GuineaVibes · Conakry · Guinea's unmarked history
The Night Portugal Invaded Conakry — and Opened Camp Boiro
On the night of 21–22 November 1970, around four hundred Portuguese soldiers and Portuguese-led Guinean fighters landed from unmarked ships around Conakry. They burnt the President's summer house, seized the power station, and captured Camp Boiro and freed the prisoners. They could not find Sékou Touré or Amílcar Cabral, so they left. Within weeks the camp was fuller than it had ever been. Twenty-nine men were executed the following January. There is a monument in Conakry to the victims of the attack. There is none to the people who died because it happened.
Guinea took independence in 1958. Portugal still held Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, and was fighting to keep them.
In 1960 Sékou Touré welcomed Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC to Guinea — the movement fighting for the independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. Cabral was given operational autonomy inside Guinea. Conakry became the rear base of a war Portugal was losing next door.
Touré also gave refuge to elements of the MPLA of Angola. Guinea had positioned itself as the vanguard state of armed decolonisation in West Africa, and it was doing real damage to Lisbon.
By 1970, Portugal had concluded that the way to win the war in Guinea-Bissau ran through Conakry.
Operação Mar Verde — Operation Green Sea, also known as the Battle of Conakry.
They landed at several points around the city, and moved fast.
Soldiers landed near Sékou Touré's summer house and burnt it. He was not there — he was at the Presidential Palace.
They took control of the city's main power plant.
Two were captured. Guinean militia forces fought back with little success.
Its headquarters in Conakry were captured. Amílcar Cabral was not there. Four or five PAIGC supply vessels were destroyed in the harbour.
They took the camp and freed the prisoners.
Of everything that happened that night, this is the part that matters most to Guinea — and the part that is least discussed.
Camp Boiro had been operating in the middle of Conakry for a decade. Its prisoners were Guineans held for political offences, many of them fabricated, and many of whom would eventually die there by the diète noire.
On the night of 21–22 November 1970, foreign soldiers opened the gates and let them out.
The raiders also freed twenty-six Portuguese prisoners of war who had been held at the camp by the PAIGC — one of the operation's stated objectives.
Siaka Touré, the camp commandant and a relative of the President, managed to hide. General Lansana Diané, the Minister of Defence, was captured; he later escaped and took refuge with the ambassador of Algeria.
A Portuguese colonial raiding force, in a country whose government had built its whole identity on anti-colonialism, opened a prison camp and let Guineans walk out of it.
Hold both halves of that. Portugal did not come to liberate anybody. It came to kill or capture Cabral and to bring down a government that was arming its enemies. Opening the camp was tactical — it created chaos and it recovered Portuguese POWs.
And the men who walked out of those cells were still men walking out of cells.
The operation had two decapitating objectives: Sékou Touré and Amílcar Cabral.
Neither could be found.
Without either man, holding Conakry was pointless. The raiders re-embarked and withdrew, having taken minor casualties — reported as one Portuguese soldier and seven Guinean dissidents killed.
Casualties on the Guinean and PAIGC side are reported across a very wide range: between 52 and 500 killed. We state the range because that is what the record contains.
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 290, condemning Portugal for the invasion of Guinea and calling on it to respect the principles of self-determination and independence.
Portugal had attacked a sovereign African state, been condemned by the Security Council, and handed Sékou Touré the most useful gift of his career.
The invasion lasted a night. The response lasted years.
A week after the attack, Sékou Touré established a ten-member committee — the Haut-Commandement, the High Command — composed of loyal members of the Political Bureau. It governed Guinea by decree.
It supervised arrests, detentions without trial, and executions. Its work decimated the ranks of government officials and the police.
Among those killed was Ousmane Baldé, Minister of Finance and President of the Central Bank of the Republic of Guinea.
After a five-day trial, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal handed down: 29 executions, carried out three days later; 33 death sentences in absentia; 68 sentences of life at forced labour; and 17 orders confiscating all property.
Portuguese soldiers emptied Camp Boiro in November. By the following spring it held more people than it ever had.
The monument raised afterwards presents 22 November as a spontaneous victory of the mobilised Guinean masses under infallible leadership. Scholars of the period describe how that account served a further purpose: by framing external aggression as inseparable from internal betrayal, it made permanent repression look like national survival.
Every subsequent alleged conspiracy — including the 1976 "Fulbe plot" that killed Diallo Telli — was built on logic laid down in the weeks after this raid.
Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo was the Archbishop of Conakry.
