2024-04-10 16:04:29
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In recent days, the question of memory has again been at the center of Guinean news. The different versions of our common history clash, sometimes in the worst possible ways.
Indeed, the commemoration of March 26, 2024 marking the fortieth anniversary of the call to God of the late Ahmed Sékou Touré has once again relaunched the debate on the thorny question of memory in Guinea. This is the case whenever it concerns a happy or painful page of our common history. From General Lansana Conté to President Alpha Condé, including Captain Moussa Dadis Camara and General Sékouba Konaté, the people of Guinea remain divided, particularly due to political and ethnic divisions, around questions of memory. Each one, for example, has their own stories and comments concerning, among other things, the 1970 aggression, the events of July 4, 1985, February 2 and 3, 1996, June 12, 2006, January-February 2007 and September 28, 2009.
Guineans remain opposed by memory. These divisions or memory battles can be explained above all by the fact that there have never been serious debates on the different faces of our past which continue to cause a lot of ink and saliva to flow, to provoke numerous comments and abundant.
No aspect of our common past, no matter how simple, is unanimously accepted. Instead of a common story with only one version, we have a common story with multiple versions. Although we belong to the same State, we recognize ourselves in the same Nation, everyone tells, as they wish, the history of our common heritage, according to their interests. Yes, the history of Guinea has always been hostage to people who mainly benefit from the painful memories of our collective journey.
The question that many Guineans have been asking themselves for a long time is: what really needs to be done to definitively resolve this question of memory in Guinea?
This question is all the more important because it concerns us all. Even if our collective experience brings us together, our memory, for its part, opposes us on many questions relating to the past of our country. How can we reconcile memories in Paradise today?
The State must in no way wait for the witnesses of the events which divide Guinean opinion to disappear one after the other to engage our country in a process of writing our common past because, without these true witnesses of our history, it would be difficult if not impossible to write our common history. Hence the urgent need to set up a national commission for clarification and the search for historical truth.
Indeed, to silence the tensions around our common past and allow it to be taught to young people and children as part of its appropriation by young people and the better knowledge of their country, we must write our common history. Who did what, when, where and how, some of which only present the negative sides and aspects on the back of a single party, must be known by all Guineans. Hence the obligation, once again, for the State to set up a national commission to write the history of Guinea. This is extremely important and even essential for national reconciliation. The future of Guinea depends on it.
In other words, to shed light, particularly on the dark pages of our common experience, which is variously appreciated by public opinion, it would be important to create a national commission to write the history of Guinea. This commission will be made up of eminent personalities coming in particular from the university ranks, namely historians, sociologists, jurists and men of letters. In addition to these academics, living witnesses, representatives of different victims’ associations, traditional communicators from the four natural regions of Guinea and foreign resource people.
This national commission for writing the history of Guinea will, among other things, have the task of bringing together all the fragments of our past. This approach, although laborious, is a guarantee not only to think and heal the wounds as well as enlighten the lantern of all Guineans on the past of our country from independence to the present day, but also to put an end to the delusions, to manipulation and deformation for new generations.
What should the State do, once this national commission for writing the history of Guinea has been established?
It must create the conditions that can facilitate access to all of the Guinean archives, including those still classified, by asking for example from France and all other powers (Nations) retaining some of our archives, the declassification of all the files relating to the plots that Guinea experienced from 1958 to 1984 and the painful pages of our collective journey. Access to these documents covered by French national defense secrecy could indeed allow the rapid and sure manifestation of the truth on several gray areas of our history which oppose the Guineans.
As the other said, without a shared past, there is no common present. This is why we must shoulder the weight of our common history together.
Easy MARA, Juriste