On October 2, 1958, Guinea became independent, the only French territory in Africa to vote no in the referendum de Gaulle held on September 28 on joining the French Community. About 95 per cent voted no. Sekou Toure, who had led the campaign, became president and kept the office until his death in 1984.
De Gaulle had offered the territories a choice between membership of a Community in which France kept defence, foreign policy and the currency, and immediate independence with French assistance withdrawn. He had toured Africa in August and had said in Conakry that Guinea could have independence if it chose, and that France would draw the consequences. Toure replied that Guinea preferred poverty in liberty to riches in slavery.
France pulled out. Its civil servants, teachers, doctors and technicians went, taking equipment and files and, in some accounts, light fittings with them. The treasury stopped the transfers that had funded the budget. Guinea had no currency of its own until it left the franc zone in 1960, and for several years it had almost no trade outside the communist bloc.
The Soviet Union offered credits and bought what Guinea could not otherwise sell, and the relationship cooled after 1961, when Toure expelled the Soviet ambassador over alleged interference in a teachers' strike. Guinea then turned to the United States and to China. Ghana and Mali formed unions with it in 1958 and 1960, and both came to nothing.
The government became steadily more repressive. The single-party state was formalised in the 1960s, the Boiro camp held thousands of political prisoners, and the attempted invasion from Portuguese Guinea in 1970, Operation Green Sea, was used as a pretext to execute and imprison opponents. Toure died during heart surgery in Cleveland in March 1984. The army took over. It did so within days.