Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté
Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté was a West African labour organiser and propagandist.
Born April 27, 1902 in Ségou in the French Sudan, Kouyaté studied at École William Ponty on the Île de Gorée in Senegal. He worked as a school teacher in the Ivory Coast from 1921 to 1923. He then travelled to Aix-en-Provence for further education, but was expelled in 1926 for spreading communist propaganda. In 1927, he helped found the communist Ligue de défense de la race nègre, editing their paper La Race nègre. When that group split, he helped create the Union des travailleurs nègres and ran a new paper Le Cri des Nègres. When Kouyaté was thrown out by the group's hardline communists, and purged from the French Communist Party, he began to work with Messali Hadj's Algerian independence group, Etoile Nord-Africaine. Even during his Communist period, Kouyaté communicated with non-communist black activists such as Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, and collaborated regularly with George Padmore.
He was executed by Nazis at Fort Montluçon in 1942. Historian Philippe Dewitte has argued that Kouyaté may have tried to collaborate with the Nazis before his execution.
