A tomato cannery was built in an area that had neither water nor tomatoes

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 399.

The Soviet embassy opened in Conakry in April 1959 and military hardware followed, with three light tanks making a big impression at a Soviet-style parade. The East Germans installed an urban public address system, but Africans tired of blaring propaganda. Trade deals also ensued, but an anti-capitalist Soviet economy produced little to trade and Guinea had nothing with which to pay for it. As a Radio Moscow correspondent explained to a US acquaintance: ‘We gave them what they wanted, and they didn’t know what to do with it.’ The Soviets kept altering the terms of barter so that iron ore and bauxite had to be added to consignments of bananas and oranges. This was part cheap buy-in, part an attempt to extend Soviet influence to West Africa.

A hodgepodge of badly made Eastern Bloc equipment and spoiled Chinese rice turned up to rust or rot on Conakry’s docks, for despite mass famine at home Mao could export 15,000 tons of rice to Guinea in 1960.49 Soviet largesse included lavatory bowls for homes with no bathrooms or plumbing (even in the presidential palace, Touré had to go to the ground floor to wash his hands since the water pressure was unable to reach his second-floor offices). Six tons of quill pens were accompanied by enough tinned crabmeat for half a century, although the snowploughs famously left to rust were in fact supposed to be brush cutters. Machines and vehicles lacked French-language maintenance manuals and so ended up rusting in ditches. Bigger capital projects disappointed: a print works operated at below 5 per cent capacity; a radio station was erected over an iron-ore vein, which interfered with its signals; and a tomato cannery was built in an area that had neither water nor tomatoes.