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Under the law his powers were limited, but no one could have made more use of them. Like Ghana's Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who has waged 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 his devastating list of particulars in hand. Toure summarily abolished the chieftaincies. When the chiefs howled, he published the French list of charges against them. When the French officials howled in turn, it was too late.
With the chiefs out of the way, he set up more than 4,000 village councils, elected by universal suffrage. This grass-roots democracy was something new to French Africa, and in the hidebound Moslem region of Fouta Djallon even some women got elected. "The election of women, griots and former slaves," declared Touré expansively, "is the mark of a veritable prize of political conscience, a spiritual revolution."
For a while, Paris forgot its former misgivings about Toure and beamed with satisfaction at the progress that the little country of rivers, steamy swamps, rocky hills and dry savannahs seemed to be making under its Marxist leader. Since De Gaulle's wartime days as the Man of Brazzaville, when the colonies rallied to his 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.
The End of Assimilation. The Loi-cadre was in itself a revolutionary 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 "the next step," and when told that the new law clearly defined Guinea's place, snapped: "We are not here to be told what the law is. We are here to make the law."