Unmasking the State

When the Republic of Guinea gained independence in 1958, one of the first policies of the new state was a village-to-village eradication of masks and other ritual objects it deemed “fetishes.” The Demystification Program, as it was called, was so urgent it even preceded the building of a national road system. In Unmasking the State , Mike McGovern attempts to understand why this program was so important to the emerging state and examines the complex role it had in creating a unified national ide