He was arrested on 24 December 1970 — Christmas Eve, a month after the raid — as part of the purges. He was tortured, tried in absentia, and sentenced to life imprisonment on 23 January 1971, the same day as the twenty-nine.
He spent the next eight years in Camp Boiro.
He was released on 7 August 1979 under an arrangement between the Holy See and the Touré regime, and flown to Rome. Six days later he resigned as Archbishop of Conakry. He was succeeded by Robert Sarah, who would later become one of the most senior African figures in the Catholic Church.
In 1987 Tchidimbo published an account of his captivity: Noviciat d'un évêque: huit ans de captivité sous Sékou Touré.
Eight years in a cell, and then a book. The survivor literature of Camp Boiro is largely in French, and it is the closest thing Guinea has to a public record of what happened there.
A monument stands in Conakry commemorating the defeat of the attack. It opened on 22 November 1971, one year to the day.
Sékou Touré laid the foundation stone. The occasion was attended by Guinean officials, and by the Guinean and Chinese workers who built it.
It is dedicated to the victims of Operação Mar Verde.
There is a monument in Conakry to the people killed when Portugal attacked. There is no monument to the people killed by their own government in the months afterwards, or to the thousands who died in Camp Boiro across twenty-four years.
Both sets of dead are Guinean. One set is commemorated with a monument built by the state. The other set was ordered a memorial in 1991 that was never built, and their families were forbidden from building one themselves. See Camp Boiro.
The Monument du 22 Novembre 1970 stands in Conakry and is a recognised city landmark, set in a memorial park. It is publicly accessible and appears on most lists of things to see in the capital — usually with no explanation of what it commemorates.
Now you know. A monument raised by a government, to a foreign attack, one year to the day, with the President laying the stone — and the purges it licensed still unmarked anywhere in the country.
Camp Boiro, built over. The Grand Mosque, where Sékou Touré is buried in the garden. And the stadium, thirty-nine years later. All within a few kilometres.
This period remains genuinely contested in Guinea. Some families lost people to the raid. Some lost people to what followed. Some hold both. Listen more than you speak.
Reviewed . Operation Green Sea (Portuguese: Operação Mar Verde), also known as the Battle of Conakry, was an amphibious attack on Conakry on the night of 21–22 November 1970 by between approximately 350 and 420 Portuguese soldiers and Portuguese-led Guinean fighters, landing from four unmarked ships including a landing ship and a cargo vessel. Around 200 of the attackers were armed Guineans in uniforms resembling those of the Guinean Army. The operation was commanded by Alpoim Calvão under the authority of António de Spínola. Attackers burnt President Sékou Touré's summer house, seized the city's main power plant, captured two army posts and the PAIGC headquarters, destroyed four or five PAIGC supply vessels, and captured Camp Boiro, freeing the prisoners and twenty-six Portuguese prisoners of war held there. Camp commandant Siaka Touré evaded capture; Defence Minister General Lansana Diané was captured, later escaped, and took refuge with the ambassador of Algeria. Neither Sékou Touré nor Amílcar Cabral was found and the raiders withdrew. Reported casualties were one Portuguese soldier and seven Guinean dissidents killed on the attacking side; figures for Guinean and PAIGC losses range from 52 to 500 and both ends of that range are stated here. On 8 December 1970 the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 290 condemning Portugal. In the aftermath Sékou Touré established a ten-member Haut-Commandement of Political Bureau loyalists governing by decree, which oversaw arrests, detentions without trial and executions; Minister of Finance and Central Bank President Ousmane Baldé was among those killed. On 23 January 1971, following a five-day trial, the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal ordered 29 executions carried out three days later, 33 death sentences in absentia, 68 sentences of life at forced labour and 17 confiscations of property. Archbishop of Conakry Raymond-Marie Tchidimbo was arrested on 24 December 1970, sentenced to life on 23 January 1971, held at Camp Boiro for eight years, released on 7 August 1979 under an arrangement with the Holy See and flown to Rome, and resigned on 13 August 1979; he was succeeded by Robert Sarah, and published Noviciat d'un évêque: huit ans de captivité sous Sékou Touré in 1987. The Monument du 22 Novembre 1970 opened on 22 November 1971, dedicated to the victims of the attack, with Sékou Touré laying the foundation stone and Guinean and Chinese workers present. This page names no living person in connection with any alleged wrongdoing. Where sources conflict, ranges are given. Corrections are welcome and will be credited. All photography © Remo Kurka. Usage strictly by prior authorisation only.
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