KEYWORDS: africa, country, map, west, conakry, guinea

Conakry Rip-Off, The

David Berg

—MOFebruary 22, 1976GP No.392

(MO tells me his dream:)

1. I HAD ONE OF THOSE RARE DREAMS WITH A SPECIFIC UNKNOWN NAME in it last night, but I didn't want to waken you so I kept thinking over and over and over again, "I must remember this‚ I must remember this name!" But I must have gone back to sleep after the dream and when I woke up I just couldn't remember the word! I tried all different kinds of combinations that began with a "C" or a "K" sound until I finally got desperate and told the Lord next time I'd write it down‚ and then it came right back to me just as clear as before:

2. CONAKRY! LOOK, I WROTE IT DOWN—"CONAKRY"! So let's look it up in the atlas index and see if it's there. Look, here it is: Conakry! How about that, Honey! Who would have ever dreamed up such a word as that?—And look‚ it is in Africa! So it's got to be right in here somewhere in West Africa because I tore off this corner of the map in my dream. Now where is it? It must be awful small, because I didn't know whether it was a town or a country.

3. NOW WHERE IS CONAKRY? Now I don't get specific names like that very often, but look at that! There it is, there it is!—And it's right on the part of the map I tore off in my dream! It doesn't look very important, but look! The only railroad they have in the whole country ends right there‚ so it must be their port.

4. IT'S IN THE FORMERLY FRENCH GUINEA. Hey, look, it's "the capital, 120,000 population" of this little bitty four-and-a–quarter million country! It's in between Portuguese Guinea and the formerly British Sierra Leone. It's the capital and port city and end of the railroad line, isn't that amazing? Boy!

5. IT WAS FRENCH. Aha‚ so it was part of French West Africa. They speak French and Tribal languages. Ethnic compositions: —I don't even know what these are—Peuls 30%, Malinke 15%, Soussou 7%, and Foulbe no percentage given. Gross national product, 700 million dollars! Income per capita‚ $170 a year.—That's not bad for Africa! Growth rate, slow. Main products, rice, bananas, palm products, coffee, millet, pineapple, groundnuts, bauxite, iron ore and diamonds.

6. MOST OF THESE LITTLE COUNTRIES IN AFRICA LIST AT LEAST SOME EUROPEAN POPULATION, BUT THIS LITTLE COUNTRY DOESN'T LIST ANY! Must be solid black. Maybe they [kicked] out all the whites.

7. HO‚ HO, HO, HO, HO, HO, HO! Guess who they obtain most of their imports from?—Russia, 34%! Must be a pro-Communist country! France, 26% and also the U.S., doesn't say what percentage. Well it's a pretty economically well-balanced little country:

8. IT EXPORTS MORE THAN IT IMPORTS! THAT'S BETTER THAN MOST OF THE AFRICAN COUNTRIES! Its exports are worth 55 million dollars, mostly aluminum‚ to France and the U.S. But France‚ Russia, the U.S. and China all give it aid.—Ha!—One of those little countries that really takes advantage of the situation! I wish you'd seen that movie with me that time: Russia and the U.S. were both falling all over themselves to give aid to this little tiny country, but the King got all excited and said, "Oh, but we don't even have room in our little country to park all those tractors you want to give us!"

9. IN ORDER TO ENTER GUINEAcan you imagine!—This is almost the longest required string of shots in the book: Cholera, typhoid‚ yellow fever and vaccination for smallpox! They really must have 'em all! Boy, that is something! It's the source of the Senegal‚ Gambia and Niger rivers, three of the most important countries on the coast.

10. I REMEMBER SOMETHING NOW ABOUT HOW IT WENT COMMUNIST IN 1958. Guinea was the only French colony to choose independence outside the French community in 1958. The Russians helped Ahmed Toure, a trade union leader, to form a Marxist political party. In 1970 Guinea-based guerillas were trying to overthrow the government in Portuguese Guinea. Finally the Portuguese army raided Guinea in retaliation which resulted in the arrest of some leading citizens and a Roman Catholic Bishop. Five were executed.

11. IN AN ATTEMPT COUP IN 1971 A WEST GERMAN BUSINESSMAN WAS KILLED so West Germany cut off diplomatic relations with Guinea. Guinea claimed some West Germans were involved in this ill-fated coup in which six people were hanged and 92 were arrested. It's a rough, wild country! Well, I begin to understand the dream a little better!

12. IT WAS THE FIRST COUNTRY IN AFRICA TO GO COMPLETELY COMMUNIST. Ha!—I thought that country was on the coast of South America. I always confuse it with Guiana. Apparently the Russians helped it to get its independence from the French in 1958. The country has iron and diamond mines and a humid equatorial climate.

