What could not be burned was tipped into the ocean

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

The rest gained their independence two years later, but in Guinea the French were spitefully vindictive. All French administrators and technicians left almost overnight, ripping out telephone cables and even smashing light bulbs. What could not be burned was tipped into the ocean. In addition, there was the more general problem that the colonial powers had never linked infrastructures between adjacent countries. This did not apply just to roads, but even to telecommunications. If you wanted to make a telephone call from the Guinean capital of Conakry to Freetown in Sierra Leone (eighty miles away), the calls had to be routed through either London or Paris.