Trade union education in former French Africa (1959–1965): ideological transmission and the role of French and Italian communists

The socialist experiences that were born in West Africa during the decolonisation of the French empire (1958–1960) showed their most significant expressions in Guinea and Mali. The two new independent republics took an anti-imperialist stance and chose to pursue a ‘non-capitalist’ development, supported by the USSR. The sudden departure of the European rulers left an untrained bureaucratic apparatus: the leading parties needed a political training for their own leadership and their mass structures to pursue a strategy of political and economic control of the state. The role of African unions became necessary in the orientation of state strategies and in the ideological dissemination of Marxism among workers. The connections of the sub-Saharan unions with the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) – referring to the international communist movement – and with the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and the Italian Confederazione Generale Italana del Lavoro (CGIL) show the permeability of the African workers’ movement to the Marxist ideas coming from European communism, that were integrated with anti-imperialism and pan-Africanist anti-colonialism. The Guinean and Malian trade unions took a vanguard vocation of socialism in their respective countries, also making use of the technical assistance of European trade unionists who had come on behalf of the WFTU in Africa to train Union Générale des Travailleurs d’Afrique Noire (UGTAN) cadres.