$Unique_ID{COW01524} $Pretitle{374} $Title{Guinea Chapter 2A. Historical Setting} $Subtitle{} $Author{George L. Harris} $Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army} $Subject{french guinea west empire century trade area africa modern peul} $Date{1973} $Log{Figure 2.*0152401.scf } Country: Guinea Book: Area Handbook for Guinea Author: George L. Harris Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army Date: 1973 Chapter 2A. Historical Setting The region of West Africa constituting the present Republic of Guinea has been inhabited since well before the Christian Era. The earliest dwellers included the ancestors of some coastal and forest peoples of modern Guinea. The forebears of the present principal ethnic groups, the Malinke and Peul, came in considerable numbers, however, only after A.D. 1000. The origins of the Soussou, the third major group, were still uncertain in the mid-1970s (see ch. 4). The Malinke and the Peul have both played major roles in the history of West Africa in an area far larger than the territory of the modern state. These two peoples attained a high degree of social development, and both created large, centralized political entities. In the case of the Malinke, political control was expanded into an extensive empire known as Mali, which at the peak of its power in the fourteenth century encompassed much of the western Sudan (see Glossary) savanna, including the savanna region of the present republic. Guineans consider their country's entry into history to have begun with that empire. Much later, in the latter 1800s, the Malinke of Guinea helped forge another empire under the leadership of Samory Toure, now a national hero. This empire, however, was short-lived, being destroyed by the French during the 1890s. The Peul became a major part of Guinean history only in the late seventeenth century after they conquered the Fouta Djallon, the mountain region that takes up most of Middle Guinea, and subsequently established there an independent theocratic Muslim state (see ch. 3). That state maintained its independence until the end of the 1800s, when sovereignty in the Fouta Djallon passed into the hands of the French. The formation of Guinea as a distinct political entity was made without the participation of any of the peoples of the modern state in the decision. It stemmed from the European division of Africa during the great power scramble for territory of the late 1800s and, more immediately, from the carving up by the French of their West African conquests into administrative units of convenience. For over half a century thereafter the French governed Guinea, utilizing amenable indigenous chiefs (who became little more than French agents) to assist them. At the same time the French pursued a general policy of imparting French culture on the theory that at some date in the future the colony would emerge with Metropolitan France into a single community. World War II engendered new ideas and brought demands for greater participation by the indigenous population in Guinean affairs. In 1946 a beginning of local representation was offered-to all French Black Africa-through membership in the newly established French Union. Thereby Guinea and the other French overseas territories became integral parts of the French Republic. World War II also brought a growth of political parties. Among these was the Democratic Party of Guinea (Parti Democratique de Guinee-PDG), which evolved, under the leadership of Ahmed Sekou Toure from the early 1950s, into a mass organization having wide popular support. In 1956 France made further concessions to its former colonies that implied the eventual granting of autonomy. In the following year elections in Guinea for a territorial assembly having new internal legislative powers placed de facto control in the hands of the PDG, which had a large majority in the assembly. Then, in 1958, France offered a new relationship to its overseas territories in the proposed French Community (Communaute Francaise), an association of the members of the French Republic in a federation of equals. Guinea's leaders, however, tended to favor a confederal setup, which would include a strong federated West African entity that could deal with Metropolitan France more effectively than its individual members. They also wished that the basic right to national independence be guaranteed. The French president, General Charles de Gaulle, refused to agree to a strong federation. More important, he strongly implied that independence would mean total severance from the community. Faced by rejection of what were considered reasonable requests, the Guinean people, led by the PDG, voted for independence in September 1958. France immediately dissociated Guinea from the community, and the former colonial territory began a new course as the Republic of Guinea. Prehistory in Guinea Through the mid-1970s only limited archaeological studies had been made of the area of West Africa constituting modern Guinea. Stone tools had been found in several localities in the country and were identified as belonging to Late Stone Age cultures, but few of the sites had been dated. Styles of