Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Gary Wilder

Subject Categories

Africana Studies | History | Intellectual History | Political History | Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies

Keywords

postcolonial, revolution, postcolonial Africa, state and nation, culture, revolutionary democracy

Abstract

This thesis reexamines the political thought of Ahmed Sékou Touré by taking seriously the theoretical ambition of the Guinean revolution. Rather than treating Touré as either a failed democrat or a mere ideologue, the study reads his writings and political interventions as a sustained attempt to resolve a core postcolonial problem: how to construct collective power and mass participation in societies fractured by colonial rule, economic dependency, and weak institutional capacity.

Through close readings of Touré’s major texts and the ideological materials of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée, the thesis reconstructs his theory of the Party-State as a distinctive model of mass democracy grounded in political formation, moral discipline, cultural integrity, and organized unity. Democracy, in this framework, is not defined by competition among elites or procedural neutrality, but by the continuous production of political subjects capable of governing themselves and defending sovereignty. The study situates this project within broader debates in African socialism and Marxist thought, placing Touré in dialogue with figures such as Kwame Nkrumah and Amilcar Cabral in order to highlight shared concerns over state power, popular agency, and the fragility of postcolonial freedom.

At the same time, the thesis offers an immanent critique of the Party-State, showing how measures introduced to consolidate popular participation—centralization, ideological unity, and moral authority—generated effects, unintended or inherent, that often ran against their original purpose and gradually eroded the conditions of collective agency. Drawing on contemporary Guinean accounts, the study shows how political communication became increasingly one-directional, how leadership hardened into command, and how dissent was reinterpreted as ethical deviance rather than political disagreement.

By highlighting the tension between political formation and political domination, this thesis argues that Touré’s legacy cannot be reduced to either repression or idealism. Instead, it reveals an instructive experiment in revolutionary governance whose unresolved questions about unity, authority, and democracy continue to shape postcolonial political thought today.

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