The dry season’s dust has again settled on Conakry’s streets, aside from a few marks of ashes and rubble on the sides of the main avenues, everything seems to be back to the bustling normal. Just about ten days ago, things looked quite different in the Guinean capital. On February 20th, a nation-wide general strike in the education sector culminated in violent demonstrations, which took the government by surprise. Seven people were shot dead by state forces, thirty were injured and a dozen arrested, numerous vehicles were burnt, and a gas station and a police commissariat were pillaged. Though Conakry has experienced plenty of similar events during the past decade, there are a number of reasons not to write this off as simply another instance of urban violence. Continue reading
CategoryEducation
Sitting astride Freetown’s Mount Aureol, Fourah Bay College (FBC) is often regarded as the crucible of Sierra Leone’s post-independence history. ‘When Fourah Bay College sneezes”, one student reflects, ‘all of Sierra Leone catches a cold’.
In the mid-1980s, FBC sneezed. Radical students, alienated by Siaka Steven’s brutal one-party regime, decamped to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya. The move set in motion a train of events which meandered, in fits and starts, towards the outbreak of the rebel war. By the time the students returned to Freetown in the early 1990s, Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) was laying waste to the country’s south-eastern flank and their idealistic dreams of revolution had evaporated. The combative student movement that had flourished throughout the 1970s and 1980s seemingly slipped off-stage.
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