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On the hot. dusty football field just outside Conakry, the graceful, black-skinned Guinea women danced tirelessly, sinuously. Blue silken turbans, spangled with gold, flashed in the blazing sun, as they stomped, glided, clapped their hands and leaped about. The clanking of the xylophones rose to fever pitch, then died away. Three griots (West African minstrels )—one in a leather cape adorned with bits of mirror, another carrying a musket, and the third strumming on a one-string gourd guitar—wailed out a chant in honor of the man who for two solid hours had been the center of all the attention. Finally. Sekou Toure. 37. President of the new Republic of Guinea, a trim figure in a European business suit, rose and raised his arm.
"Vive I'indépendance!" he shouted, and three times the crowd roared back. "Vive I'indépendance!" "Vive I'Afrique!" he shrieked in a voice close to frenzy. Once again, the cry was three times repeated. There was no reason for Toure to do more. The crowd had seen and heard him, and that was enough.
Needed: New Maps. Broad-shouldered and handsome, Sékou Touré is as dynamic a platform performer as any in all Black Africa. He is the idol of his 2,500,000 people, and the shadow he casts over Africa stretches far beyond the borders of his Oregon-sized country. As the head of the only French territory to vote against De Gaulle's constitution and thus to choose complete independence, he has been suddenly catapulted into the forefront of the African scene. Last week somnolent, picturesque Conakry was getting to know how it feels to be the capital of an independent nation. France, Britain and the U.S. were busy setting up embassies; there had been trade missions from East Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia; and last week the first ambassador arrived—from Communist Bulgaria. When Touré decided to say no to De Gaulle, he cut adrift a land that has only 200 university graduates, a literacy rate of 5%, and an average annual income for most peasants of about $40. But Africa today is in no mood to be practical. Guinea's big gamble was just the thing to capture the imagination of 185 million blacks plunging headlong toward independence.
As week after week the drive picks up momentum, Africa seems in perpetual need of new maps. When Touré was born, Liberia and Ethiopia were the only independent states on the continent. Today there are another eight—Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, the Union of South Africa. Ghana and Toure's own Guinea. In the land known as "Black Africa"* four more territories—the Cameroons. Togoland, Somalia and the vast land of Nigeria, Britain's biggest colonial possession—will be free by 1960.