This article examines how contestation between political parties, politicians, and their supporters shaped Guinea's decolonization from 1945 to 1961. The last region to resist the rise of Sékou Touré's PDG, the Fulbe-dominated Futa Jallon – as both a political space and representation of Fulbe culture – was at the center of strategic and intellectual struggles over the shape of the postcolonial Guinean state and society. What resulted from contestation was the general belief that the Fulbe and the Futa Jallon were divergent from the rest of Guinea, a fragment in the making.

Recent research on twentieth-century Africa has been marked by a surge of interest in autobiographical narrative. While this development is generally praiseworthy, the knowledge it has produced has been uneven, in temporal as well as spatial terms. This article channels the current interest in personal experience and narrative to a place and time where resonances of the ‘common’ voice have been rather weak: the Republic of Guinea, across the final decades of the twentieth century. Foregrounding the autobiographical reflections of a local teacher in the country's southeastern forest region, it forges new perspectives on political subjectivity in Guinea's understudied provinces.

This study focuses on the ancient past of coastal Guinea's Rio Nunez region, a coastal rice-growing region virtually unexplored by studies of West African rice and rice farmers. It argues that coastal cultivators have adapted mangrove rice-farming systems in situ for approximately the past 1,000 years, a historical period pre-dating the European travelers' accounts on which the current literature heavily relies. Rather than diffusing from the interior, these specialized farming systems grew organically out of land-use systems. Using the comparative method of historical linguistics and cultural vocabulary, the study establishes different stages in coastal farmers' experimentation, adaptation and specialization in the coastal environment and approximates historical dates when the different stages occurred. And with botanical and biological studies of mangrove vegetation, the study distinguishes between the softer, spongy roots of white mangroves and hard, twisted roots of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary evidence reveals that knowledge of white mangroves was an early formative stage in cultivators' fabrication of coastal land-use systems. Lastly, from an examination of loanwords, the study discusses the important contributions made by Mande groups, who speak the Susu language in the Rio Nunez region, in intensifying mangrove rice-farming systems indigenous to the coast and extending them from zones of white to those of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary methods and sources enable the study to capture localized experimentation and innovation as continuous processes, thereby breaking with the current literature's emphasis on diffusion from the interior to the coast.

When the Cold War broke out in Western Europe at the end of the Second World War, France was a key battleground. Its Cold War choices played out in the empire as well as in the métropole. After communist party ministers were ousted from the tripartite government in 1947, repression against communists and their associates intensified – both in the Republic and overseas. In French sub-Saharan Africa, the primary victims of this repression were members of the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA), an interterritorial alliance of political parties with affiliates in most of the 14 territories of French West and Equatorial Africa, and in the United Nations trusts of Togo and Cameroon. When, under duress, RDA parliamentarians severed their ties with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1950, grassroots activists in Guinea opposed the break. Their voices muted throughout most of the decade, Leftist militants regained preeminence in 1958, when trade unionists, students, the party's women's and youth wings, and other grassroots actors pushed the Guinean RDA to reject a constitution that would have relegated the country to junior partnership in the French Community, and to proclaim Guinea's independence instead. Guinea's vote for independence, and its break with the interterritorial RDA in this regard, were the culmination of a decade-long struggle between grassroots activists on the political Left and the party's territorial and interterritorial leadership for control of the political agenda.

This article examines the trade in wild rubber that emerged in Upper Guinée, in the colony of Guinée Française, at the end of the nineteenth century. Guinée's rubber boom went through two phases. The first, from the 1880s to 1901, was dominated by local collectors and Muslim traders who directed the trade to the British port of Freetown, Sierra Leone. In the second phase, 1901–13, expatriate merchant houses entered the long-distance trade and, with the help of the colonial state, reoriented the commerce to Conakry, port city and capital of Guinée. The Guinée case offers an alternative perspective to that provided by the better studied rubber markets of Central Africa and South America, and contributes to scholarly debates about export economies, colonial rule and social change. In Guinée, local production and commercial networks maintained significant influence in the market throughout the rubber boom, thwarting colonial efforts to control the trade. The colonial state proved particularly challenged by the practice of rubber adulteration, whereby local collectors and traders corrupted rubber with foreign objects to increase its weight. While the trade exposes the limits of colonial power, rubber also played a largely overlooked role in the social and economic transformations of the period. Evidence suggests that profits from the rubber trade enabled peasants, escaped slaves and former masters to alter their circumstances, accumulate wealth and rebuild homes and communities destroyed during the preceding era of warfare and upheaval.

This article investigates the role of African colonial employees in the functioning of the colonial state in French West Africa. Case studies from the 1890s and early 1900s demonstrate that in the transition from conquest to occupation, low-level African colonial intermediaries continually shaped the localized meanings that colonialism acquired in practice. Well-placed African colonial intermediaries in the colonies of Guinée Française and Soudan Français often controlled the dissemination of information and knowledge in the interactions of French colonial officials with local elites and members of the general population. The contributions of these African employees to the daily operations of the French colonial state show that scholars have long overlooked a cadre of men who played a significant role in shaping colonial rule.