Guinea

Three of West Africa’s great rivers rise in Guinea: the Niger in the highlands of the south, the Senegal and the Gambia among the sandstone tablelands of the Fouta Djallon. The coast is mangrove estuary and rice field under torrential monsoon rains; the Fouta Djallon is cool upland pasture cut by cliffs and waterfalls; Upper Guinea is savanna along the young Niger around Kankan; and in the south-east the forest region climbs to Mount Nimba.

The upper Niger plains formed the core of the Mali empire, which Sundiata Keita founded in the thirteenth century; griots still sing his epic. In the eighteenth century Fula Muslims set up an Islamic state in the Fouta Djallon. Samori Touré fought the French advance until his capture in 1898. In 1958 Guinea rejected de Gaulle’s French Community and took its independence at once, the first French colony south of the Sahara to do so, under Ahmed Sékou Touré.

Fula, Malinké and Susu are the main peoples, and most Guineans are Muslim. After independence the state sponsored Les Ballets Africains and orchestras such as Bembeya Jazz, and at Niagassola griots guard the Sosso Bala, a balafon said to date from Sundiata’s time. Camara Laye’s L’Enfant noir recalls a Malinké childhood. Rice with groundnut or cassava-leaf sauce is the daily meal. Bauxite from Boké goes by rail to Kamsar, gold is dug around Siguiri, and the Simandou range holds iron ore.