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Elizabeth Schmidt. Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea, 1946-1958. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007. Western African Studies series, xiv + 310 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $55.00. Cloth. $26.95. Paper.
Elizabeth Schmidt. Mobilizing the Masses: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Nationalist Movement in Guinea, 1939-1958. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 2005. Social History of Africa series, xvii + 293 pp. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $137.50. Cloth. $27.95. Paper.
Elizabeth Schmidt has written two excellent books that detail the political efflorescence, watershed moments, and ultimate success of the independence movement in Guinea, then a French colony, in 1958. The two books are major contributions to the history of decolonization in Africa. Based on a synthesis of archival and oral sources, they examine the ways that various sectors of the colonized Guiñean society came together, mobilized resources, and articulated powerful anticolonial ideologies to attain independence.
Both books share intersecting themes that address the forces of polarization of the independence movement at home and in France: how local perceptions of colonialism and French politics during the period of global decolonization in the post-Second World War period charted the Guinean trajectory of independence. Indeed, the two books are complementary: taken together, they not only enunciate the history of the struggle for independence in Guinea, but also document the larger history of decolonization in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. The subject matter of both books also provides a comparative lens on decolonization in Africa as a whole. Cold War and Decolonization in Guinea chronicles the ways that the Guinean Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) seized differing and even antipodal populist forces of the cold war and turned itself into an agency of independence on the left. Mobilizing the M asses focuses on how institutions of gender, ethnicity, and class shaped the pathways of the Guinean independence movement. Unlike a considerable number of works on decolonization in Africa, especially those published in the immediate aftermath of these epochal events, Schmidt moves away from the staple historiography privileging the role of the educated elite and restores the voices of the masses - including those of women - to...