kenya’s one-party system. A former Mau Mau leader, Bildad Kaggia, attacked the government for allowing land to pass into the hands of individual Africans, some of whom were able to amass considerable landholdings. He warned of the dangers of letting a new class of African landholders replace white settlers while landless Africans were struggling to survive. Instead of compensating white farmers, he wanted their land to be distributed free to the landless and to ex-Mau Mau fighters.
A more general assault on the direction of government policies was made by a prominent Luo politician, Oginga Odinga, whom Kenyatta had appointed vice-president after independence. As well as free distribution of white-owned land, he advocated a programme of nationalisation of foreign-owned enterprises and a shift in foreign policy away from Kenya’s close links with Western countries in favour of new ties to the Eastern bloc.
Kenyatta was ruthless in dealing with any challenge to his authority. Once a Moscow-trained revolutionary himself, he accused Odinga’s faction of harbouring communist allegiances. ‘Some people try deliberately to exploit the colonial hangover for their own interest, to serve some external force,’ he said in 1965. ‘To us, communism is as bad as imperialism.’ When Odinga resigned from the government and set up an opposition party with a small core of supporters, the government harassed it at every turn. Kenyatta portrayed the opposition as subversive and ‘tribalistic’. In 1969 Odinga was arrested and his party banned. Once again Kenya became a one-party state.
In the 1970s Kenyatta faced a more formidable critic. A young, ambitious Kikuyu politician, J. M. Kariuki, who had once been detained by British authorities during the Mau Mau era, emerged as a champion of the poor and landless, with a popular following that came close to rivalling Kenyatta’s own. Kariuki’s goal, quite openly, was to inherit the presidency after Kenyatta’s death. He built his popularity with a sustained attack on the scramble for land and wealth that so occupied the Kenyan elite. ‘A stable social order’, he declared, ‘cannot be built on the poverty of millions. Frustrations born of poverty breed turmoil and violence.’
In truth, Kariuki was not a particularly admirable character. A playboy, an inveterate gambler, he himself owned two farms, a racehorse, a light aircraft and several cars; he also had a reputation for sharp business practices. But he possessed an unerring popular touch and he skilfully exploited the groundswell of discontent that was building up over the greed and corruption clearly evident at the top of Kenyan society.
Kenyatta himself was never a target of such criticism, but members of his own family – ‘the royal family’, as they were known – aroused strong resentment. The focus of attention rested mainly on the activities of two members in particular: his young wife, Ngina – ‘the wife of his old age’ – and his daughter, Margaret, the mayor of Nairobi. Both operated business empires and ruthlessly used their link with Kenyatta for personal gain. Ngina Kenyatta became one of the richest individuals in the country with interests that included plantations, ranches, property and hotels. Both were involved in the ivory trade. During the Kenyatta years, high-level corruption cost Kenya half of its elephant population; at least 70,000 elephants were slaughtered.
In his role as champion of the poor, Kariuki persistently attacked the activities of the elite. He called for ‘a complete overhaul of the existing social, economic and political systems in Kenya,’ claiming that ‘a small but powerful group of greedy, self-seeking elite in the form of politicians, civil servants and businessmen has steadily but very surely monopolised the fruits of independence to the exclusion of the majority of our people.’ He never mentioned names, but no one was left in any doubt to whom he was referring when he said, ‘We do not want a Kenya of ten millionaires and ten million beggars.’ Kariuki also dwelt provocatively on the issues over which the Mau Mau rebellion had been fought, a topic that in public was virtually forbidden. ‘Our people who died in the forests died with a handful of soil in their right hands, believing that they had fallen in a noble struggle to regain our land . . . [but] . . . we are being carried away by selfishness and greed.’ The end result, he warned, would be violence. ‘Unless something is done the land question will be answered by bloodshed.’
To the ruling elite, Kariuki represented a clear threat. In March 1975 he was murdered, his body dumped at the foot of the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi. Subsequent investigations implicated members of Kenyatta’s inner circle.
In his last years, Kenyatta showed less and less interest in the business of government. Much of his time he spent pottering about his two farms, either at Gatundu or at Rongai in the Rift Valley. In private his thoughts turned to religion; he was given to lecturing visitors on the finer points of theology. And he liked to recall the past – the dour Scottish missionaries who so influenced his childhood. His favourite relaxation, though, was to construct complex riddles – the peculiar delight of the Kikuyu people – in the company of his brother-in-law Mbiyu Koinange. Then at times he would feel lonely and complain with emotion of old friends deserting him. The morning was his best time. He would rise at dawn and occasionally place an early telephone call to his ministers. In the evening he still enjoyed watching tribal dancers. He would retire to bed early, sometimes dropping asleep in the front of the television news. His aides would creep in to switch off the set. He died on 23 August 1978.
Léopold Senghor often said he would prefer to be remembered as a poet than as a politician. As president of Senegal, he continued to write poetry that received acclaim. His collection, Nocturnes, published in 1961 won a prize for the best poetry collection in French published by a foreigner. A review in the respected Figaro Littéraire in April 1961 called him ‘one of our greatest living writers’.
