Guinea: itineraries of a bruised memory<

Sixty years after independence, a stifling silence still surrounds the trauma that the First Republic of Ahmed Sékou Touré constituted for Guinea. This complex and painful history has been little written, let alone judged, and is difficult to transmit from one generation to the next, leaving Guinean youth in confusion and paving the way for new cycles of violence.

"In Guinea, nothing is respected, not even the dead," fumed MP Fodé Maréga, crossing the rusty gate of a cemetery in Nongo, in the suburbs of Conakry. A small alley separates the place in two. On the left, an epitaph dating from 2012, a few heaps of fresh earth lined with stones, visibly recent graves. On the right, a vast wasteland overgrown with tall grass, and in the background a few rows of corn grown by residents of the neighborhood. It is hard to imagine that here, in the 1970s, dozens – perhaps hundreds – of victims of the Sékou Touré regime were buried. And that this place, which over the years has become a wild cemetery, would be, according to testimonies from ex-soldiers and residents of the district, one of the first mass graves dating from this period formally identified. “The prisoners arrived at night”, says Fodé Maréga, ex-president of the Association of Victims of Camp Boiro (AVCB), named after the most emblematic political prison of the time, where were imprisoned, tortured and killed. many Guineans. “Some dug their own graves by torchlight before they were executed. Others arrived already dead. We have tried to protect this place, to make it a place of memory so that Guineans come to meditate there and understand that the Sékou Touré regime was a tyranny. But today everyone puts their dead there without distinction, because in Conakry there is a lack of space, ”laments the deputy.

Among the corpses still buried here, however, is that of the most famous of them, Diallo Telli, diplomat, ex-Secretary General of the OAU, the ancestor of the African Union. He was the pride of Guinea before being accused of "plotting" against Sékou Touré and dying in 1976 in one of his jails, as a result of the black diet, this method of torture which consisted of total deprivation of drink and food. "The head of the district told us that he saw Sékou Touré come back here one day in the middle of the night to dig up his body, and make sure it was really him, before leaving," recalls Fodé Maréga. It is thanks to this testimony and to others that in 1991, the AVCB and the Diallo Telli foundation, created by his widow, obtained that a cement wall, now blackened, be built all around to enclose the place, and save it in extremis while the government of Lansana Conté was preparing to sell it to a real estate developer.

At the time, the association hoped that the bodies would be identified, returned to their families and recognized as victims. Eventually, the place will be abandoned. The elders of the district have perished, with them the memory of the dramas that were played out here. The young girls who pass by on their way to school that morning do not take a look. Fodé Maréga, he hardly ever sets foot there. And in front of this spectacle, he oscillates between weariness and anger, he whose father was executed in Kindia in 1971 and who decided to leave his peaceful life as a doctor in France to return to Guinea because, he says, "I didn't want it ends like this. Without memory”. Today, he accuses the country's successive leaders of having knowingly organized an "amnesia" for the crimes of the past. Including the current president, Alpha Condé, yet also a victim of President Sékou Touré, in 1970, when, a teacher in France, he was sentenced to death in absentia and forced to remain in exile for more than twenty years.

“Building a collective memory in Guinea is something very difficult, because our country lives on a myth, that of the “No” to General de Gaulle. We had our independence thanks to Sékou Touré, so people do not understand that we can say that our first president behaved like a clumsy, like a tyrant, like a bloodthirsty, gets carried away Fodé Maréga. But we do not understand that Alpha Condé, after having been a renegade of this regime, behaves as if he needed his anointing. He had a duty of memory vis-à-vis all those who died. It's inconceivable that he can't at least give us the truth about what happened."

