From oral tradition to writing
The oral tradition is so important in Guinea, as it is throughout Africa, that in 2006 the World Association for the School as an Instrument of Peace (EIP) launched an educational project for students. The project was based on sound materials - also vectors of emotions - to promulgate societal and educational messages (modules on respect for dignity, women's rights, freedom of expression, etc.). But the oral tradition has another function besides being a source of knowledge, it is also the guardian of memory, which in a severely oppressed country takes on its full meaning. The Guinean Djibril Tamsir Niane, born in Conakry in 1932 and who died in Dakar (Senegal) in 2021, was the director of a fascinating publication entitled Oral Tradition and Archives of the Slave Trade, which is available for free reading in the UNESCO digital library. The preface by the Senegalese Doudou Diène reminds us that "while Europe and America have abundant documentation on the slave trade and slavery, Africa has long remained silent. The work of collecting testimonies from researchers was essential to ensure the preservation of this intangible heritage. Djibril Tamsir Niane, a great specialist of the Mandé region, a territory that today extends from southern Mali to eastern Guinea, also earned his reputation as a historian by writing down the epic of Soundiata as it was told to him by the griot Mamadou Kouyaté. At the end of the 1950s, he proposed the publication of this founding myth of the Mali empire, which appeared in the 13th century, to the publisher Présence Africaine, who accepted it. To finish with the oral tradition, without having done the trick, we could mention the book Quand les animaux parlent, published by Gérard Meyer in 2020 at L'Harmattan, which includes 34 stories that he collected in West Africa, and Paroles tissées: Sénégal et Guinée, a new collection of 28 stories that he published the following year at the same publisher.
It is common to hear that African languages are not written and that the first books were written in the language of the colonist, usually English or French, which is a serious mistake, as the story of the imamat of Fouta-Djalon located in present-day Guinea demonstrates. This territory was the scene in 1726 of the battle of Talansan between the Muslims, mostly of Fulani origin, and the Soussou, who were driven to the coast. As far as literature is concerned, it is important to remember that Fulani religious poetry (and soon more widely all types of works, from treatises on astronomy to satires and so-called everyday poems) began in the 18th century to be written in the Arabic alphabet, a language of which it also kept the metre, giving a unique model of which Thierno Diawo (1900-1984), a disciple of Thierno Aliou Bhoubha Ndian, was a worthy representative. It was at the Sorbonne that Alfa Ibrahima Sow (1934-2005) wrote a dissertation devoted, among other things, to the Fulani poets of Fouta-Djalon, a specialization, coupled with translation work, which earned him the 1975 French Language Prize awarded by the Académie française, together with Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a Malian writer and ethnologist. The previous year, he had co-founded the Nubia publishing house with a group of pan-African authors. He has also held the chair of West African literature at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) in Paris for many years. In the same vein, we should also mention the anthropologist Sory Camara, who was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire in 1977 for Gens de la parole: essai sur la condition et le rôle des griots dans la société malinké, as well as Ibrahima Baba Kaké (1932-1994), professor of history and director of a collection at Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, who went into exile after the arrival in power of the first president of Guinea, Sékou Touré, who became independent in 1958.
Autobiographies and novels
It is in a particular context, that of decolonization, that the generation of the 1920s turns to the novel. The political changes were initiated or in the process of being initiated, and the writings were tinged with the question of positioning in relation to the past and the definition of a national identity. Fodéba Keïta (1921-1969) was one of the first instigators of this new genre, although he began his artistic career by devoting himself to music and dance, creating in 1948 the Sud Jazz orchestra and then in 1950 the Ballets africains de la République de Guinée. During the same year, he published a collection, Poèmes africains, then in 1952 two short stories: Le Maître d'école followed by Minuit. This second text is particularly engaged since it refers to the French invasion, and is perhaps a harbinger of the political turn that Keïta will give to his career by becoming in 1961 Minister of National Defense and Security in the government of President Sékou Touré ... who will eventually accuse him of conspiracy a few years later. He died in Camp Boiro - the Guinean "Auschwitz" where Amnesty International estimates that 50,000 people lost their lives - which he himself had apparently helped to transform into an internment and torture camp.
