In 2008 I received Endangered
Archives Programme major project funding for the
archival project Syliphone
- an early
African recording label, whereby I presented to the Guinean government the complete
catalogue of Syliphone recordings. Following its successful launch, the Guinean government
granted access to their
national sound
archives held at the Radio Télévision Guinée (RTG) offices in the suburb of Boulbinet, Conakry.
In 2008, the process of gaining access to the archives had taken many
weeks, and when granted acess I was amazed
to see hundreds of audio reels of studio recordings on 1/4" magnetic tape of
Guinean orchestras, traditional ensembles, choirs and oral narratives. There was
far more material than I had thought existed and,
during the short period of time I had,
I preserved and digitised as much of the sound archive as
possible. I had focused on the recordings of the "orchestres moderne",
Guinea's acclaimed popular ensembles featuring electric guitars and brass
sections, and over a few weeks
I preserved and digitised 554 songs held on 69 reels
of 1/4" audio tape. A great deal of
work remained, and I
hoped to return in 2009 to complete the project with further Endangered
Archives Programme funding, my project renamed
as the "Guinea's Syliphone archive".
Early in 2009, I received the welcome news that my application for
a second round of funding was successful. I thus arrived in Conakry in
mid-July, confident that the new Minister of Culture and Communication, Justin
Morel Jnr, would be supportive of my project. Previously, a central
difficulty in commencing
work at the RTG was
the process of gaining access to
its
materials. The RTG resides within the Ministry of Communication,
however the support of
the Ministry of Culture was also required as
the
archives contained cultural
artefacts. Thus,
the project partners involved the cooperation of two
Guinean ministries.
This can cause undue delays, however, following the death of President Conté in late
2008, for the first time in Guinean
politics these two
ministries had merged. The experienced Justin Morel Jnr
had been appointed as
Minister,
and thus the prospects
of achieving the archival project were very positive. When I arrived in Conakry, Minister Morel
was overseas on business, and in his stead the Secretary
General, Jean Paul Cedy, was most helpful in progressing the archival project. Guinean bureaucracy,
however, can be very slow, and it took nearly a month before I could re-commence
the archiving work in the RTG, which I had to cease in 2008, due to lack of
time.
In early August 2009, I began to archive, preserve and digitise
the collection of audio reels held at the RTG's sound archive. I
estimated that there were 700 reels in the archive, containing approximately
5,000 songs, or some 30,000 minutes of music. Firm
relations with the Ministry had been etablished, and I
set myself to the
task of archiving. A most pressing
issue, however, was Guinea's fragile political
state. The death of President Conté after 24 years at the helm resulted in a
military coup, with
Capt. Moussa "Dadis" Camara declared President. "Dadis", as everyone knew him,
projected himself as a
man of the people. He actively curbed Guinea's slide into a narco state,
jailing and ridiculing on
live television the many corrupt officials involved in
the illegal trade of drugs, namely cocaine. His long
speeches, with his voice ever-rising in pitch, were mesmerising
and
theatrical.
As the
weeks of his rule turned to months,
and as his auotcarcy grew, his few said plans for Guinea's
future amounted to little other than to bolster the military. Guinea
was thus a highly militarised state. The constitution had been suspended, and
on the streets Guinea's soldiers acted with near impunity. There was little
of law and order,
except that which the soldiers meted out, on the spot. When Conakry's
police force demanded extra pay
and threatened to strike, for example, they were warned by Dadis' government not to take matters into
their own hand, but they planned to strike
nevertheless. The
government responded by sending in several units of soldiers who attacked the
city's main police station.
The police officers hid in the ceilings of their station, only
to be machine-gunned. Guinea's soldiers kicked
and beat many others in the station's car park, men and women alike. A video of this raid was widely
circulated.
In 2009, Conakry was thus a dangerous. It was
tense, violent and
very unpredictable. President Dadis was becoming increasingly unpopular,
as it grew more obvious that
he was not going to leave office, as promised. Guinea's public,
who had endured 50 years of one-party and military
rule, were fed up with dictatorships, and this new regime was proving
even more corrupt
than its predecessors.
