Silencing and Unsilencing the Memory of Ahmed Sékou Touré

Thinking with Michel-Rolph Trouillot, this paper critically examines the memory of Ahmed Sékou Touré in postcolonial Guinea (Conakry). In 1958, under the leadership of Touré and the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), Guinea became the only West African country to vote against membership in the Communauté française and in favour of immediate independence. Since then, Guinean national narrative has been built upon the ‘mythe du “non”’ (Goerg et al 2008), even as Touré’s legacy has been hotly contested by his successors. In particular, two key historical events have revisited the memory of Touré: in 1984, Lansana Conté negated Touré and his ideology during a military coup. In 2021, Mamadi Doumbouya set about rehabilitating Touré following his own military coup. Each event sought to redress the silencing of the past whilst introducing new silences into the archive and the historical narrative. I trace the production of silence through the lens of Trouillot’s (1995) four moments: the moment of fact creation, the moment of fact collection, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance. To do so, I draw from interviews with archivists, heritage workers, and PDG activists, as well as case studies of contested sites of memory linked to Touré. I argue that in Guinea, Trouillot’s four moments—and national memory at large (Ho Tai 2001)—are overlapping and non-linear, such that successive regimes have suppressed the archival traces of their immediate predecessors whilst identifying the retrospective significance of earlier, previously silenced historical figures. Yet in each instance, counterpublics have resisted the selective silencing of the past, troubling both the negation of Touré’s memory and his rehabilitation.