Jean Suret-Canale

Jean Suret-Canale (27 April 1921 – 23 June 2007) was a French historian of Africa, Marxist theoritican, political activist, and World War II French Resistance fighter.

Suret-Canale was born to father Victor Suret-Canale (1883–1958), an engraver educated at École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, and Thérèse Suret-Canale, a German painter educated first in Germany and then at the Académie Julian in Paris.

As a student, he won scholarships to study in the French colonies of Dahomey and (Benin) in 1938 and French Indochina in 1939. He returned to France, and was an underground member of the jeunesses communistes resistance from 1940 to 1944. During this time he met his wife, Georgette, a feminist journalist, novelist and poet. He received a degree from the Université de Paris (1946) in geography, specialising in the countries of West Africa and African studies.

Returning to French West Africa after the war, he engaged in political and trade union organizing, taught secondary school in Dakar, but was forced to leave the then colony by the French government under military order. He was present during the 1947 Dakar-Niger railroad strike on which Ousmane Sembène later based his seminal novel God's Bits of Wood.

Back in France, Suret-Canale found a teaching post in Laval, Mayenne and pursued his political writing while keeping active in the Communist party.

When Guinea became independent he returned to Africa, first teaching in Conakry (Lycée Classique), becoming head of the former local branch of Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) (later the Institut National de Recherche et Documentation: the National Library, Archives and Museum of Guinea). Suret-Canale was later head of the Teachers College at Kindia (Ecole Normale Supérieure). In the late 60s, he was again forced to return home by the French government under threat of having his nationality revoked.

...
Wikipedia