Soldiers drove at breakneck speed through Conakry's crowded streets, they
strutted the town with their machine guns, and it was common for drunken
soldiers to harass the public. It grew worse. They kidnapped business
leaders, such as the CEO of TOTAL, the petroleum giant. I recall that Guinean soldiers exchanged gunfire with a government minister's bodyguards, and
then stole his car. And that they robbed the Ghanaian ambassador of his car and
of his clothes, leaving him in his underwear by the side of the road. The soldiers
had become thieves, and it was common to see
them driving their own private Mercedes or Jaguars or 4x4s in town - vehicles
impossible to afford on a soldier's salary. Their acts went largely unpunished. As their pillaging grew, so did the tension.
Something was going to give, but I did not know in what shape or form. In such
an environment, I worked as fast as I could!
On 28 September 1958, President de Gaulle of France offered Guineans the choice
between total independence or the opportunity of autonomy within a confederation
of French states. Guineans, famously, voted overwhelmingly for their
independence, the first of the Francophone states to do so. The 28th of September is
a national holiday in Guinea. In 2009, Guinea's opposition parties chose this
date for a major rally, the
biggest that Guinea had seen since Dadis had come to power. Estimates of the number
of people who went to the football stadium that day to rally and protest against Dadis' rule vary
from 40,000 - 50,000. Shortly after the speeches had begun, fully armed units of
soldiers burst into the stadium and commenced firing into the crowds. Guinea's
most shameful day had begun. Within minutes, 187 unarmed
civilians were killed by Guinean soldiers and more
than 2,000 injured. According to eyewitness reports, when the soldiers ran out
of bullets they used their bayonets. They raped women in the streets.
Human
Rights Watch's report of the massacre is necessary and difficult reading,
for what happened on September 28 2009 should never be forgotten. It was a day
of such utter shame that I hope that it is rubbed into
the face of every Guinean
soldier every morning when they present in their barracks. The government of Dadis Camara did its best to cover up
these events. In order to lower the
body count, for example, many of the dead were dumped at sea, only to float back
ashore over
the coming days in a macabre spectacle. Of those
murdered, less than 100 bodies were presented at Conakry's mosque for
identification by relatives, and those are some of the saddest photographs of
atrocities I have ever
seen. It is also factual that the solders targeted those of Fulbé ethnicity,
as witnessed, and I have
published
several articles
which reveal the falsity of Guinea's claims to a
broad ethnic representation,
prior to the Presidecy of Dadis Camara, of which the cultural
policy of authenticité was a leading example.
On the day of the "stadium massacre", as it has become known, I was working at the RTG
alone. I walked out of the offices that afternoon and on the street I realised something had
radically changed. The roads were quiet
and near deserted, in fact there was no traffic at all. I then saw a military vehicle speeding
like crazy on the road ahead. It nearly smashed into a taxi.
A soldier got out and assaulted the taxi driver.
I went down side streets, as fast as I could walk, laptop in tow. I knew
about the protest rally that day and that something
had gone very
wrong. Back at the Catholic Mission, where I lived, I then heard the news about what had occurred.
People were already preparing to leave Guinea.
The next few days were unlike any other. Conakry's city centre
completely closed down, not one shop open. It was empty of vehicles and
as quiet as a rural village.
Foreign governments were warning
their citizens to leave Guinea immediately. The
(predominantly Lebanese) owners of supermarkets, who had never left Guinea, I was told, had left
with their families,
as had what few tourists there were, and NGOs and foreign
embassy staff. I decided to see it through, and within a few days there
were three of us left at the Catholic Mission. It was
an anxious time, with rumours of impending civil war, split
factions in the army,
French navy vessels on the way, CIA agents in town sent to kill Dadis, soldiers
robbing those en route to the airport, kidnappings, flight cancellations,
mobile phone and internet networks about to be cut, electricity sporadic.. it was very tense. There
was gunfire at night, military jets performed sonic booms over the city, there
were ad hoc muffled explosions, and no-one knew what was
happening or what was going to happen.
