Revisiting Decolonization in Guinea

Elizabeth Schmidt has written two excellent books that detail the political efflorescence, watershed moments, and ultimate success of the independence movement in Guinea, then a French colony, in 1958. The two books are major contributions to the history of decolonization in Africa. Based on a synthesis of archival and oral sources, they examine the ways that various sectors of the colonized Guinean society came together, mobilized resources, and articulated powerful anticolonial ideologies to attain independence.

Both books share intersecting themes that address the forces of polarization of the independence movement at home and in France: how local perceptions of colonialism and French politics during the period of global decolonization in the post–Second World War period charted the Guinean trajectory of independence. Indeed, the two books are complementary: taken together, they not only enunciate the history of the struggle for independence in Guinea, but also document the larger history of decolonization in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. The subject matter of both books also provides a comparative lens on decolonization in Africa as a whole. Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea chronicles the ways that the Guinean Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) seized differing and even antipodal populist forces of the cold war and turned itself into an agency of independence on the left. Mobilizing the Masses focuses on how institutions of gender, ethnicity, and class shaped the pathways of the Guinean independence movement. Unlike a considerable number of works on decolonization in Africa, especially those published in the immediate aftermath of these epochal events, Schmidt moves away from the staple historiography privileging the role of the educated elite and restores the voices of the masses—including those of women—to the history of decolonization. Both books are refreshing in the sense that Schmidt provides historiographical insights, not so much about what non-Guinean historians have written about Guinean independence, but more significantly about what Guineans, whose ideas were shaped by their lived experiences at the time of decolonization, have brought to the historiographical table.

Chapter 1 of Mobilizing the Masses deals with the consolidation of Guinean nationalism whose roots, embedded in the precolonial epoch, spread and advanced throughout the colonial period, thereby contributing to the political union of the RDA in 1946. The RDA set the stage for the decolonization of the Federations of French West Africa and Equatorial Guinea, as well as the Trust Territories of Togo and the Cameroon—then under the auspices of the United Nations. Added to this mainspring of Guinean anti-colonialism were the abrasive economic and political effects of the Second War World War, which crystallized into the activism of ex-servicemen, whose political horizons had been broadened not only by the war itself, but also by the mounting economic problems exacerbated by the exigencies of wartime. Indeed, contradicting the Guinean responses to the Second World War, the French in the immediate postwar period sought to hold on to empire as both a symbolic superstructure and a foundation upon which the battered French image could be rebuilt. In many ways, chapter 1 of Mobilizing the Masses serves as a kind of introduction to the earlier book, Cold War and Decolonization, which examines the post-1945 period.

In chapter 1 of Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea Schmidt takes up the history of the French government's strategic responses, both at the metropolitan and colonial levels, to the simmering nationalism in Guinea and, by extension, other French enclaves in Africa and Asia. Spanning the decades of the mid-1940s and 1950s, African nationalism had crested from reformism to revolution, championed in Guinea by (among others) the African veterans of World War II. Schmidt shows how the French government...