Guinea Republic

Guinea Republic stamps available at Io Collezionista. Guinea is a former French colony that gained independence in 1958 after the referendum promoted by Charles De Gaulle. To this day the country has not managed the long awaited democratisation of its governing institutions: from 1958 to 1984 President Sekou Toure built an autocratic one party system, and the situation remained substantially unchanged under his successor Lansana Conte, in office until 2008. The military coup that followed Conte's death appears to have slowed the country's approach to modern standards of democracy still further, and to have sharpened the tensions between the Fula and Malinke ethnic groups.