If the memory of his victims seems to have been erased, the mausoleum of Ahmed Sékou Touré occupies a place of choice within the walls of the Great Mosque of Conakry. It is there, under a marble slab that the ex-president rests alongside Samory Touré and Alpha Yaya Diallo, heroes of the fight against “colonial penetration” whose busts line the aisle. In 2017, under the leadership of Alpha Condé, the place was renovated. Nabi Bangoura, who supervises the maintenance of the site for the NGO ODESIPEG, rarely misses an opportunity to remind visitors of what a “martyrhero” Sékou Touré was. A "severe" but "just" man, he says, who gave his life for the "freedom of the country". He quotes by heart the famous words launched in 1958 by Ahmed Sékou Touré to General de Gaulle and which open the way to independence: "We prefer freedom in poverty to wealth in slavery."

For this 50-year-old, the allegations of "torture" under the First Republic are only "canons", and the victims, either "liars" or "criminals who violated the law". As for the Boiro camp? Nabi Bangoura was “too young”, he says to know what happened, but it is “in the past”. A speech that is not uncommon to hear in Conakry.

Heroic memory celebrated on one side, victim memory erased on the other. Camp Boiro, which stands a few steps away, has changed its name, renamed Camp Camayenne by the authorities, and completely renovated during the military transition of 2009-2010, officially as part of a reform of the army. This renovation took with it the history of the place most emblematic of the violence of the Sékou Touré regime, including the bullet holes that had riddled the walls of the camp since the attack of November 22, 1970[1].

The AVCB was barely able to obtain the reconstruction of a replica of a building called the "death's head" in the prison part located at the south-eastern end of the camp. Four roofless walls where the prisoners considered the most "dangerous" were delivered to the rain, the sun and the wind. The traces left on these walls by prisoners who engraved or affixed inscriptions by means of their blood or their excrement have disappeared. The place is only accessible on request to members of the association. And little by little the space is nibbled away. Outside, under a hangar, women have now set up a kitchen for the soldiers. Recently toilets have even been built. But still nothing that recalls the tragic history of the place. On January 25, 2015, the first stone of what – the victims' associations hope – will one day become a dedicated memorial, was laid, in the presence of the ambassadors of France and the United States and the Minister of Human Rights. A strong moment that crowned years of struggle against oblivion. Three days later, the stone mysteriously disappeared.

Abbas Bah, 74, who himself spent seven long years in the camp, was the first to notice it. "It's as if they wanted to amputate the essence of my life. I was detained in secret. I wouldn't want the rest of my life to pass in secret as well, he sums up. There are so many people who don't want this story to be known. But until the bodies of all the victims have not been returned to their loved ones and this story will not have been told, fifty thousand souls will continue to haunt the memory of Guinea", i.e. as many as the estimated number of victims according to the AVCB, in the absence of an official report [2].

“One day, recalls Abbas Bah, Lansana Conté (who seized power in a coup after the death of Sékou Touré, editor’s note) had us welcomed to the Presidency by Colonel Kandé. We arrived, and he told us: "I like geography, but I don't like history. He said he had visited Nazi camps in Europe and that for him, to preserve these places was to turn the knife in the wound. I replied, "Colonel, I don't think you can turn the page of a book you haven't read. This is part of Guinea's history. We can't hide that. Otherwise history will not stop repeating itself. My greatest happiness, explained Abbas Bah that day with a dreamy smile, would be that all this would be told in the history books. I consider that I owe that to the companions who were here with me, but who could not come out alive.

But in Guinea, the erasure of the Boiro camp is not only physical. No school textbook retraces with precision the unfolding of events during the First Republic. While the struggle for independence is abundantly recounted and glorified, the years that followed are often overlooked by teachers in need of teaching tools. Few Guinean historians still dare today to tackle this complex and – 34 years later – still conflicting history. Apparently, speech has been released a little. Testimonials exist, numerous over the past fifteen years. But the available literature suffers from Manichaeism: alongside the accounts of direct or indirect victims of the regime, two versions of the story clash. the figure of Sékou Touré and justify the use of political violence by the need to save national sovereignty threatened by the 'plots' hatched from outside, with the complicity of Guinean enemies of the regime. (…) On the other hand, the accounts of detractors, according to which from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, Sékou Touré succeeded in arousing the enthusiasm of his compatriots by promising the advent of a new society of socialist inspiration, until his thirst for power prevails. To hide the economic and political failures of his regime, he would then have devoted all his energy to the invention of a quasi-totalitarian regime, dominated by the repression of the elites and the impoverishment of the rural populations.