His presidency received less favourable reviews. The close ties he maintained with France prompted accusations from radicals that he was lending himself to neocolonial interests rather than promoting the kind of African socialism he claimed to support. He relied on French advisers, allowed French companies to continue their domination of trade and industry, and kept a French praetorian guard at a military base on the perimeter of Dakar’s international airport to ensure national security. He rebuffed demands for the nationalisation of French and other foreign companies, arguing that it would ‘kill the goose that laid the golden egg’. French capital, he insisted, was essential to Senegal’s economic development. He refused to countenance a more rapid rate of Africanisation – to Africanise at a discount, as he put it – by allowing unqualified Africans to take over jobs from qualified Frenchmen. In Dakar the French population actually grew after independence. He also continued to spend much time in Paris and at his wife’s family home in Normandy.
Despite French assistance, Senegal’s economy, heavily dependent on groundnut exports, remained largely stagnant. Senghor put an end to a promising programme of rural reform that encouraged peasant cooperatives not because it encountered difficulties but because it threatened the interests of powerful Muslim Brotherhoods who dominated groundnut production and whose political support Senghor needed. A series of droughts affected groundnut production. Exports of groundnuts in shell fell in 1960–70 by 5.5 per cent and in 1970–9 by 8.4 per cent; exports of groundnut oil rose at first by 4.4 per cent, but then fell by 3.5 per cent. When French subsidies for groundnut prices were withdrawn during the 1960s, Senegal had to sell at world market prices that were substantially lower. Its terms of trade were also adverse. A centralised system of groundnut management that Senghor introduced soon became bogged down in incompetence and corruption.
Overall, gross domestic product grew at 2.5 per cent a year from 1960 to 1979, but the average annual growth of population of 2.4 per cent in the 1960s and 2.6 per cent in the 1970s effectively cancelled out the increase. Average incomes for the whole period between 1960 and 1979 declined by 0.2 per cent. At the same time Senegal became increasingly encumbered by external debt. External debt rose from $98 million in 1970 to $738 million in 1979; and debt service from $6.7 million to $130 million. By 1979 Senegal was heavily dependent on foreign aid; net official assistance in that year represented $56 a head – more than 12.5 per cent of total per capita incomes and 13 per cent of gross domestic product.
Senghor steered through these difficulties with a mixture of compromise, coercion and pork-barrel politics. He kept the support of the Muslim Brotherhoods by providing marabouts (religious leaders) with special favours, such as large ‘loans’ and strategically placed development projects. He bought off political opponents by offering them government posts and material benefits. He reacted to student protests over neocolonialism and corruption with strong-arm tactics – tear gas and arrests.
Approaching the age of seventy, Senghor appeared to have lost the common touch for which he was once renowned. He had become a remote figure, distancing himself from the predicaments of ordinary life, no longer venturing into the countryside except to confer with his supporters, the marabouts, still proclaiming the merits of African socialism and négritude but dealing with dissent with an iron fist. French literary critics who reviewed his poetry in French journals bemoaned the contradiction between his gift for subtle poetry and his authoritarian politics.
But just when it seemed that Senegal was slipping towards being another corrupt one-party state, Senghor rejuvenated the political system by launching an innovative version of multi-party politics. New laws in 1976 authorised the establishment of three political parties, each of which was given a defined ideological framework. Senghor’s Union Progressiste Sénégalaise occupied the central position as a ‘socialist and democratic’ party, leaving allocated spaces to its right for a ‘liberal and democratic’ party and to its left for a ‘Marxist-Leninist or communist’ party. In explaining this arrangement, Senghor argued that the proliferation of too many small parties would threaten political stability, but that the existence of choice was essential for the needs of African socialism. Two new parties were duly registered. In elections in 1978, Senghor’s party, renamed Parti Socialiste, won 80 per cent of the vote and 82 seats; the ‘liberal democratic’ Parti Démocratique Sénégalaise won 18 seats; and the Marxists, with just over 3,000 votes, won nothing.
Another innovation was sprung in 1980. At the age of seventy-four, Senghor announced his decision to resign in favour of his protégé, Abdou Diouf, a skilful technocrat. Senghor thus became the first African leader since independence to give up power voluntarily. The tradition of multi-party politics he established in Senegal survived. In 1981 Diouf passed legislation allowing for the legalisation of all political parties – ‘an opening up, but with firmness’. By 1983 fourteen political parties had been legally recognised, including five from the far left. Diouf went on to win elections in 1983, 1988, 1993 and 1998, accepting defeat in 2000.
The ultimate accolade for Senghor came after his retirement. In 1984 he was elected to membership of the French Academy, one of forty living ‘immortals’, as they are called, each considered to have made an enduring contribution to the legacy of French culture and statecraft. It was the highest honour France awarded to its men of letters. Senghor died in France in 2001 at the age of ninety-five.
