The aims of the MLN were immediate independence for Africans, the creation of a United States of Africa, and socialism. The MLN contacted nationalist leaders in many of the other French colonies, to persuade them to reject the referendum on the creation of a Franco-African community presented by the French president Charles de Gaulle. However, in the whole of West Africa at that time, only Guinea voted no to the referendum and, as a result, achieved its independence relatively early in 1958. As a result, Sekou Touré, the first president of independent Guinea, invited Ki-Zerbo and his wife along with other volunteers to come to Conakry to replace the French teachers who had left.