In Guinea, this ideological divide runs through the community of historians themselves, more inclined to research and write about before than about after 1958. And so since 1994, all writing projects collegiate study of a general history of Guinea ended in failure. Many questions, sometimes simple but always unanswered, haunt the Guinean memory. Were the successive plots used by Sékou Touré to justify the repression real or invented? How many victims did the successive regimes do? Where are they buried? How many remain buried in individual or collective memories?

“People are still afraid to speak up. They are traumatized, it is a legacy of the time, ”says the writer Lamine Kamara, also a survivor of the First Republic. "The fear that terrorized Guineans under Sékou Touré has not yet entirely disappeared." According to him, the regime has been able to lock speech even in families. “In a sibling, it was not uncommon for one of the sons to be appointed minister or governor while the other was arrested. It was deliberate. We made sure that the cards were scrambled”. In these families, to speak is to threaten the cohesion of several generations.

In Conakry, to explain the persistence of this leaden screed, many also mention the consanguinity between all the successive regimes since "Lansana Conté came from the Sékou Touré regime, and even today many senior civil servants are former leaders of the PDG, the state party at the time. But no head of state can agree to be hara-kiri with his own story,” said a sociologist who wishes to remain anonymous. “Guinea has sealed a pact of silence with its past,” finally believes Bertrand Cochery, former French ambassador to Guinea.

When Sékou Touré died, his successor Lansana Conté had nevertheless displayed a desire for rupture, reconciliation and truth. Quickly, after 1984, a commission was set up to "autopsy" the country, says General Facinet Touré, the number 2 of the regime who then took power and prided himself on being the initiator. Objective: to write a "against white paper", to list the crimes of the Sékou Touré regime. And to counterbalance the famous White Paper in which the ex-president described the real or supposed crimes of those he had just arrested.

We are in 1985. From concordant sources, the commission has many testimonies and archives: presidency, Camp Boiro, police, certain personal archives of Sékou Touré. But a year later the “autopsy” business came to a halt. And 35 years later, the actors of the time continue to blame themselves for this failure. Some claim that Lansana Conté, Deputy Chief of Staff under Sékou Touré, would have dissolved the Commission after the discovery of a document implicating him in the crimes committed at Camp Boiro. The others affirm on the contrary that in a drawer of this camp would have been found a document "exculpating Ahmed Sékou Touré" for the "benefit" of his brother. “Many things that we believed to be true were false and many things that we believed to be false were true”, explains, enigmatic, Amadou Tayiré Diallo, at the time Secretary General of the Commission, without however being able to present the famous document.

In place of the "truth", the Guineans witnessed a new series of summary executions a few months later, reminiscent of methods that were said to be outdated, when, after a failed coup attempt, Diarra Traoré and other dignitaries of the old regime are executed after a sham trial, typical of the regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré, which is more akin to a settling of accounts at the highest level of the state than to a any form of justice.

As for the archives, in Conakry rumors are rife about who holds them. Have they been sold? Have they disappeared? Many people say they own all or part of them, or at least know where they are, without being able to show them. One thing is certain, only a tiny part has been transferred to the National Archives. Like memory, in Guinea, archives therefore seem fragmented, scattered. And the mythology surrounding them fuels the most contradictory accounts of supposed hidden truths that these records are supposed to reveal. While both accuse each other of keeping them secret to better be able to falsify history[3].

While the debate on the individual responsibility of Sékou Touré takes center stage, the story of the experiences of thousands of Guineans is relegated to the background, as is the debate on human rights and the State responsibility.

“In Guinea, the criteria between what is fair or unfair, true or false are absent. This perpetuates a culture of violence and impunity,” worries a sociologist. “Guinea after the Sékou Toure era recovered as best it could without ever returning to this troubled background which haunts it like a demon”, deplores a diplomat.

