Read more
This book is different from existing works on Ahmed Sékou Touré and the Guinean Democratic Party (PDG) and their struggle for national independence. Its uniqueness stems from the fact that all the chapters focus on the Guinean traditions of struggle over memories between the elites and the subordinates, highlighting the independent initiatives of the latter. Other books on Ahmed Sékou Touré are primarily based on their writers' political or social history perspectives. This is the first study that equally integrates political and social history to address the theoretical and methodological issues of identity and construction of identity as necessary for understanding the roles of the elites and the subordinates in their struggles for access to power and resources in colonial and postcolonial Guinea. In this book, Saidou Mohamed N'Daou provides equal space for the initiatives and interests of the elites and the subordinates. Ahmed Sékou Touré used the ideology of the PDG as a mirror reflection of the social changes that he and his party intended to create. N'Daou argues that one must displace the ideology of the PDG from the center to understand Ahmed Sékou Touré's personality, his role in Guinea's independence and his leadership of the PDG as well as expand the analytical space to allow other voices to be heard. N'Daou reaches this goal by discovering Ahmed Sékou Touré's first order of knowledge, another unique feature of this book.
List of contents
From the Ideology of the PDG to Ahmed Sekou Toure's First Order of Knowledge (Theoretical and Methodological Implications) - Ahmed Sekou Toure: Formative Years and the Issue of the First Order of Knowledge - Transforming Paradigms, Intellectual Immersion, Creativity, and Self- Individuation - Ahmed Sekou Toure: Numinous Selections (Metaphilosophy and Its Ideological Forms of Expression) - Critical Review of Theoretical, Contextual, and OrganizationalIssues - Ahmed Sekou Toure: History of Guinea or Histories of Guinea? (Illustrative Chapters of the Integrated Approach) - Subordinate Groups and Their Struggle over Memories: A History without the Griots (Professional Storytellers) - The Elite of Groups of Villages' Struggle over the Memories of the 1871 Foton War in Precolonial Sangalan Federation - Urban Colonial Guinea: Competition over the Memories of the Strike of 72 Days (Ahmed Sekou Toure and Aissata Mafory Bangoura) - Postcolonial Socialist Guinea: Competition over the Memories of Sundiata Keita (Niane's "Sundiata" as Ahmed Sekou Toure and Conrad's "Sundiata" as Fakoli) - Postcolonial Socialist Guinea: Struggle over the Memories of Almamy Samory Toure's History ("Almamy Samori Toure" as Ahmed Sekou Toure, "Karamoko Lamina" as Dialonka) - Histories of Dress and History of Guinea from 19th to 20th Century (Not Only of Ahmed Sekou Toure and the PDG) - Index.
About the author
Saidou Mohamed N¿Daou (PhD, University of Minnesota) is Professor of History at Chicago State University. He is the author of Sangalan Oral Traditions and co-editor of Mande Mansa.
Report
"Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and autobiographical analysis, Saidou Mohamed N'Daou offers unique insights by his rich descriptions of the struggles over memories in Guinea, from the precolonial to the postcolonial, socialist era. N'Daou convincingly shows that the elite and the rest of the population had competing nationalist agendas in which both mobilized images of great Mande empires." -Jan Jansen, Leiden University, The Netherlands
