Pan-Africanism, Capitalism, and Islam: Negotiating Global Bauxite Markets in Postcolonial Guinea

In the mid 1970s, Guinea, under the leadership of Ahmed Sékou Touré, departed from the quasi-secularist policy of scientific socialism it had advocated for the first decade and a half of independence, and began to promote a politics of Islamic internationalism, rooted in its earlier politics of Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism. Whereas in the mid-1960s, the Guinean state had advocated a policy of “demystification,” aimed at neutralizing the power of Islamic clerics, by the mid-1970s, Touré began championing Islam as “a complete ideology for liberation.”

This paper places Guinea’s shift toward an outward-facing Islamic political ideology within the frame of Guinean attempts to navigate its uneven incorporation into capitalist world economy. After Guinea rejected membership in the Communauté française in 1958, it was expelled from the preferential French trading zone, and exposed to global markets, where it struggled to export its agricultural commodities to either side of the Cold War divide. However, by the 1970s, Guinea was poised to become one of the most important hubs for the global aluminium industry as the country became a critical bauxite exporter.

However, in an unequal world economy, Guinea struggled to acquire the capital necessary to develop the infrastructure needed to export vast quantities of bauxite on the world market. Islam, this paper argues, became one of the keys to tackling this challenge. Courting capital investments through a prism of Islamic internationalism, Guinea turned to the Islamic-majority oil-producing states for loans to develop its bauxite resources. Although Islamic ties allowed Guinea to strengthen political-economic ties with the OPEC nations, it simultaneously weakened previous South-South ties. While Guinea maintained an outward politics of Pan-Africanism, it did little to challenge the global shifts in bauxite sourcing, and undercut its black Caribbean counterparts, Jamaica and Guyana, exposing the limits of ideological Pan-Africanism in the capitalist world economy.