And while the Guinean elite struggles on these issues, the youth lives in confusion, in a country where amnesia borders on schizophrenia. “We do not have a History but Stories”, deplores Alseny Sall, young lawyer, defender of human rights. Who is telling the truth? Who says wrong? To question the memory of the past in Guinea is to come up against many unanswered questions.

Those of this student, for example, crossed at a terrace in the Mafanco district, and to whom the parents explained, as a child, that Ahmed Sékou Touré was "the best president that Guinea has known" before he did not discover at the age of 25 a photo of the public hangings of January 1971[4], which took away officials of the time, accused of conspiracy. “Why were they hanged like that? How to know the truth about all this?”, he wonders again.

Or those of this young Guinean met in high school on October 2, – so named in reference to the day in 1958 when the country's independence was proclaimed. He would like, he says, to become "a Guinean executive" but first needs to understand how and why one morning in 1971, Sékou Touré decided to attack his ruling elite in this way. "If I don't understand what they did and why they were killed, how am I going to avoid making the same mistakes and risk being arrested too?" "Our country's history is made up of black holes," laments his turn the journalist Ibrahim Baldé.

Paradoxically, the holes in Guinean history have allowed, in recent years, a return of the faithful of Sékou Touré to the public and media scene, unthinkable even 10 or 15 years ago. A character embodies this return: Ansoumane Bangoura, ex-director of the cabinet of the last Minister of Information under Sékou Touré, emblematic figure of the struggle for independence, a strapping 76-year-old man, loud talker, elegant and proud green suit today again today to present himself as a journalist "DE" the voice of the revolution, the only national radio authorized at the time, with particular emphasis on this "DE" to which he is attached, he says, "like a particle of nobility". For two years, every Sunday on the airwaves of a private radio station, Radio Évasion, he has hosted "Témoin de l'histoire", a program in which, under the guise of "catharsis" for the Guinean people, he and his guests remember the glorious facts of the Sékou Touré regime, his mark on the arts, sport, Guinea's place on the African scene and reactivate the myth of this Pan-African figure who for a time embodied the ideals of youth. and intellectuals from the continent.

“We are sick of our history, pleads Ansoumane Bangoura. Those who fought the independence of Guinea, and who fought the regime of Ahmed Sékou Touré are keen at all costs to present Guinea under the most ugly tinsel: bloodthirsty dictatorship, monster, Camp Boiro. You see, there is a negative tropism. “Guinea? This is Camp Boiro. Sekou Toure? He's a killer." This causes the Guinean to be traumatized. So lying has become cultural in Guinea. We are in a Kafkaesque world. I'm not ashamed to say it. The Guinean is a man who takes refuge in the comfort of madness,” concludes the host.

Even if it remains marginal, this discourse resonates with a poorly educated youth, largely unemployed, in search of authority and a glorious past to which they could tie up in their fight for emancipation in the same way as his Ivorian or Senegalese brothers and neighbours.

"Until the end of the 1990s, people thought twice before talking about the PDG-RDA (Sekou Touré's party-state, editor's note), but that period is over," says historian Maladho Siddy Balde. The turning point took place, according to him, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of independence. It was at this time that a new presidential palace was inaugurated, built in the 1990s on the ruins of the old one and officially called “Sékoutouréya”, which means “at Sékou Touré”. “President Lansana Conté would have commented on the event in these terms: “We owe him that!”, notes the historian Céline Pauthier[5].

Today, Sékou Touré's widow, back home after a long exile, proudly welcomes visitors to the couple's house. It was here, she likes to recall, that in 1966 the Touré family welcomed Kwame Nkrumah, the father of Ghanaian independence. She boasts without flinching "the goodness" of her husband, "misunderstood" according to her and whose memory would have been voluntarily soiled. On the wall, we see him on the cover of newspapers of the time, for example shaking hands with Patrice Lumumba, in the small family museum dedicated to him. Mohamed Touré, his son was a legislative candidate in 2017 under the banner of the PDG-RDA, recreated on the ruins of the old one. Those who know him well even tease him about the way he replicates his father's accents. As for the sister, Aminata Touré, she created the surprise by winning as an independent candidate a seat in the last communal elections and not just anywhere: in Kaloum, the administrative district of the capital.