I wanted to
finish the archival project
and decided to wait and see what happened. I
had reasoned that it was highly
likely that soldiers would kick down my bedroom door, so I made plans to escape through the
rear window. My room in the Catholic Mission was very high up, on a first floor,
with the only escape route through the window onto the
much higher rusty corrugated iron roof above. From there, it would be rooftop to rooftop.
Sheer madness, that plan,
which I nearly enacted, as Dadis,
a Christian,
had personally sent a large Brahman bull to the Catholic Mission, which was
tied to a tree in the car park for all to view. The bull would be used to "supply food",
I was informed. This was a situation made worse when one afternoon an army truck
full of soldiers arrived. They immediately set
up a large mounted machine gun in the car park, I swear it was aimed at my room!
I peeked at them through a tiny gap in my door. Fortunately none of them
ascended the stairs, or else my plan of escape would have been enacted.
With the situation deteriorating, both the British and
Australian governments insisted that I leave.
Pfft. My family in Australia were
more worried, so I booked a flight to escape
the unfolding disaster. I couldn't continue to work at the
nerve centre of Guinea's television and radio broadcaster in such circumstances. The RTG is
very likely the first place to be assaulted during in any coup, and indeed it has
been attacked by Guinea's armed forces before, by artillery in 1985. I was in little doubt
that there would be a response of some kind to the slaughter at the football
stadium, and that, if discovered at the RTG archiving the audio reels, I would
be arrested, or worse. There was no law and order to rely upon.
Dadis attempted to
explain the stadium massacre, but his response was facile. None
were prosecuted or held responsible, no soldiers were arrested. The international community thus mobilised itself against his regime
and Crimes Against Humanity charges were drafted. Guinea's military junta, led
by Dadis, realised that their time was soon to be up. It
was then rumoured that Lt. Toumba Diakité, a close friend of Dadis and commander of
the National Guard, was going to be named as the main perpetrator of the
massacre, and would thus be the fall-guy to take the blame
for the massacre. On 4 December, Dadis was
shot in the head while visiting Camp
Koundara, the army barracks which protects the RTG, some 100
metres from the
sound archive. Dadis
was shot
by Lt. Toumba Diakité, who then fled with dozens of fully-armed armed red berets. Amazingly, Dadis survived, and was flown to Rabat
in Morocco, where he
slowly recuperated. Thus, with Guinea crumbling, I left via
the airport. I remember that there were 13 passport
checks, with the last overseen by a teenage boy
soldier on the tarmac. With the full support of the Endangered
Archives Programme the 2009 archival project
was concluded.
Postscript: After many weeks of
convalescence, Dadis was ready to return to Guinea,
but instead of his plane flying to Conakry it took him to Ouagadougou in Burkina
Faso. General Sékouba Konaté
then declared himself interim leader of Guinea and
promised to bring the nation to democracy. He did so, in fact,
and in 2010 Guineans elected Alpha Condé,
a veteran opposition leader, as their new President. With this result I then began to plan my
third
project with the Endangered Archives Programme, which would see me return to
Guinea in 2012.
For further reading
on my Endangered Archives Programme projects see EAP
187: "Syliphone
– an early African recording label" (2008) and EAP
608: "Guinea's Syliphone archives II"
(2012-2013).
See also
The complete catalogue of
RTG recordings.
Readers may also be interested in these publications:
"Music for a coup - 'Armée
Guinéenne'. An overview of Guinea's recent political turmoil", in the
Australasian Review of African Studies. 2010, 31 (2), pp. 94-112.
"Music
for a revolution: The sound archives of Radio Télévision Guinée",
in From Dust to Digital: Ten Years of the Endangered
Archives Programme, Maja Kominko (ed). Cambridge: Open Book
Publishers, 2015, pp. 547-586.
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