workmanship indicated that at least some of the early toolmakers had probably come from the Sahara region to the north and northeast. The time of this movement was unknown, but it was speculated that changing living conditions brought on by the gradual desiccation of the Sahara, which had become quite noticeable by the third millennium B.C., were an important factor in the migration. By A.D. 1000 peoples in the coastal region of present-day Lower Guinea, believed to have been mainly speakers of West Atlantic languages at that time, were generally cultivators (see ch. 4). These groups experienced little pressure from outside their own communities, and the development of political organization was minimal. Mostly they lived in small, independent or loosely associated villages and hamlets. The staple crop was rice, which had been introduced from the Niger River valley sometime during the first millennium A.D. Fishing was also an important occupation for some, and cured fish and salt obtained by solar evaporation were probably trade items. In the forested areas behind the coastal zone, in parts of the Fouta Djallon, and in the Forest Region of modern Guinea, other speakers of West Atlantic languages and presumably some Mande languages roamed as hunters and gatherers. By A.D. 1000 many such groups had settled in isolated farming villages in forest clearings, where they also practiced slash-and-burn agriculture. Their adoption of a sedentary life had been encouraged by the new knowledge of iron smelting and forging that brought replacement of earlier stone farming implements by iron ones and made cultivation easier and more productive. As in coastal areas there was little stimulus for the development of central political controls, which was further discouraged by the difficulty of communications. In contrast to the coastal and forest areas, the open land of the savanna was conducive to the early development of settled agricultural communities. During the first centuries of the Christian Era, technological advances in agriculture resulted in the growth of such communities in the broad savanna zone between the upper Niger River basin and the southern limits of the Sahara-a zone that includes the savanna region of modern Upper Guinea. This growth was accompanied by the gradual development of more complex societies in which social classes became differentiated and highly organized political institutions appeared that evolved into hereditary kingdoms. Historical Antecedents Important in the rise of centralized kingdoms in the savanna area was the expansion of trans-Saharan trade, between Mediterranean North Africa and the western Sudan, that occurred after the introduction of the camel at about the beginning of the Christian Era. Certain caravan terminals in the western Sahel zone on the Sahara's southern edge developed into commercial centers. Control of the trade through these points-principally the export of gold and slaves to North Africa in exchange for salt and some other commodities-led by about the middle of the first millennium A.D. to the emergence in this area of a powerful black kingdom peopled or dominated by the Soninke, who belong like the Malinke of modern Guinea to the Manding group. During the next several centuries this kingdom absorbed or reduced to tributary status neighboring states, including some Berber groups in the southern Sahara. It expanded in the process to a politically well-organized, militarily powerful, and economically wealthy empire. Generally known as Ghana (although apparently called Wagadu by the Soninke), the empire covered a large area roughly northeast of modern Guinea. Its borders did not encompass any present Guinean territory, but the empire's influence certainly extended at the peak of its power in the eleventh century well into the savanna area of the modern Guinean state (see fig. 2). The decline of Ghana started abruptly in the latter eleventh century. In the 1050s Berber groups to the north were swept up by the Almoravid movement-a militant Muslim religious community and their supporters in Berber West Africa. Fired in part by Islamizing zeal and perhaps to a greater degree by visions of Ghana's riches, the Almoravids invaded the empire and subdued it in 1076. After several decades the Soninke regained control, but the imperial power had been weakened, and many of the vassal states broke away. Among them was the kingdom of Soso, lying to the south of Ghana, which expanded aggressively throughout the twelfth century. Soso was decisively defeated in the early 1200s, however, by the rising Malinke state of Mali, which soon made itself the successor empire to Ghana. Oral traditions have placed the origin of Mali on the upper Niger River in about the eighth century A.D. Growth into an empire began, however, only some three centuries later when the emergence of the Boure goldfields (on the headwaters of the Bakoye River in present-day Upper Guinea) as the major source of gold and the extension of trade routes southward to the Niger provided favorable economic conditions. The expansion of Mali dates from Sundiata (ruled 1230-55), who defeated the Soso kingdom in 1235 and founded the empire. Northward, control was obtained of the trans-Saharan trading centers, and over time the empire's boundaries were pushed westward, eventually reaching the Atlantic Ocean and including within them approximately the northern half of modern Guinea. The height of power was reached in the fourteenth century under Mansa Musa, who reigned from 1307 to 1332. