GUINEA: Toure on Tour

GUINEA Touré on TourAs their President traveled in high style through foreign lands last week, thousands of Guineans back home crowded excitedly around big bulletin boards plastered with pictures and reports of Sékou Touré’s trip. They had reason to be proud. There he was. aged 37, and head of a nation only 14 months old, hobnobbing with the big names of world affairs. He had chatted with Dwight Eisenhower in Washington, dined with Harold Macmillan at 10 Downing Street, got the red-carpet treatment in Bonn from Konrad Adenauer.

After all this, his cordial welcome in Moscow, with Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov and a big honor guard at the flag-bedecked airport, might have seemed anticlimactic, but it had a significance all its own to Neutralist Sékou Touré. For little Guinea (pop. 2,500,000), an Oregon-sized chunk of hot, humid West Africa, has leaned heavily on support from Russia’s Communist bloc since it broke away from France’s new African community last year and, alone among 13 French-African territories, opted for full independence.

Looking East. Today Guineans make their bread with East German flour, use Czech cement in their new buildings, and ride Hungarian buses in the streets of Conakry. Guinea’s Director of Mines is a Pole, and Czech specialists help operate the nation’s main airport.

“We had no choice,” argues Guinea’s Minister of Information Allassane Diop. Rejected by Guinea, the French had taken everything with them when they left—all their seasoned officials, the office equipment, even the government records. Guinea lost the main markets for its exports and the chief sources of supply for imports of finished goods. When the U.S. and other Western countries responded coolly to Guinea’s overtures, Marxist-trained Sékou Touré had no qualms about accepting the $35 million low-interest loan that Moscow readily proffered; or the 9,000 rifles sent by the Czechs. Barter agreements with several Communist countries expire this month, and although the East German flour is poor and the Czech cement unsuitable to the humid climate, Guinea will probably renew the pacts, since no Western country has offered an alternative way for Guinea to dispose of its bananas, coffee and palm oil.

With the help of the Communists, Guinea’s economy has survived the first year of independence. No one can be sure how well it is really doing, since the inexperienced Guinean government has not even any statistics to work with. Busily reconstructing their files, officials keep printing presses so occupied with changing documents from “Guinée Françaiseto “République de Guinée” that no newspapers can be printed, not even the organ of Touré’s all-powerful Parti Démocratique de Guinée.

Free Labor. In Marxist fashion, Touré has clamped tight central controls on everything in sight. There is a government foreign-trade monopoly, and the state-run cooperatives, which buy farmers’ products and sell them finished goods, are slowly pushing private merchants out of business. Each Sunday, workers are induced “voluntarily” to build roads, schools and clinics in a scheme grandly titled “Human Investment,” and Touré is working hard to rip up tribal roots and create a Guinea nationalism. By requiring English as well as French instruction in schools, he hopes to create a bilingual nation that one day can lead both English-and French-speaking West Africa. Such a nation, Touré was insisting last week, would not be Communist, as his enemies and some of his old friends are beginning to fear. The hundreds of English teachers he seeks, the new radio transmitter he wants as replacement for Conakry’s present peanut whistle, the capital he needs for hydroelectric development, all could come from the West. é

“We have absolutely no intention of delivering Guinea either to Western or Eastern influence,” says Touré, proclaiming his creed to be “Pan-African neutralism.” Even if his procedures owe more to Lenin than to Jefferson, those who know him best believe that 1) ambitious Sékou Touré intends to be beholden to no one, 2) his fellow-traveling companions, who made the journey to the U.S. with him, found the U.S. a much better place than it had seemed through Red-colored glasses.