Unmasking the State: Making Guinea Modern by Mike McGovern (review)

The Demystification Program conducted by the government of Sékou Touré in Guinea’s Forest region in the early years of independence has been attracting scholarly attention at least since the early 1970s. Mike McGovern’s contribution to our understanding of its brutality and iconoclasm is especially valuable, however—both as an example of careful interdisciplinary scholarship and as a source for it.

The core of McGovern’s work is anthropological fieldwork among the Loma and Manya-speaking people of Macenta Préfecture, beginning in the late 1990s, which led him to consider “the complexities of iconoclasm at the everyday level of village life” (8). He makes the case that the urge by some in the region to erase details of their own biographies—shared with and readily verifiable by neighbors in the village—amounts to “a form of iconoclasm at the individual level” (7). To explain this puzzling and alienating behavior in the present day, McGovern delves into the past. He illuminates a centuries-old pattern of the migration of northern Mande-speakers into the southern Forest region to trace how and why patterns of interaction with Loma-speakers have changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He finds a “deep reservoir of iconoclastic practice” from which Sékou Touré could draw (123): the political renewal movements of El Hajj Umar Tal and Samory Touré, which mixed universalism (in the form of Islam) with political objectives (imperial extension, which the postcolonial state has chosen to remember as resistance to French imperialism); and then, linked with the demise of France’s West African empire, the incursions of Wahhabiyya and of Islamic revival and iconoclasm in the Bagaspeaking region of coastal Guinea. Carefully, McGovern points out that while French penetration, conquest, and administration of the region were “crucial catalysts” of religio-political ferment in all these cases, it was “by no means determinative of the strategies and objectives” deployed (132).

Touré’s postcolonial government drank deep from this well, but for a purpose that was deeply rooted in the national and international imperatives of Touré’s own time. The Demystification Program, initiated in 1959 and carried on, despite regular proclamations of successful completion, into the 1970s, gained momentum from a combination of two factors: “the will of the authoritarian high modernist state … to refashion social relations of every kind, and the somewhat manic energy invested in the construction of a stereotype of Forestiers as a savage foil to the modern national subject” (168). The Touré government, not content to destroy the artifacts associated with initiation rituals of the Loma-speakers and others in the Forest region, then sought to appropriate the masks and dances associated with these secrets as a central part of the new “national” culture it sought to create in the postcolonial nation-state.

McGovern’s use of James Scott’s term to characterize Touré’s postcolonial government leads me to my only quibble with this fascinating and valuable book. Though what he describes is certainly an “authoritarian high modernist state,” as Scott named its type in Seeking Like a State (1998), I am less comfortable with the book’s identification of Touré’s government with socialism. Certainly Touré expressed himself in Marxist idioms, implemented some collectivist measures among his many, often contradictory, efforts to salvage his new state’s economy, and counted the Soviet Union (most of the time), the People’s Republic of China and, especially after 1970, the German Democratic Republic among the state’s stalwart supporters. It is also true that in retrospect, the United States has glossed its own complex—but even more consistent—relationship with Guinea’s First Republic as one that cooled once and for all when Touré began to show “communist” tendencies. But the term both oversimplifies and vilifies the international and domestic politics of Touré’s government. Touré himself frequently replied to Western journalists’ queries...