Jeanne-Martin Cissé, Guinean teacher and politician, Died at 91

Jeanne-Martin Cissé was born on April 6, 1926, in Kankan, Guinea and died on

She was a Guinean teacher and nationalist politician.

She served as ambassador to the United Nations and in 1972 was the first woman to chair the United Nations Security Council.

Jeanne-Martin Cissé served in the government of Guinea as Minister of Social Affairs from 1976 until the 1984 military coup.

She was the eldest of seven children.

Jeanne-Martin’s father was Malinke and her mother Soussou.

Cissé attended the Ecole Normale d’Institutrices de Rufisque in Dakar, Senegal where she trained to become a teacher.

She was one of Guinea’s first female teachers and was assigned to the girls’ school in Kankan in 1944.

Cissé became a member of the Union Madingue in 1946.

Cissé met future President Ahmed Sékou Touré, then a PTT trade unionist, and joined the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain in December 1947.

Cissé resided in Senegal with her husband in the 1950s and represented the Senegalese Democratic Union at the Congress of the International Federation of Women in France in October 1954.

Following her 1958 referendum, she returned to Guinea where her husband became chief of staff to the Minister of Health in the new Republic of Guinea.

During 1959, Cissé was a delegate to the congress of the West African Women’s Union in Bamako, which sought to maintain a pan-African women’s movement.

She was appointed as Guinea’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, in 1972.

Her biography, Daughter of the Milo, was published in 2008.

Cissé married Mohamed Camara, in 1946, a police inspector whom she did not know.

Her husband died in a car accident later that year when she was three months pregnant.

Then in 1948, she married Ansoumane Touré, one of the founders of the Guinea Democratic Party.

That husband died in Camp Boiro prison in 1971 after being arrested in the aftermath of Operation Mar Verde.

She has six children and resided in Baltimore, Maryland.

Jeanne-Martin Cissé passed away at 91 years old.