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"I Am Everybody." Had it not been for the special talents of the man in the Presidential Palace, the newborn nation might have come apart at the seams. But Touré combines the Marxist genius for organizing with an almost mystical view of himself as the father of his people. He is most at home talking to village headmen, acts as if all their problems are his own. Though raised a Moslem, he now refuses to pin down his faith in public. "I am Protestant, Catholic, Moslem and fetishist," says he. "I am all faiths. As President, I am everybody." As a politician, he is everybody too.
Though no Soviet-style Communist, Touré rules his country not through government but through a single party. The 4,000 local committees of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (P.D.G.) provide one committee for every 600 men, women and children. Since the committees are freely elected each year, Touré boasts that his system is "total democracy," organized "from the base to the summit." "The government," he goes on to explain, "has no role in the party. It is the party that has the role in the government." And what of Parliament? Says Touré's No. 2 man, President Diallo Saifoulaye of the National Assembly: "Parliament is an institution for the legalization of party decisions."
Why, then, should it bother to debate? "There is practically no discussion in Parliament. Discussion is for journalists."
Touré is also showing a marked desire to trade with his old Communist friends. He has reached agreements with the East German, Czech and Polish trade delegations amounting to 30% of Guinea's normal foreign trade. They will get all of Guinea's palm kernel nuts, about half its bananas and coffee. The Soviet Union may buy the rest of the coffee crop. Last week Toure set up by decree a special state trading agency to handle his new business—a move that greatly distresses local businessmen, who fear that he wants to channel private trade through government agencies.
They Must Work. In a desperate attempt to compensate for the loss of French services, Touré, who can get by with only three or four hours of sleep a night, began driving his countrymen as hard as himself. He is not nicknamed "The Elephant" for nothing. "Men of Africa must work," he said. "In underdeveloped countries, human energy is the principal capital." To the wild beating of tomtoms he inaugurated his "human investment program"—a campaign of "travail obligatoire" that bears a disturbing resemblance to the communes of Communist China, as well as to the corvée, or forced road labor, of the ancien régime in France. Actually, the program so far involves little more than innumerable local work bees in which a whole village will turn out to clean streets, cut back underbrush, make bricks for a new school. "A year from now," Touré told his people, "you will no longer be able to see a single young Guinean girl, torso naked, carrying two bananas on a platter, going out to engage in prostitution.