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In a sense, he was born in the right place and with the right ancestry to favor a big role. Though Africa was, until the Europeans came, the continent that could not write, it had known its times of glory. Guinea was once part of the powerful Mali Empire that stretched from the French Sudan, on the upper reaches of the Niger, to just short of West Africa's Atlantic Coast. When its 14th century ruler, the Mansa (Sultan) Musa, made his pilgrimage to Mecca, he traveled with a caravan of 60,000 men, and among his camels were 80 that each bore 300 Ibs. of gold. He built his wife a swimming pool in the desert, and filled it with water borne in skins by his slaves; he turned the fabled city of Timbuktu into a trading center and a refuge for scholars. But such medieval empires one by one faded away. Gradually the history of Africa became, not the story of those who lived there, but of men named Livingstone, Stanley, Peters and Rhodes, and of countless anonymous adventurers in search of gold, ivory and slaves.
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, French hegemony over the area was recognized. The "scramble for Africa" was on, and there was little the Africans could do about it.
One man who did was Almamy Samory Touré, who pledged himself to an enemy chief and became a slave so that his captive mother could be released. Like the Biblical Joseph, he rose to head the enemy tribe, fought the French until 1898 when he was captured. The French swarmed over French West and French Equatorial Africa and Madagascar—an area 14 times the size of France. But the legend lived on of the warrior Samory, whom Sekou Toure claims as his grandfather.
The Troublemaker. Aside from this lofty connection, Touré's childhood was singularly unmajestic. One of seven children of an impoverished peasant farmer, he attended a school of Koranic studies at Kankan, eventually wound up in a French technical school. Even after he was forced to quit school, he nagged his friends who were still going to tell him what they had learned, started to read everything he could lay his 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."