Since January 2006, national strikes and violently suppressed demonstrations have shocked Guinea, culminating in the installation of a government of large consensus. Beside this first success, the popular movement brought a wave of national sentiments and the spirit of change to a country, which had so far been paralyzed by an official silence.
These events reveal the split between what is perceived to be a predatory state and Le Peuple Guinéen, the nation forged by Sékou Touré’s socialist-inspired independence movement and his terrorizing revolutionary regime of 26 years. Nation-building efforts were neglected by the ensuing military government, and national sentiments only re-surfaced publicly during recent events. The experience of the power a united population can have and the memory of the independence struggle, the anti-imperialist ideology dominating the 1st Republic, and the fact of having survived the suffering inflicted by the Sékou-Touré regime revive national pride.
Yet at the same time, the sudden change in patriotic sentiments brings about insecurities: mistrust in the unity and determination of the population and, even more importantly, in the efforts of the state to undermine the current anticipation for change. This apprehension is based on the local conceptions of the Guinean state and nation, opposing a corrupt and voracious administrative power to a subdued and suffering population.
While such simplifying perspectives feed the public rhetoric, they overlook the personalized links between the two spheres: what is the role of the individual as citizen and as civil servant? Do locally elected councilors belong to the nation or to the state, or are they rather, as the canton chiefs during the colonial period, perceived as the mediators and “playthings” between the two fundamentally opposed parties: the state, le Pouvoir vs. le Peuple, the nation?
That is to say: where do the historical and current margins of the state end and where does the nation begin at times of a disintegrating state apparatus and public mobilization against le Pouvoir? Can parallels be drawn between Guinea’s current situation and the pre-war conditions its neighbors knew in the 1990s?