Meanwhile, the Guinean authorities seem to be advocating reconciliation through oblivion, which involves putting victims and perpetrators under a bushel, together. This causes the concern of victims' associations: "If we cannot resolve these issues today, it is not our children who will do it", fears Fodé Maréga. "We, who are psychologically scarred by the disappearance of our parents, continue to fight against oblivion, but if we disappear, we fear that this fight will go nowhere."

As for human rights defenders, they deplore the traces left by these memory lapses in Guinean society:

lack of trust in the state, lack of trust in justice, violence in social relations, and a culture of impunity. In 2009, more than 150 Guineans were killed by the police and dozens of women raped in a stadium in the capital Conakry, without anyone responsible having been tried or punished so far. Each year, the anniversary of this massacre of September 28 is an opportunity for associations to recall to what extent today's tragedies find their sources in the silences of yesterday. 2017 was no exception. That day, at the headquarters of AVIPA, the association created around the victims of the stadium massacre, a theater group performed a play inspired by this drama, which still goes unpunished. Rape, yelling, police violence. It's raw. Then the cries of pain from the actors mingle with those of the public. A woman screams. Faints. She was in the stadium on September 28, 2009 and is demanding justice. Three people help each other to evacuate him. Another stands up. Ask for all of this to stop. "We're already dead, that's enough," he yells. The performance ends. Only silences and traumas remain. In the audience, there are several representatives of the European Union. None from the Guinean government. The proof in the eyes of many victims, of “the inability of the State to recognize its responsibility” in the succession of violent episodes which, since 1958, have not ceased to mourn the country. A few weeks later, a breach opened up, with the announcement of the end of the investigation, in the file of the September 28 massacre. It paves the way for a trial. The associations hope that it will be an essential first step in combating "the scourge of political violence, which is recurrent in Guinea".

"Guinea: a history of political violence" is a project initiated on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of Guinean independence (October 2, 1958). It brings together journalists (RFI), human rights defenders (FIDH, OGDH,) and academics. This project has been carried out with the financial support of the European Union. Its content is the sole responsibility of its authors and does not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Source: Rfi Savoirs

[1] PAUTHIER Céline, “The controversial legacy of Sékou Touré, “hero” of independence” in the Vingtième Siècle. History review, vol. 118, no. 2, 2013, p. 31-44.

[2] The number of victims of the First Republic remains a matter of controversy. The AVCB puts the figure at 50,000 dead, citing a press release from Amnesty International, the trace of which could not be found. No independent source is able to confirm this figure, disputed by the defenders of the First Republic. The authorities of the country do not advance any estimate. Nadine Bari, widow of Abdoulaye Djibril Bari, a senior Guinean official who disappeared after his arrest in August 1972, has undertaken over the past 20 years to establish a database of prisoners in Boiro, Kindia and Kankan prisons. But access to the archives remains problematic. And this census, still in progress, does not take into account the victims of the regime who were, for example, killed at the borders, but did not pass through any of these three camps.

[3] ARIEFF Alexis, MC GOVERN Mike“History is stubborn: Talk about Truth, Justice, and National Reconciliation in the Republic of Guinea”, in Congressional Research Service,Volume 55, Issue 1, January 2013 , pp. 198-225.

[4] On January 25, 1971, in the early morning, 4 senior executives from Guinea were hanged on the Pont du 8 Novembre at the entrance to downtown Conakry, known since as the “Pont des pendés” . At the same time, similar scenes are taking place in several major cities across the country. Everywhere, the bodies remain exposed all day, in full view of passers-by. In Conakry, an order has even been given to school officials to take their students there, so that they can watch the macabre spectacle.

[5] PAUTHIER Celine, op. cit.