13. THEIR GOVERNMENTAL SYSTEM IS A SEMI-COMMUNIST REPUBLIC WITH A RUSSIAN, CZECH AND CHINESE-EQUIPPED ARMY. Maybe this is the next place the communists are going to strike! I guess if I'm going to write something about Africa‚ the Lord wanted to show me some more, some real hot advance information! I couldn't have told whether it was a country or a town or what, but that name Conakry was just as clear as anything in my dream, and on exactly that part of the map!

14. AND NOW THE DREAM: ARE YOU READY FOR THE DREAM? On the table in front of me was this big six-foot map of Africa spread out with West Africa pointing directly toward me and South Africa on my right, as though I'm looking eastward. A great great big thick book about six to eight inches thick‚ like a big dictionary or encyclopedia or even one of those big pulpit Bibles, was sitting on the eastern half of the map, East Africa, the part that was away from me on the other side.

15. SUDDENLY I REACHED OVER AND GRABBED THE MAP JUST ABOVE CONAKRY AND RIPPED OFF A STRIP about a half-of–an-inch wide and about three inches long, so that this whole coast here was ripped off starting here north of Conakry. The map was a cutout map of Africa, just the continent lying there, not any borders or seas or anything.

16. SO I TORE OFF THIS WHOLE COASTAL STRIP OF FRENCH WEST AFRICA.—And the way I tore it off—it was pointed right where I started tearing it off. If I knew exactly how much‚ I bet I could tell you just how much the communists are going to rip off! It was a little pointed strip of paper, from where I started the tear it was pointed. Where I started tearing it, it was a point and it was about as long as half your ballpoint pen, and on the strip it said "Conakry"! I started tearing with my thumb under the map and my forefinger on top of the map.

17. I TORE IT FROM MY LEFT TO MY RIGHT, FROM THE NORTH TO THE SOUTH‚ THE PROBABLE DIRECTION OF THE COMMUNIST STRIKE! I tore a strip about three inches long and about a half-of-an-inch wide, about the size of half your ball-point pen if it was flat, leaving the base of the strip attached to the map on my right or the South. I tore it upward. I didn't tear it completely off the map, but there was this piece of map with Conakry on it, a slim three–inch pointed piece now sticking up from the surface of the map and the table.

18. ALL OF A SUDDEN THIS LITTLE STRIP BEGAN TO WIGGLE LIKE A LITTLE WORM OR SNAKE ALL EXCITED LIKE IT WAS HAPPY AND FREE! The point was the head looking North and the base was on the South. It was all excited and happy and free!

19. THE MINUTE THAT HAPPENED THERE WERE A WHOLE BUNCH OF OUR ROAD TEAMS in cars and trucks and buses and whatnot and they were all set free! It was like that was the signal for them to all pile in and start going, and they were just running all over the place!

20. WHERE THEY WERE RUNNING I DON'T KNOW, but it was just like that set them free and they all started moving. They were all happy and free and excited like that little snake or worm about the size of my little finger—it was wiggling like that. (He holds up his right little finger and wiggles it.)

21. CONAKRY IS THE CAPITAL OF THE ONLY REAL COMMUNIST COUNTRY IN ALL AFRICA! There are lots of pro-Communist countries‚ but there is no country that I know of where the Russians took such a direct hand in helping it go Communist, outside of Angola.

22. THAT COULD MEAN THAT CONAKRY IS GOING TO BE THE BASE OF A NEW COMMUNIST DRIVE TO RIP OFF THE WHOLE WEST AFRICAN COAST, and I would say from the size of that map that the rip-off extended from Dakar‚ Senegal, to Liberia, most of the West African Coast including what used to be the British colonies of Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Portuguese colony of Portuguese Guinea, and the U.S. colony of Liberia, that whole strip!

23. THIS WOULD THEN GIVE THE COMMUNISTS CONTROL OF NOT ONLY SOUTH AFRICA BUT ALSO WEST AFRICA along with the pro-Communist Arab control of North Africa. I can certainly see how they could use Guinea for a base for a drive in both directions along the coast there‚ say with Cuban troops, to liberate all those former European colonies that are still dominated by the Western powers of Britain, Portugal‚ France and the U.S.

24. THEY COULD EASILY CLAIM TO BE LIBERATING THEM FROM THEIR WESTERN OPPRESSORS in a real rip-off of some of the most important parts of West Africa which dominate the major sea lanes from Europe to South Africa. See how the Lord very clearly illustrated the rip-off by causing me to actually rip that section nearly off the map! The only reason I can think of that that piece wasn't torn completely off the map was that at the base of that strip could be Liberia, the U.S.-dominated colony of Liberia.

