.png){kind=icon}
GUINEA IN 2020: UPDATES AND REFLECTIONS
Most of the research for Global Nomads was conducted over eighteen months in 2009-2010. Many things happened in Guinea, and to the people whose stories appear in this book, between that time and the time of publication in 2020. The following are just a few notable circumstances from the intervening years:
- Guinea was the site of the emergence of the 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic. Nearly 29,000 cases of the disease and over 11,000 deaths were recorded in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. The CDC has more information here https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/history/2014-2016-outbreak/index.html, and the WHO here https://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/en/.
- The perpetrators of the September 28, 2009 stadium massacre have yet to be brought to justice. Aboubacar "Toumba" Diakite was arrested in Senegal in 2016 and extradited to Guinea in 2017. Moussa Dadis Camara remains exiled in Burkina Faso. In 2017, a panel of Guinean judges brought charges against over a dozen suspected individuals, including Dadis and Toumba, but these suspects have not yet been brought to trial. For more information, see Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/11/10/guinea-judges-conclude-2009-massacre-inquiry. The International Criminal Court is conducting an ongoing preliminary examination into the stadium massacre (https://www.icc-cpi.int/guinea).
- Alpha Conde won a second 5-year presidential term in 2015. In this election, as in 2010, Cellou Dalein was his unsuccessful challenger. In 2019, Conde proposed a new constitution, which would allow him to run for a third term in 2020. This proposal was met with a series of popular protests in 2019 and the early months of 2020. Security forces responded to these protests with violence. The constitutional referendum passed in March 2020 and many people expect that Alpha Conde will face Cellou Dalein Diallo once again in presidential elections in October. To read more about these events, see reporting by Amnesty International (https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/11/guinea-human-rights-red-flags-ahead-of-presidential-election/), The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/apr/02/protests-postponements-and-the-last-stand-of-an-african-strongman-alpha-conde), and Human Rights Watch (https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/10/guinea-violence-during-referendum).
- The full effects of the coronavirus pandemic in Guinea are yet to be seen, but given the country's overall quality of infrastructure, the fact that Guinea has only recently recovered from the Ebola epidemic, and the government's handling of the crisis, there is reason for concern (https://apnews.com/e59a4fbab362882bdb25ff90ef555fce).
Even if Guinea's recent history were less dramatic, no one's lives are unchanging. Many of the people and places described in this book are quite different in 2020 from how they were in 2010, and they will obviously continue to change as the years pass. What do you think this implies about the value of ethnography in a world that is always changing? What can ethnography help us to understand, and what are its limits? If you were going to conduct research on migration in the Fouta Djallon today, how would you design your study and what do you think you might find?