GuineaVibes · Conakry · Guinea's unmarked history
The Camp in the Middle of Conakry That Guinea Ordered Marked, and Never Marked
In 1961 the commandant of Camp Boiro had the windows made smaller. The reason recorded is that they were too large for condemned men. Between 1960 and 1984 thousands of Guineans died behind those windows — many by the diète noire, the black diet: locked in a cell and given nothing to eat or drink until they died. Among them was Diallo Telli, the first Guinean to lead the Organisation of African Unity. In 1991 Guinea's own government ordered a memorial built here. Nothing was built, and the survivors were then forbidden a museum.
Camp Boiro — formally Camp Mamadou Boiro — operated from 1960 to 1984 in the centre of Conakry, in the Camayenne area of the city.
It was not built as a prison. Under French colonial rule the site was Camp Camayenne, barracks of the Republican Guard. Independence came in 1958. Within two years it had become something else.
The political prison block was constructed with assistance from the government of Czechoslovakia.
That detail deserves a moment. A socialist-bloc European government supplied technical help to build a detention block in a newly independent African state, and thousands of Africans died in it. The Cold War is usually told as a story about superpowers. It was also a story about who helped build the cells.
In 1961, the commandant had the windows reduced in size. The recorded reason is that they were too large for condemned men.
Somebody looked at a window and decided it was too generous for a person who was going to die in that room.
The method most associated with Camp Boiro has a name in French: la diète noire. The black diet.
It was not a beating or an execution. A prisoner was placed in a cell and given nothing at all — no food, no water — until they died. It took, typically, around two weeks.
Deaths by the black diet were not accidents of overcrowding or neglect. They were ordered, applied to named individuals, and recorded.
It required no weapon, no executioner, and no order that anyone had to sign twice. It required a locked door and patience.
Estimates of the total number who died at Camp Boiro vary enormously. The most widely cited figure is around 5,000 executed or dead from torture and starvation. Other estimates put the number ten times higher, at 50,000.
We give both, because both are published and neither has been established. That range is itself a fact about Guinea: nobody has ever been permitted to count.
Boubacar Diallo Telli was born in 1925 at Porédaka, in the Fouta Djallon. He was Fulani.
He studied at the École normale supérieure William Ponty in Dakar, then at the École Nationale de la France d'Outre-Mer in Paris. He became Guinea's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in 1958 — the year of independence.
In 1964 he became Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity, the body that would later become the African Union. He held the post until 1972, serving two terms. He was one of the most senior African diplomats of his generation.
He returned to Guinea and became Minister of Justice in 1972.
On 18 July 1976 he was arrested at his home and taken to Camp Boiro.
The alleged conspiracy he was accused of is remembered as the Diallo Telli plot — and, more revealingly, as the Fulbe plot, because the arrests that followed fell heavily on Fulani Guineans.
He died in cell number 52, after fourteen days of the black diet. Sources give the date as February 1977 and as 1 March 1977; we state both rather than choose.
The first Guinean to lead the Organisation of African Unity was starved to death by his own government, in a cell with a number on the door, in the capital city.
What that means beyond Guinea. The OAU existed to advance African liberation and dignity. Its former Secretary-General was killed by an African government using deliberate starvation, nine years after he left the post. No African institution intervened. That silence is part of the record, and it is rarely discussed.
Telli was not alone, and the pattern is documented.
Five prominent prisoners were eliminated by the black diet: Diallo Telli; former ministers Barry Alpha Oumar and Dramé Alioune; and army officers Diallo Alhassana and Kouyaté Laminé.
Five more people died of starvation.
Bah Mamadou, a Guinean from Labé who had emigrated to France, returned to visit his family. He entered the country from Senegal. Every occupant of his vehicle was arrested and taken to Camp Boiro. Within a month, eight of the travellers had died of the black diet. Only Bah himself survived.
He came home to see his family, and everyone in the car with him was dead within a month.
Why the diaspora exists. There is a large Guinean population in France, in Senegal, in the United States. A significant part of it is not economic migration. It is people who left and did not come back, and their children. Camp Boiro is one of the reasons Guinea's diaspora is the size it is — and one of the reasons some families still will not return.
Siaka Touré (1935–1985) commanded Camp Boiro.
He was born in Kankan, studied in Paris and Moscow, and became an army officer. He also served as Minister of Transport.
He was a nephew — some sources say cousin — of President Ahmed Sékou Touré. Through that line he was a descendant of Samori Ture, the Almami who fought the French for seventeen years and is one of the great figures of West African resistance.