25. THE RUSSIANS MAY BE AFRAID TO ATTACK LIBERIA or have the Cubans attack it for fear of a U.S. reprisal. But Britain is too weak to resist, and France could hardly object because her colonies are already supposed to be free, and Portugal certainly couldn't object since she's supposed to be setting her colonies free anyhow.

26. THIS COULD MEAN THAT THE LORD IS SHOWING US WHERE THE NEXT COMMUNIST PENETRATION OF AFRICA IS GOING TO OCCUR‚ and which is very logical since they already virtually own Guinea, the first truly Communist-dominated country in all Africa, and they have had it ever since 1958, nearly 20 years! So they must be fairly firmly entrenched there by this time. It is also a fairly large country compared with the little ones that surround it.

27. GUINEA DEFINITELY DOMINATES THE REGION geographically and strategically and is the center of the whole area of the West African colonies. It has a sizeable railroad reaching into the interior from the capital and port city of Conakry which connects with the Trans-Sahara motor route that crosses the Sahara to Algiers in pro-Communist Algeria and which also passes through the immense but very sparsely—populated pro-Communist country of Mali, the only country between Guinea and Algeria.

28. SO PRO-COMMUNIST ALGERIA WITH PRO–COMMUNIST MALI AND COMMUNIST GUINEA CUT COMPLETELY THROUGH WEST AFRICA FROM THE MEDITERRANEAN TO THE ATLANTIC, and could easily dominate all of West Africa! Mali has a small Soviet-equipped air force and an army of 3,500; Guinea, a Communist-equipped army of 5,000; Algeria, a French and Communist-equipped army of about 60,000, the third strongest in all Africa, with a Russian equipped air force.

29. THIS WOULD VIRTUALLY FINISH THE COMMUNIST CONQUEST OF MOST OF WEST AFRICA. The tiny little countries on the south side of West Africa, like Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo‚ etc.‚ would fall like dominoes in the face of such overwhelming Communist domination and strategic control, which would virtually complete the total Communist domination of all of Africa—quite a rip-off!

30. WHY THE HUGE BOOK WAS SITTING ON THE MAP I don't know, except that I had the feeling it was an encyclopedia or some kind of book of general knowledge in which I was to look to find out all these facts—which I have now done.

31. BUT WHY IT MEANT A GREATER LIBERATION FOR OUR OWN ROAD TEAMS and threw them into such a flurry of activity I don't know, unless it means that we're going to benefit from it somehow in a greater flurry of witnessing somewhere, maybe Africa!—And, oh yes!—I almost forgot!:

32. WHEN THE TEAMS STARTED OUT WITNESSING THEY FOUND OUR ENEMIES BURIED UNDER A HUGE LOAD OF LITERATURE of some kind. That's what it was!—It was our lit! They were absolutely buried under our lit and couldn't even move, completely buried and immobile under the tremendous weight of our lit! Hallelujah!

33. THE WAY TO PUT THE ENEMY OUT OF ACTION IS WITH THE WORD! Just bury him in a flood of the truth! That was all.—Or maybe it's a warning dream that we better get busy before the Communists do take over all of Africa. But the funny part of it was that it wasn't until that part was ripped off and the little worm wiggled with glee that they were set free!

34. MAYBE YOU CAN FIGURE IT OUT or ask God for the answer!—All I know is what I saw and what I believe: Conakry will be the center of a new Communist drive that will seal the fate of West Africa.

35. WITH THE ANGOLAN DRIVE ON SOUTH AFRICA AND THE ALGERIAN DRIVE ON MOROCCO, THE CONAKRY DRIVE WILL ELIMINATE THE LAST U.S. AND PRO–WESTERN BASES IN AFRICA and set all Africa free from Western control‚ placing the whole continent squarely and entirely in the Communist camp!—Another stepping stone toward the Americas!

36. IF GOD CAN SO GUIDE THE COURSE OF NATIONS, CAN'T HE GUIDE YOU TOO? If He can so accurately foretell the route of empires, why not trust Him with your future?

37. GIVE JESUS YOUR HEART AND LIFE TODAY and follow Him with us into the glorious Kingdom of God on Earth! Write or visit us today for more information on the future. There are thousands of us in hundreds of Colonies in 70 countries on all continents happy in His service. Come and see!

P.S. We've just discovered since writing this Letter that the largest Soviet and Cuban military presence in all West Africa outside of Algeria is in Guinea whose Capital is Conakry!—I didn't know that, did you?—WOW! God sure knows what He shows, doesn't He!