GUINEA-BISSAU

Area: 13,948 square miles

Population: 1,442,029 (2006 estimate)

Capital: Bissau (pop. 296,900 - 2003 estimate)

Ethnic Composition: Balanta (30%), Fula (20%), Mandinga (13%), Manjaca (14%), Papel (7%), others (16%)

Languages: African languages, Crioulo, Portuguese (official)

Religion: Traditional beliefs (65%), Muslim (30%),

Christian (5%)

Literacy: 42% (2002 estimate)

Industry: Food processing, bricks, textiles

Export Crops: Peanuts, cashews, nuts, cotton, palm kernels, seafood, timber

Food Crops: Rice, corn, beans, cassava, millet

Archaeologists believe the region known as present-day Guinea-Bissau was occupied as early as 9000 B.C.E. by small bands of hunters, gatherers, and fishing people. The Mandinka were among the last groups to arrive in the area. Their kingdom of Gabú (also spelled Kaabu), which was part of the larger Mali Empire, arose around 1250 and flourished into the 15th century. After 1546 Gabú became more autonomous. Parts of the kingdom existed until 1867.

Portuguese sailors began exploring the West African coast in 1446. After first settling on the Cape Verde islands about 350 miles northwest of Guinea-Bissau, the Portuguese claimed the coastal area around present-day Guinea-Bissau as Portuguese Guinea. Here and along the coast, they built trading posts and forts, trading alcohol, horses, manufactured goods, textiles, and weapons, for copra (coconut flesh, containing the oil), gold, ivory, and palm oil. In the 1600s, the Portuguese began exporting slaves to their Cape Verde Island territory, putting them to work on sugar plantations or shipping them to the Americas. Scholars estimate that the Portuguese sent 600,000 people from the region to the international slave market. By the late 1600s, Portugal lost its trade monopoly when the British, Spanish, French, and Dutch entered the slave trade and captured most of their forts.

In 1879 when Europe began carving up the continent during the “Scramble for Africa,” Portugal lay claim to the interior of Portuguese Guinea. Inhabitants of the inland areas fought fiercely to resist Portuguese control, and only after a long series of wars were they subdued in 1915.

A military coup in Portugal brought the dictator, António de Salazar, to power in 1926. His repressive regime turned Portuguese Guinea into a vast peanut and palm oil plantation. Pass-book laws and forced labor laws were imposed, and for over four decades Salazar's police force controlled and stamped out all forms of political opposition.

In 1956 Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist of Cape Verdean and Guinean parentage who became one of African’s modern-day heroes, co-founded the Partido Africano da Independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde or PAIGC, the Portuguese acronym for the African Party for Independence in Guinea and Cape Verde. Originally established to advocate peacefully for independence, the party led the nationalist struggle for the next 18 years. In 1963 the PAIGC initiated guerrilla warfare against the Portuguese after Portugal refused to give up its colonies at a time when many African countries were gaining independence from their European colonial rulers. Portugal’s determination to hang on to its African colonies led to what many historians regard as the longest and most brutal liberation struggle in the history of Africa.

By 1972 the PAIGC controlled about two-thirds of Portuguese Guinea. That same year, after conducting a general election throughout the liberated areas and forming a national assembly, Guinea-Bissau declared its independence in October 1973 with Amílcar Cabral’s half-brother, Luis Cabral, as president. Only a few months earlier, on June 20, 1973, Amílcar Cabral was assassinated by a disgruntled PAIGC follower widely believed to have been in the service of the Portuguese.

It took the overthrow of the dictatorial Portuguese government in a military coup in April 1974 before Portugal finally withdrew its forces and recognized Guinea-Bissau as an independent country in September 1974. African historian, Professor Ali A. Mazrui, has argued that the African liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, which severely strained and weakened the Lisbon government under the dictators, were in large part responsible for bringing about democracy in Portugal.

Guinea-Bissau entered independence in a state of poverty with its agricultural economy destroyed by the war and a huge national debt inherited from years of Portuguese misrule. The country possessed only a few small factories, 14 university graduates, and not a single medical doctor.

In1980 João "Nino" Vieira led a military coup that deposed Guinea-Bissau’s first president, Luis Cabral. The union between Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde was dissolved at this time. Vieira took over the presidency and ruled the country as a one-party state until 1994. In the early 1990s, political opposition to the one-party state increased. The country’s first multiparty elections were held on July 3, 1994. The PAIGC won 64 of the 100 seats in the national assembly, and Nino Vieira was elected president a month later in a run-off against his closest rival, Dr. Kumba Iala. In June 1998, Brigadier Ansumane Mane, the army’s top military commander, staged a coup against President Vieira, which escalated into civil war between forces loyal to Vieira and rebel army troops. A peace accord brokered in November disintegrated in February 1999 with the renewal of fighting. In May 1999 rebels deposed Vieira. In his 19 years of rule, Vieira was criticized for corruption and for failing to alleviate the poverty of Guinea- Bissau, one of the world’s poorest countries. He also brought in troops from Senegal and Guinea to help fight against the insurgency movement, a highly unpopular act.

Kumba Yalá, a former teacher and popular leader of Guinea-Bissau’s independence movement, was elected president in 2000. In September 2003, he, too, was deposed in a military coup as a result of his increasingly repressive acts and refusal to hold elections. In 2005, former president Vieira returned from six years of exile in Portugal and won the presidency in the July 2005 elections. In March 2006, government troops attempted to oust Casamance rebels from Senegal who had established bases in northwest Guinea-Bissau. Fighting ensued.

SOURCES:

Associated Press, “Thousands Flee Guinea-Bissau Capital as Loyalist-Rebel Fighting Intensifies,” The Oregonian, February 2, 1999.

“Guinea-Bissau,” Lycos Network: www.infoplease.lycos.com/ipa/A0107604.html, 2007.

“Guinea-Bissau,” Microsoft Encarta Africana: Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture, edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Microsoft Corp., 1993-1999.

Hudgens, Jim, and Richard Trillo. West Africa: The Rough Guide. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

July, Robert W. A History of the African People. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1998.

Mazrui, Ali A. The Africans: A Triple Heritage. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1986.

Newton, Alex, and David Else. West Africa. Oakland: Lonely Planet Publications, 1995.

Oliver, Roland, and Michael Crowder. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

“Republic of Guinea-Bissau,” Culturgram. David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, Brigham Young University, 1998.

Compiled by Mary Holmström and updated in February 2007.

RETURN to CFAF17.