A descendant of the man who fought the French empire ran a camp where Guineans were starved to death by other Guineans.
Ahmed Sékou Touré died in March 1984. The military took power within days.
Many political prisoners at Camp Boiro were released. Leaders of the former regime were themselves imprisoned, and some were later executed. Siaka Touré died in 1985.
The camp ceased operating.
And then, very largely, the subject was closed.
This is the part that belongs at the centre of any honest account.
On 27 August 1991, Guinea's council of ministers issued a communiqué ordering the renovation of the camp and the construction of a memorial to all the victims.
No action followed.
The Association of Victims of Camp Boiro — survivors and the families of the dead — campaigned for years to keep the memory alive. They sought to establish a museum in the former camp.
They were forbidden.
The state ordered a memorial and did not build it. Then it refused to let the survivors build one themselves.
Where the site is now. Camp Boiro stood at approximately 9°32′13″N, 13°41′08″W, in central Conakry. The site has been substantially built over and is not presented to visitors in any organised way. There is no museum, no visitor centre, and no official interpretation of what happened here.
We are foreigners writing about another country's grief, and we are careful about that. But there is a public argument in Guinea, in Guinean sources, and it is not our invention.
Victims' families and the Association hold that the plots were fabricated as pretexts for mass arrest, that those arrested were innocent, and that Guinea needs a truth and reconciliation commission along South African lines.
Sékou Touré was also the man who, in 1958, told Charles de Gaulle that Guinea preferred poverty in freedom to riches in slavery — and who was punished for it when France withdrew and took what it could carry. To many Guineans and many Africans, that remains one of the great moments of the independence era.
Both are true. The man who said no to an empire also built a camp in his capital where his own citizens were starved to death.
A country can be founded on an act of extraordinary courage and still owe its dead an accounting. The first does not settle the second.
Why we publish this. Guinea's tourism is presented, when it is presented at all, as waterfalls and highlands and beaches. All of that is real and we cover it at length. But a country's history is not only its scenery, and a capital city with an unmarked camp in the middle of it is a fact about that capital. Readers deserve to know it exists.
There is no site to visit in any conventional sense. No museum, no memorial, no signage, no guide.
If you are in Conakry and want to understand this, the honest advice is:
Many families are directly affected. Many will speak about it; some will not. Follow their lead, and do not press.
The area is built up and residential. There is nothing to photograph that would mean anything to a stranger, and photographing people's homes for a story about atrocity is intrusion.
A substantial memoir literature exists, largely in French — accounts by Alpha-Abdoulaye Diallo, Amadou Diallo, Almamy Fodé Sylla and others, alongside the documentation work of the Camp Boiro Memorial project.
Sékou Touré's rehabilitation is an active project in Guinea, with its own institutions and supporters. You will meet people on both sides.
Reviewed . Camp Boiro, formally Camp Mamadou Boiro, operated in Conakry from 1960 to 1984, on a site previously used as Camp Camayenne, barracks of the Republican Guard under French colonial rule. The political prison block was constructed with assistance from the Czechoslovak government; the reduction of window sizes in 1961 on the commandant's instruction is as recorded. Estimates of the death toll vary between approximately 5,000 and 50,000; both figures are published, neither has been independently established, and both are stated here. The diète noire — total deprivation of food and water until death — is documented in survivor accounts and scholarly work. Diallo Telli (1925–1977), born at Porédaka, Guinea's Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1958, Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity 1964–1972 and Minister of Justice from 1972, was arrested at his home on 18 July 1976 and died at Camp Boiro after fourteen days of the black diet; sources give the date as February 1977 and as 1 March 1977, in cell 52. The February 1977 deaths of Barry Alpha Oumar, Dramé Alioune, Diallo Alhassana and Kouyaté Laminé, and the August 1979 arrest of Bah Mamadou's travelling party with eight subsequent deaths, are as documented. Siaka Touré (1935–1985), commandant of the camp, was a relative of President Ahmed Sékou Touré and a descendant of Samori Ture. The council of ministers' communiqué of 27 August 1991 ordering renovation of the camp and construction of a memorial, the absence of any subsequent action, and the prohibition on the Association of Victims of Camp Boiro establishing a museum on the site, are as recorded. This page names no living person and makes no allegation against any living person. Where sources conflict, both versions are given. Corrections and first-hand accounts are welcome and will be credited. All photography © Remo Kurka. Usage strictly by prior authorisation only.
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