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, weakness and dissension within the regime led to a decline of central authority. Vassal states gradually threw off Mali's sovereignty and acquired part of its territory. During the fifteenth century disintegration continued, and a large area was lost to Songhai, formerly a tributary state along the middle Niger River, which expanded into an empire, largely at Mali's expense, during this period. Songhai continued to expand in the 1500s to become the largest unified state in the western Sudan until establishment of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Francaise) at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the sixteenth century Songhai in turn was weakened by relatively constant warfare and the problems of dynastic succession. During that century gold and slaves began moving toward new outlets on the Atlantic coast as European traders entered the market (see The European Arrival and. Its Aftermath to 1900, this ch.) The possibilities of increasingly declining trade across the Sahara caused concern in Morocco, which attacked and conquered Songhai in 1591. Moorish controls proved ineffective, and political disintegration of the empire occurred rapidly. From then until the nineteenth century the western Sudan was characterized politically by small, frequently warring states. New migrations into the Guinea area resulted, perhaps the most significant for the modern state being the arrival of the Peul in the seventeenth century (see The Peul Islamic Theocracy, this ch.). [See Figure 2.: Early West African Empires Source: Adapted from Roland Oliver and J. D. Fage, A Short History of Africa, Baltimore, 1962, p. 87.] The Spread of Islam Islam, which was to become in time a binding force among different ethnic groups in the western Sudan, probably reached Ghana about, or not long after, the Arab conquest of North Africa in the early eighth century A.D. It did not arrive as a proselytizing force, however, but as a coincidental factor in the efforts of Berber and other arabized merchants to expand trade with the Sudan. By the year A.D. 1000, Muslim traders were living in separate sections of the main trading towns. They were permitted complete freedom of worship, and some actually held important court posts. At the time Islam appears to have had little general appeal and spread principally as a class religion of the aristocracy; it had been adopted by the rulers of several small kingdoms-although the ruler of Ghana was apparently not then a Muslim. Some members of the trading class had also accepted it. The Almoravid conquest of Ghana brought conversion of almost all of the Soninke. Ghana remained powerful for some time after the Soninke dynasty was restored, and Islam was spread among the subject peoples still within the empire. No reversion occurred when Mali succeeded Ghana, for the ruling Keita dynasty had already been Islamized before the state began its expansion. Islam was not officially spread until after establishment of the empire, when the country took on the appearance of a Muslim state. Koranic schools and mosques flourished under royal sponsorship, and several rulers made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Ambassadors were exchanged with Morocco, and that country became a center of learning for scholars from Mali. Islam was also professed by the rulers of Songhai, and Muslim practices continued to spread. The diffusion occurred peacefully in general-during the time of the three empires the state rarely attempted to enforce conformity. In areas outside the main towns its dissemination was carried out principally through the personal efforts of those African traders who had become Muslims. The acceptance of Islam at first appears to have been as a belief parallel to existing traditional religious beliefs, which continued to be practiced. This was in line with the African concept of social harmony and accommodation. Eventually Islam became for many a syncretic religion combining Koranic teachings and indigenous religious practice. After the decline of Mali and the destruction of Songhai, it seems likely that, although Koranic teaching remained influential at courts of some residual states, the religious practices of rulers and chiefs tended gradually to give greater emphasis to traditional observances. Many individuals nominally Muslim, mainly in agricultural areas but also in towns, apparently reverted completely to indigenous religious beliefs. Efforts to enforce the doctrines and practices of Islam to the exclusion of other religious beliefs began in the modern Guinea region with the jihads (see Glossary) of the Peul theocracy founded in the Fouta Djallon in the 1700s. During the following century Islam attained its greatest militancy in the jihad of