Word: guinea
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Legendary Grandfather. In 1815 Europeans began penetrating the thick forests of Guinea, which was to give its name to a coin of purest gold, a kind of grass, and a species of hen. Among them was a young Frenchman named René Caillé, who, dressed as an Arab, talked of his captivity by the Egyptians, was accepted as a Moslem and was able to make his famed journey safely to Timbuktu. After him other Frenchmen came, and eventually, by the "rules of the game,"*laid down by the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 for spreading civilization throughout darkest Africa...
...hands on. In time he became a French colonial treasury clerk in his own country, but his real interests were something else. When the treasury tried to muffle his shrill union talk by sending him to a post outside the country, he quit and became fulltime head of the Guinea branch of France's Confederation Generale du Travail. French officials have vivid memories of the Toure of those days. "He was impossible," says one. "Always making trouble...
...relentless war against the traditional tribal power of the Ashanti chiefs in his homeland, Toure tackled the tribalism that plagues all of Africa. He summoned the French commandants de cercle-the French equivalent of the British district commissioners -asked them what they thought of the chiefs who were running Guinea's 240 cantons. The commandants were delighted to help: this chief was lazy, that one corrupt. As a matter of fact, the whole cantonal system had degenerated into a kind of feudal thievery that was costing the government at least 400 million francs ($1.140,000) a year. With...
...cause, France had been taking a new interest in her southern empire. While, before the war. the whole of French Africa got only one-eighth of what France poured into her other overseas territories, it has since received more than $2 billion. Of that, $79 million has gone to Guinea...
...move in French colonial thinking. It meant the end of the concept of a French republic "one and indivisible" and of the tradition of cultural "assimilation." But for all France's concessions, and for all the money it belatedly spent on schools (there are still only 250 in Guinea), on building the port of Conakry, on roads and on the battles against such scourges as malaria, sleeping sickness and leprosy, Toure made no secret of the fact that he regarded the Loi-cadre as only "a first step in an irreversible process." He even went to Paris to discuss...