Guinea Rejects the French Community
Guinea voted no to de Gaulle in September 1958 and France dismantled the colony on the way out. The referendum offered France's African territories membership of a new community with internal autonomy, or immediate independence with the loss of all French assistance. De Gaulle put the case in Conakry himself in August and was answered from the platform by Sékou Touré with the sentence that Guinea preferred poverty in freedom to riches in slavery. The territory voted no by about 95 per cent, the only one of twelve to do so. Independence came on 2 October, and the French withdrawal over the following two months was punitive by design: administrators, doctors, teachers and technicians left, files were burned, telephone wires were pulled out, medicines were destroyed, and the crockery at the governor's residence was reportedly smashed. Guinea was expelled from the franc zone and refused a place at the United Nations for weeks. Touré turned to the Soviet bloc, Ghana lent the new state ten million pounds, and the country became a reference point for African radicals — the Non-Aligned meetings, support for the guerrillas in Portuguese Guinea, and a rhetoric of pan-Africanism. It also became a police state. Real and imagined plots produced a permanent purge, Camp Boiro held thousands, and perhaps a million people fled, mostly to Senegal and Ivory Coast. Touré died in 1984 and the army took over within a week. The other eleven territories voted yes and were independent within two years anyway, which suggests the referendum settled less than it appeared to. What Guinea got was two extra years and a French determination to make an example of it.
- Year: 1958 CE
- Category: Independence