Al Haj Omar in the savanna area of Guinea, which started about 1850, and from about 1880 in that of Samory, which encompassed most of eastern Guinea and continued until the French conquest in the 1890s. The Peul Islamic Theocracy The plateau areas of the Fouta Djallon have long offered attractive grazing land for the nomadic Peul pastoralist, and during the early centuries of the second millennium A.D. some Peul groups migrated to this region. The historical importance of the Peul in Guinean history dates, however, only from the seventeenth century, when considerable numbers arrived in the Fouta Djallon from Macina (Massina), a state in the upper Niger River basin. The Peul newcomers, then only nominally Muslims, were accompanied by devout religious teachers. By about 1725 the teachers had converted the Peul into strong believers, as well as converting some of the surrounding Dialonke, a branch of the Soussou. In that year a jihad was launched under the cleric Ibrahim Musa against other nonbelievers. Despite early successes the jihad was at the point of failure when Ibrahim Musa died in 1751. He was succeeded by Ibrahim Sori, a secular military leader, who managed finally to establish firm Peul control over the Fouta Djallon and some surrounding territory in the latter 1770s. A theocratic governmental system was instituted by the Peul under which the state, divided into semiautonomous provinces, was ruled by a Muslim aristocracy under an almamy (a military, religious, and spiritual leader) chosen by a select body of clerics and acclaimed by a general assembly of free Peul. Sori's early dictatorial attitude when war leader had caused concern and led to selection of a descendant of Ibrahim Musa as almamy. After Sori's victories in the 1760s, however, he ruled jointly with Ibrahim Musa until his death in 1784. The system of having joint almamy was then continued, and a sometimes bloody struggle ensued between the two groups of descendants until agreement was reached in 1837 for each almamy to rule for two years alternately. Refusal to hand over power resulted from time to time in further dissension, however, and this situation was not finally resolved until the French seized control of the Fouta Djallon in 1896 and a pro-French almamy was elected in the following year. Although not particularly strong militarily, the Peul theocratic state substantially influenced some of the peoples around it. The practice of government based on Islamic legal and ethical principles offered reassurances that law and justice would be relatively uniformly applied. This tended to encourage trade through the Fouta Djallon, which appears to have become a crossroads for traffic between the forest zone and the savanna. The European Arrival and its Aftermath to 1900 Early Activities to the Mid-1800s The first European explorers to reach the area of modern Guinea were Portuguese, who sailed along the coast in the mid-1400s. The voyages were part of a long range exploration plan of Prince Henry the Navigator that included as one goal the bypassing of Muslim North Africa in order to secure direct access to trade in West Africa, particularly to the sources of gold. Little gold was found on the early voyages, but West African captives were taken to Portugal for training to assist in future explorations. Portuguese merchants saw in the captives, rather, a source of slave labor, and exploitation of the market was actively under way by the latter 1400s. During the 1500s British and French business ventures occasionally sought trade along the West African coast; but by the latter part of the century the plundering of Spanish shipping from the New World proved more profitable, and West African trade was left largely to the Portuguese. The principal exception was filling the need for slaves for the new West Indian plantations, which resulted in some British and French activity. During the century Portuguese trading posts were established at various points along the Guinean coast, but few records of their early operations remain. It is known, however, that from sometime in the 1500s slaves and ivory were being sent out via the Rio Nunez estuary. The seventeenth century was a period of intense commercial competition between the Dutch, British, and French. Much of Portuguese authority along the West African coast disappeared during this time. The Dutch, initially strong, were eliminated from that coast by about the end of the century, and the area from present-day Sierra Leone to north of Senegal was generally under French domination. French and other European commercial interest was centered on Senegal in the 1700s. The coast of modern Guinea, greatly indented and difficult to navigate, offered little attraction, and throughout the century trade conducted there was largely in the hands of stateless Portuguese and Portuguese half-castes who had settled permanently and had become part of the indigenous societies. British-French wars from about midcentury brought loss of important French settlements in Senegal. They were restored in 1783 only to be lost again during the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), which also brought a