On the other hand, and in a strange paradox, the first Guinean novel to really shine abroad - to the point of receiving the Swiss literary prize Charles Veillon in 1954 - is considered by some to be singularly lacking in political commitment, or even objectivity. In fact, in L'Enfant noir, published in France in 1953, Camara Laye (1928-1980) delivers a story with a strong autobiographical accent in which the horrors of colonization seem to be toned down, to say the least, which was harshly criticized by the so-called negritude movement, who saw in it only a wickedly picturesque bluette... while at the same time, some people (among them Léopold Sédar Senghor!) praised this enchanting vision of the kingdom of childhood. In any case, and although the question is still being debated, this novel is now a classic that was even adapted to the cinema. It should also be noted that in his later texts, particularly in Dramouss (1966), Camara Laye became more critical, making explicit the pain of exile and putting words, as a precursor, on the excesses of the power then in place in his native country. Despite these complex circumstances, the floodgates were open and future writers would not hesitate to speak out.
Writing, in spite of everything
Guinea-Conakry", which only has a population of about ten million, can boast a number of talented authors, including Alioum Fantouré, who was born in 1938 and was awarded the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire at the age of 35. He was noticed as soon as his first novel, Le Cercle des tropiques, was published by Présence Africaine, a sharp vision of the post-colonization period that is still available from the same publisher. It is also with Présence Africaine that the equally political work of Williams Sassine, the half-breed child of a Lebanese-Guinean couple born in 1944 in Kankan, is discovered. His return to his native country after his studies in France will be impossible because of the regime of Sékou Touré, his texts will be impregnated with this forced exile which will last until the coup d'état of 1984 and will dig the difficulties of the borders between two worlds, two cultures, as in Memory of a skin, while not refusing to indulge sometimes in the picaresque genre(The Zeher is not just anyone). Ahmed-Tidjani Cissé's career has similarities with that of Sassine, since he found refuge in France from 1964 to 1991 after being harassed by the government. A jack-of-all-trades, he has published poetry(Derrière la palissade, des femmes, des enfants), collections of stories(Naby Yoro, le géant de Malakan) and above all plays(Maudit soit Cham, Au nom du peuple). The stage is indeed a territory that Guinean authors like to explore, such as Souleymane Koly (1944-2014) who had created the company Kotéba d'Abidjan (named after the traditional Malian theater), or Saïdou Bokoum who wrote and staged several plays presented in Avignon(Dépossession) and in Côte d'Ivoire(Opération coup de poing, Chic choc chèque...), but also published a novel, Chaîne (1974, Denöel), nominated for the Goncourt. Tierno Monémembo (1947-2008) won another French prize, the Renaudot, for Le Roi de Kahel (Seuil), the fictionalized biography of Aimé Olivier de Sanderval (1840-1919) from Lyon, who tried to establish a kingdom in the heart of Fouta-Djalon. This is not the only award that greeted the fertile work of Monémembo since he also received the Grand Prix littéraire d'Afrique noire for Les Écailles du ciel (Seuil, 1986), the Ahmadou-Kourouma prize for Le Terroriste noir (Seuil, 2012) and the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2017 for all of his writing.
On the women's side, we should mention Kesso Barry and her autobiographical story Kesso, princesse peuhle published by Seghers in 1988, Koumanthio Diallo who in 1994 was the first to publish a book of poetry(Moi, femme), Mariama Kesso Diallo who recounted her exile with her children in La Chance and Katoucha Niane who addressed the harsh reality of female genital mutilation with Dans ma chair.
We could make her work resonate with that of Nadine Bari who did the opposite: born in Dordogne in 1940, she settled with her husband in Conakry. Back in France, he was murdered before he could join her. She worked for the UN and then for the European Court of Human Rights and fought for years to find out what had happened. Nadine Bari is discovered at L'Harmattan: Le Cri de la mangouste, La Dictature, modes d'emploi, L'Espérancière, etc. These feminist causes have also been taken up by the writer Libar M. Fofana - whether in L'Étrange Rêve d'une femme inachevée (Ouest-France/Étonnants voyageurs prize) or in Comme la nuit se fait lorsque le jour s' en va - and remain at the heart of the work of the activist Maimouna Diakhaby, born in 1985 in Conakry. A new generation is indeed working to continue to build Guinean letters: filmmaker and writer Sunjata Koly whose Kalachnikov Blues (Vents d'ailleurs) received the 2010 Continental Literary Prize, Hakim Bah awarded the RFI Theatre Prize in 2016 for Convulsions, Abdourahmane Sénateur Diallo who presented his first novel Nation enchantée en 2021 at the 72h heures du livre de Conakry or Falmarès, born in 2001, who describes himself as a "poetic refugee" in France and continues to write despite the threat of deportation to which he was subjected(Soulagements, published by Les Mandarines).
