Fouta Djallon and Samory
The highlands of the Fouta Djallon, the water tower of West Africa where the Niger, Senegal and Gambia rivers rise, were home from the eighteenth century to a Fula Islamic state, the Imamate of Futa Jallon, one of the region's earliest theocratic federations and a centre of scholarship and, less comfortably, of slave-holding.
In the late nineteenth century the Malinke leader Samory Touré built an empire across the region and fought France for nearly two decades in one of the most determined resistances to colonial conquest, until his capture in 1898. That legacy of defiance would be claimed, and abused, by the man who shared his surname sixty years later.
The "No" and the terror
When de Gaulle offered France's colonies a 1958 referendum — autonomy within a French community, or independence and an abrupt cut-off of aid — only Guinea voted No. Sékou Touré declared that Guinea preferred "poverty in freedom to riches in slavery", and independence came on 2 October 1958. France retaliated by withdrawing everything it could.
Touré turned to the Soviet bloc and built a one-party state that grew steadily more paranoid. Real and imagined plots were met with mass arrests; the Camp Boiro detention centre became notorious for torture and starvation, and tens of thousands died or fled into exile. When Touré died in 1984 a military coup swiftly ended his party's rule.
Coups and bauxite
Lansana Conté ran a military-backed regime until his death in 2008. A junta under Moussa Dadis Camara followed, and on 28 September 2009 its soldiers massacred more than 150 opposition demonstrators in a Conakry stadium and raped scores of women — a crime for which Camara and others were finally convicted in 2024.
Alpha Condé won Guinea's first genuinely competitive election in 2010, but clung on to a contested third term in 2020, and in September 2021 was overthrown by Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya. Through all of it the mineral wealth loomed: Guinea holds the world's largest bauxite reserves and, at Simandou, one of the richest untapped iron-ore deposits on earth, whose long-delayed development finally began to move in the 2020s.
The water tower and its music
Guinea is, in the common phrase, the water tower of West Africa: the Niger, the Senegal and the Gambia all rise in its highlands, so a poor country feeds the rivers of its richer neighbours. Its soil holds perhaps a quarter of the world's known bauxite, the ore of aluminium, yet most Guineans have seen little of that wealth.
Its cultural legacy outweighs its economy. Sékou Touré, for all his cruelty, poured money into the national ensembles, and Bembeya Jazz National and Les Ballets Africains carried a proud, modern African sound and dance around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. The waterfalls of the Fouta Djallon and the masks of the forest region remain among the least-visited attractions anywhere in West Africa.