complete halt to French trade with West Africa. The Treaty of Paris of 1814 returned France's West African holdings and established equal French trading rights with the British and the Portuguese. Until the mid-1800s, However, British economic influence was dominant all along the coast of Guinea, and there was considerable sentiment in Sierra Leone for annexation of the coastal zone, but the idea received little support from the home government. In 1818 the British obtained the Iles de Los by treaties with local chiefs, although for other purposes, and continued to hold them until 1904. In 1816 the British had also attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish political and trade ties with the Fouta Djallon. During the early decades of the 1800s, French influence and French trading activities developed slowly in the coastal area of modern Guinea. Agreements were made with local chiefs for trading privileges in exchange for payment of fees. Among the early agreements was one with the Landouma, a people living upriver from the Rio Nunez estuary, on which a French trading post had been established. Another was concluded with the neighboring coastal Nalou. Most arrangements were made directly by private traders, although some agreements or treaties may have involved official participation. In 1837 a French mission recommended that official French trading activities be limited to north of the Casamance River in southern Senegal. Two years, later, however, a new Landouma chief raised trading fees; the traders refused to pay, and their houses were destroyed. British and French warships arrived, and the customary fees were reinstated. But trouble over fees continued during the next ten years, and in 1849 a French ship bombarded Boke, the principal Landouma center. This resulted in local acceptance of French sovereignty, the first such instance in the modern Guinea region. Exports during these years consisted of various locally produced goods and of hides and some gold that came from the Fouta Djallon. Slaves were also an item of trade. The slave trade was made illegal by the French in 1818, and in 1831 France further allowed British naval vessels to stop and search suspected slave ships. The trade was officially abolished in 1848; but the many inlets and estuaries of the Guinea coast offered excellent hiding places for slave ships, and the trade continued until about 1865. The French Conquest of Guinea (1850-1900) Until the mid-1800s French power in West Africa was largely centered in Saint-Louis and the Ile de Goree in Senegal, other French holdings being little more than trading areas occupied or used by French merchants. There was little enthusiasm in France for the acquisition of colonies although, after the accession of Napoleon III in 1848, the government announced that it would actively promote the development of trade in Senegal and extension of French influence toward the interior. In 1854 Captain (later General) Louis Faidherbe arrived in Senegal as governor. Faidherbe was convinced that access to the Sudan hinterland and its trade and French control of such access were vital to the development of a viable French commerce in the region. This aim, which he pursued throughout his long tenure (1854-61 and 1863-65), had an important influence on the military officers who later led the way in the acquisition of the French West African colonies. Faidherbe's arrival coincided with a period of militant Islamic revival and the formation in the western Sudan of the Toucouleur Empire of Al Haj Omar. Originally from the Fouta Toro, Al Haj Omar had established himself at Dinguiraye in present-day Upper Guinea in 1850. Using this as a base, he organized a large military force, which included many Toucouleur people, and began the conquest, partly by conversion and partly by arms, of native states lying to the north and northeast. Although Al Haj Omar appears to have been interested in cooperation with the French, recognizing the value of their trade to provide him with arms, Faidherbe perceived militant Islamism as a threat to his own goal and the safety of the coastal settlements. In 1857 his forces halted the Muslim advance at Medina (at which a French fort had been built in 1855) on the upper Senegal River, and Al Haj Omar's main thrust then turned eastward. Al Haj Omar was killed in 1864, but his son Ahmadu continued to hold areas of eastern Guinea until the Toucouleur Empire was defeated by the French in 1893. The French drive toward the interior of West Africa ended for a time, however, when Faidherbe left Senegal in 1865. His immediate successor favored extension of activities along the present Guinea coast, and in 1866 a French military detachment was sent to garrison Boke; the following year a military post was established at Benti. French political control of the coastal area of Guinea was strengthened, meanwhile, when the ruler of Forecariah placed himself and his people under French suzerainty and protection in 1865, and similar actions were taken by the Landouma and Nalou in treaties in 1866. During this time in Metropolitan France, Napoleon III's Second Empire was experiencing increasing