Toward the end of the Second World War, France sought to bring its colonies closer by integrating them politically and economically with the metropole. This was done as a compromise between the factions favoring the maintenance of the status quo and those leaning toward independence for the colonized territories. Part of this new settlement was to allow the organization of native political parties and to hold elections for native representatives from the colonies to the French National Assembly. As I write in my response to this Côte d’Ivoire question, these representatives were chosen by a tiny fraction of the native populations and generally came from the class of a powerful colonial elite, as was the case with Félix Houphouët-Boigny.

In Guinea, we see the development after 1946 of three major political parties: the Bloc Africain de Guinée (BAG), which was dominated by the economic and social elite; the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), which was a branch of the pan-African Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, and the Démocratie Socialiste de Guinée (DSG). Because of the limitations on voting rights, the BAG was the party in control until 1956. With the extension of universal suffrage after the passage of the Loi-cadre, the PDG, with the socialist trade-unionist Ahmed Sékou Touré at its helm, won nearly all the seats in the territorial assembly during the 1957 elections.

Why did the PDG take over? Because it was able to successfully organize the vast underclasses of the economically impoverished and politically disenfranchised at the grassroots level. Its leader, Sékou Touré, was a savvy politician and strong communicator, allowing him to unite groups of various ethnic and religious backgrounds against exploitation. He was able to focus discontent with a perceived lack of economic development--particularly when it came to the extraction of bauxite ore, the raw material for aluminum production--against France, which proved to be extremely important the following year, when Charles de Gaulle called for the referendum on the constitution of the Fifth Republic.

In this election, France’s colonies were given the choice to accept the constitution as written or to receive immediate independence. Sékou Touré and the PDG, now in nearly complete control of the territorial government, rejected the proposed political and economic reforms as insufficient and mobilized Guineans against the new constitution. The result was that over 95 percent of the votes cast in the referendum favored independence, the obverse of the counts in other territories in French West Africa where elites still retained control of the political system. The French colonial administrators and technicians evacuated almost instantly, and Guinea’s independence was declared on October 2, 1958, the first domino to fall in the disintegration of France’s African empire.

SOURCES:

Chafer, Tony. The End of Empire in French West Africa: France's Successful Decolonization? Oxford: Berg: 2002.

Cooper, Frederick. Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Schmidt, Elizabeth. “Anticolonial Nationalism in French West Africa: What Made Guinea Unique?” African Studies Review 52, no. 2 (2009): 1–34.