In neighbouring Guinea, Ahmed Sékou Touré inhabited a world of conspiracies. He spoke frequently of what he called a ‘permanent plot’ to overthrow his regime, a vast conspiracy, so he claimed, organised by Western powers and other enemies of the ‘Guinean revolution’. Some plots were undoubtedly real; some were contrived; others were simply fictitious. Touré used plots as a pretext for liquidating his opponents, whether there was evidence against them or not. Discovering plots became an instrument of government, a device to deal not only with critics and dissenters but ordinary people at times of economic crisis. His regime became notorious for show trials, public executions, arbitrary imprisonment and the use of torture. About one fifth of Guinea’s population emigrated to neighbouring African countries, mostly to escape his harsh domestic policies. Few of Touré’s close associates escaped unscathed. More than fifty ministers were shot or hanged, or died in detention, or served prison sentences. Among them was Diallo Telli, a distinguished Guinean diplomat who had served as the first secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity; Telli was imprisoned, tortured and then subjected to ‘la diète noire’, a drawn-out form of execution which consisted of depriving a prisoner of food and water until he died. Through all the chaos his regime engendered, Touré battled grimly on, as the historian John Dunn noted, ‘like an eighteenth century prizefighter blinded by his own blood’.
The plots and purges started in 1960, only two years after Guinea became independent. Touré announced he had discovered a conspiracy by French nationals and Guinean dissidents to assassinate him, and arrested scores of people; some died under torture. In 1961 he announced the discovery of a ‘teachers’ plot’ after teachers had demanded equal pay for equal work and criticised government policies; prominent teachers and intellectuals were detained, and the Soviet ambassador was summarily expelled, accused of meddling in Guinea’s affairs. In 1965, after a group of traders tried to form an opposition party and nominated a candidate to stand in the presidential election against Touré, they were arrested and condemned to death. In 1970, when Portuguese troops from neighbouring Portuguese Guinea launched an abortive invasion aiming to overthrow Touré and destroy the nationalist guerrilla headquarters he allowed to operate from Conakry against the Portuguese, Touré used the occasion to carry out a massive purge. On the pretext that a ‘fifth column of internal stooges of imperialism and neocolonialism’ was at work, hundreds of people, including ministers, ambassadors and party leaders were arrested and put on trial before a ‘supreme revolutionary court’. They were given no opportunity to defend themselves nor to retain lawyers nor even to see or talk to the judges. Some fifty-eight accused were later hanged in public in what the government called a carnival atmosphere. In 1972 a medicine shortage was described by Touré as a ‘plot by the physicians to discredit the Revolution’. He also interpreted news of a cholera epidemic in Guinea in 1973 as a counter-revolutionary plot. Even Guinea’s defeat in the finals of the African soccer championship in 1976 was viewed as a plot. ‘The psychosis of permanent plots instilled fear among the citizenry and coerced them to comply,’ wrote Lansiné Kaba, an exile. ‘In this inferno, no one was safe, including the party’s faithful servants and dignitaries.’
Guinea was potentially a rich country, with well-watered coastal plains and extensive uplands offering huge agricultural potential and vast deposits of bauxite and iron ore. But Touré’s economic strategy proved ruinous. To free Guinea from its subordination to France and to prevent the rise of an elite entrepreneurial class in the country, he extended state control to every sector of the economy. Independent traders were denounced as bourgeois traitors to the revolution and replaced by a huge state trading corporation; new state industries were launched as part of an ambitious industrialisation programme; agricultural cooperatives were established; and public works expanded. Yet there was no coherent planning behind the schemes and few trained Guineans to manage them. The result was a string of state corporations that were badly managed, heavily in debt, rife with corruption and crippled by low production. The agricultural cooperatives also failed and, as a result of low crop prices set by the government, food production declined. Whereas at independence Guinea was almost self-sufficient in food, it soon became heavily dependent on food imports.
Despite the chaos and disruption it caused, Touré carried his campaign against small African traders and transporters to even greater lengths. In 1977 a government decree closed all village markets – a major feature of life in Guinea – and accorded state enterprises, run by local party and government officials, a total monopoly on local trade. All farmers were required to deliver their crops to these enterprises. This decree and other grievances over the shortage of goods and the rough treatment dealt out by Touré’s ‘economic police’ led to protest demonstrations by market women, which began in rural centres, then spread to provincial towns and finally erupted in the capital. When market women in Conakry marched on the presidential palace, government troops were instructed to fire on them. The party newspaper, Horoya, described the incident as part of the ‘historical struggle between revolution and counter-revolution’. Touré himself resorted to blaming ‘the fifth column’.
What saved Guinea from complete ruin was the revenue derived from the country’s bauxite mines which Touré was careful to leave in the hands of foreign companies. The giant foreign conglomerate at Fria commenced production in 1960 and within a year provided almost three-quarters of total exports and foreign exchange earnings. By 1975, with production running at 9 million tons annually, bauxite and alumina made up 95 per cent of all exports and one-third of gross domestic product.
After twenty years of enforced socialism, Touré began to retreat, permitting some private business and trading firms to operate, and disbanding the ‘economic police’. He also began to make overtures to Western investors. ‘For the first twenty years we have concentrated on developing the mentality of our people,’ he explained in 1979. ‘Now we are ready to do business with others.’ In 1982 he travelled to New York to appeal to Wall Street financiers for increased private investment in Guinea. He died in 1984, not at the hands of an assassin, as many had expected, but undergoing a heart operation in an American hospital.