financial problems. There seemed little profit in pursuing an active policy of annexation of colonial territories, and a new governor sent to Senegal in 1869 was instructed to emphasize the peaceful consolidation of trade. The French interest in colonial expansion was further weakened by defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871; it remained largely dormant until the end of the decade. The 1880s-the decade in which the so-called scramble for Africa by the principal European powers started-and the 1890s brought a major division of West Africa between Great Britain and France. Individuals directly involved in this action included several French military officers in West Africa who were imbued by Faidherbe's vision of empire and who conducted campaigns and political intrigues frequently without prior approval from the civilian authorities in France. Moreover, in contrast to British goals, which were for a long time basically concerned with the protection of economic spheres of interest, French operations were in fact military conquests aimed at securing colonial territory. The goal of these French officers ruled out any accommodation with indigenous states other than as a temporary expedient. In the Guinea area it resulted in a major and lengthy conflict with the powerful Manding Empire of Samory Toure, a Malinke, that began in the mid-1880s and ended only in 1898. In the early 1800s the Manding descendants of the Mali Empire inhabited a large area centering generally in the old Manding heartland between Siguiri in modern Guinea and Bamako in Mali. They were only loosely organized politically but possessed an underlying feeling of national cohesion and a pride in their history stemming from the glories of the Mali Empire. By about 1870 several small Manding states had been welded together by Samory, a former trader and a convert to Islam, who set up his capital at Bissandougou, near present-day Kerouane. By the mid-1880s Samory's empire covered most of present-day Upper Guinea and the Forest Region, as well as parts of Mali and Ivory Coast. In 1885 the French attempted to occupy the Boure gold-producing region held by Samory but were forced to withdraw. The next year, however, Samory signed a treaty of friendship with France in which he gave up all territory (mainly in Guinea) north of the Niger River. Although subsequently refuted by Samory, the French claimed that he had accepted a protectorate status; this turned out to be an important point in later British-French negotiations and in British decisions not to help Samory. In the latter 1880s French penetration into Guinea was essentially peaceful. The British and the French governments, their economies and their French West African trade seriously affected by an international recession, had little interest in military ventures and sought to resolve colonial problems by compromise. During this time Samory, concerned over future French ambitions, approached the British for a mutual agreement. Merchants in Sierra Leone favored collaboration as offering possibilities for access to trade in the interior, but Samory's offer appears to have been given little consideration in Great Britain. In 1889 a British-French boundaries agreement established an interior demarcation line for Sierra Leone, in effect leaving the western Sudan interior to the French. The relative lull in French West African military operations after 1885 was broken by an attack on the Toucouleur Empire in 1889. The attack was mounted by one of the so-called Sudan officers, French military men who during the next decade often took matters into their own hands but whose military exploits brought them national acclaim from a public that became increasingly colony-minded during the 1890s. As part of their effort to conquer the western Sudan interior for France, an attempt was made to induce the king of Sikasso to attack Samory's empire, which was seen as a major obstacle to their goal. Samory, upon learning of this, repudiated his earlier treaty with the French. The French then advanced into Guinea and took Bissandougou in 1891. A Samory offer to cede his empire to the British in return for their help was of no avail, and a bloody, destructive, and societally highly disruptive war was fought during which his forces finally withdrew eastward completely out of Guinea. The war ended only with the capitulation of Samory in 1898. Modern African attitudes toward Samory have been described as ambiguous by West African scholars. His earlier conquests and especially his later resistance to the French advance are remembered for the great suffering, and in some places the considerable depopulation, they caused, which included selling captives into slavery to obtain funds for arms and cavalry horses. There is little question, however, of his military and administrative abilities, and he has been given great credit for his struggle to maintain independence. In modern Guinea Samory is popularly regarded as a national hero and as a symbol of resistance to colonialism. A significant feature of Samory's empire was the spread of Islam among the Manding and other peoples included in it. Samory himself