Guinea-Bissau

In Guinea-Bissau the Atlantic reaches deep inland. Broad estuaries, the Cacheu, the Mansoa and the Geba, carry the tides far upstream between walls of mangrove, and offshore lie the Bijagós, dozens of islands where hippos swim in the sea and green turtles nest on Poilão. Inland, the low plain rises gently to wooded savanna and the Boé hills in the south-east. Monsoon rains soak the country in summer, and the dry season brings dusty harmattan winds.

Much of the country lay within Kaabu, a Mandinka kingdom that held the interior until Kansala fell in 1867. Portuguese navigators arrived in the 1440s, and Cacheu, founded in 1588, shipped enslaved people across the Atlantic, though Portugal’s grip on the interior stayed weak until the twentieth century. In August 1959 a dock strike at Pidjiguiti ended in a massacre, and Amílcar Cabral’s PAIGC took up arms in 1963. Cabral was assassinated in January 1973; independence was declared that September and accepted by Portugal in 1974.

Balanta, Fula, Mandinka, Manjaco, Papel and Bijagó people share Kriol, a Portuguese-based creole, as a common tongue. Islam, Christianity and older beliefs coexist, and on some Bijagó islands sacred groves are open only to the initiated. Gumbé rhythms drive the music, and Carnival brings masked groups into the streets each February. Balanta farmers grow rice in diked mangrove paddies, but cashew nuts are the great cash crop and the main export, followed by fish and the fishing licences sold to foreign fleets.