Lansana Conté

Conté was born at Moussayah Loumbaya, near Dubréka, a member of the Susu people; the English article notes that he estimated his own birth date and never knew it exactly. ^{1 2} He was educated at a local Qur'anic school and at Dubréka primary school, then at military preparatory schools in Bingerville and Saint-Louis. ¹ He enlisted in the French Army in 1955 and served in Algeria, then joined the new Guinean army at independence in 1958, rising through its officer schools; in 1980 he took part in the ruling party's official pilgrimage to Mecca as a head of delegation in his government capacity. ¹

President Ahmed Sékou Touré died on 26 March 1984, and after a brief interim under the prime minister, Conté led the military coup of 3 April 1984 and was proclaimed president on 5 April, succeeding Touré as Guinea's second president. ¹ He denounced the Touré regime's human rights abuses, released political prisoners and closed the Camp Boiro detention centre. ¹ His government pursued economic liberalisation, and in the early 1990s he began a transition to multiparty rule, winning the presidential elections of 1993, 1998 and 2003 amid opposition fraud allegations; his regime remained authoritarian though milder than Touré's. ¹ He died in office in Conakry on 22 December 2008. ^{1 3}

The Arabic article states in text that Conté was of the Muslim religion; the English article records only his Qur'anic schooling and his part in an official party pilgrimage to Mecca, and files him under Guinean Muslims, while Wikidata carries the single value Islam. ^{2 1 3} No source names a school or branch for him, so the museum records his faith as unknown and preserves the attestation in the data file.

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.