originally held indigenous religious beliefs (although his ancestors had at one time been Muslims) but was converted to Islam, probably around the mid-1800s. His Islamic belief was to some extent pragmatic, and it was not until about 1880, several years after acquiring broad political power, that he began a jihad to convert unbelievers. During the succeeding years, however, Islamic practices were introduced throughout the area under his control, and by the empire's demise in 1898 a substantial number of individuals had been brought into the faith. Formation of French Guinea Initially all French settlements in West Africa were under the authority of Senegal, but in 1845 French possessions were divided into Senegal, having its administrative center in Saint-Louis, and Rivieres du Sud, which was placed under a naval commander in chief with headquarters at Ile de Goree. The latter's authority included all French centers (at that time coastal only in nature) from Ile de Goree to Gabon. In 1859 Senegal assumed direct administration of the Rivieres du Sud colony. The following year the Peul in the Fouta Djallon ceded rights to a large area around Boke (actually occupied by the Landouma but tributary to the Peul). Some twenty years elapsed, however, before the French officially secured a foothold in the interior of Guinea. This was effected through a treaty of friendship, concerned mainly with French trading rights, concluded with the almamy in the Fouta Djallon in 1881. In return the French engaged to pay agreed upon fees on a regular basis. This treaty in fact established a protectorate over the Fouta Djallon, although effective implementation of this provision did not occur until after the mid-1890s. In 1882 Rivieres du Sud was again made a separate political until under a lieutenant governor who was, however, subordinate to the governor of Senegal. In 1890 greater administrative autonomy was acquired by the colony, which included Dahomey and Ivory Coast. Separate budgets and staff were authorized, the latter to be located in Conakry. A lieutenant governor remained in charge, but he had direct access to the government in Paris and was only required to report to Senegal. The colony was also given responsibility for the Fouta Djallon protectorate. Then in 1891 an independent governor was authorized, and the colony was officially designated French Guinea and Dependencies. Two years later, the holdings in Dahomey and Ivory Coast were separated from the new political unit. In 1893 the colony of French Guinea actually included only the Maritime Region and the Fouta Djallon protectorate (still nominal, although a new treaty in 1888 had reaffirmed its existence). This was only about one-half of the area encompassed by the Republic of Guinea in 1975 (see fig. 3). A firm hold existed only over the coastal zone, except for the Iles de Los, which were in British hands. The 1888 treaty failed to provide continued payment of fees to the almamy, causing resentment. Upon the death of the incumbent almamy in 1889, a civil war erupted between pro- and anti-French chiefs-the latter suspected supporters of Samory-over his successor. Disturbances continued during the next several years until finally a French military contingent occupied Timbo, capital of the Peul state, in 1896. A new pro-French almamy was elected, and a treaty, signed by the almamy with the French in early 1897, gave France effective sovereignty. A French resident administrator was appointed, and the French acquired the right to set up civil and military posts freely. Local chiefs continued to be elected, but they had to have the approval of French administrators, and they ruled with French advice. The treaty also established local taxes in the amount of two francs per head or ten francs per household. This head tax was later extended to the rest of the colony. The area to the east of the Fouta Djallon was the province of the French Sudan military administration in the 1890s but was not brought under effective control until after the expulsion of Samory's forces. In 1895 a section along the Sierra Leone frontier corresponding roughly to the present-day Faranah Administrative Region was transferred to Guinea. Most of the remainder of present-day Upper Guinea was detached from French Sudan and added to the colony in 1899. In 1892 a frontier agreement with Liberia had accorded the colony a considerable area in the Forest Region of modern Guinea. Operations against Samory led to French entry into the area, however, and it was in effect made part of Guinea in 1899, organized as a separate military district; confirmation of French possession occurred in a French-Liberian agreement in 1911. The various ethnic groups in the forest resisted the French advance, and it was not until 1911 that the last group, the Toma, was pacified. The French possessions in the western Sudan, including the new colony of French Guinea, were grouped together into one large administrative unit, French West Africa, in 1895. French Guinea remained a part of that body until establishment of the French Union in 1946 (see French Rule to World War II; From World War II to Independence, this ch.).