Kaabu and the coast
The mainland was long part of the Kaabu Empire, a Mandinka successor state to Mali that flourished from the sixteenth century until it fell in the nineteenth. Offshore, the Bijagós archipelago developed a distinctive, matrilineal society whose women chose husbands and led religious life, and whose islanders resisted outside control for centuries.
The Portuguese reached the rivers in the fifteenth century and made the coast a slaving ground, but they did not subdue the interior until the early twentieth century, after prolonged "pacification" wars. Portuguese Guinea remained a neglected, thinly ruled colony — until it became the crucible of a liberation war that would help bring down a European dictatorship.
Cabral's war
Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist born to Cape Verdean parents, founded the PAIGC in 1956 to free both Guinea and Cape Verde. From 1963 he led a rural guerrilla war that, by the early 1970s, controlled most of the countryside, ran its own schools and clinics, and drew admiration across the Third World. Cabral's writings on national liberation and "returning to the source" of African culture became foundational texts.
On 20 January 1973 he was assassinated in Conakry, months before victory. The PAIGC declared independence on 24 September 1973; Portugal, after its own Carnation Revolution, recognised it on 10 September 1974. Cape Verde went its separate way in 1975, ending the dream of union.
The coup machine
Independence delivered neither stability nor development. Amílcar's brother Luís Cabral was overthrown in 1980 by João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira, who dominated the next quarter-century through coups and a civil war in 1998–99, and was himself assassinated in 2009. Almost no elected president has completed a full term; the army has intervened again and again.
From the mid-2000s Guinea-Bissau became a key staging post for cocaine flown or shipped from South America to Europe, with senior officers implicated, hardening its reputation as a "narco-state". Political turmoil has continued into the 2020s, with disputed elections, a contested presidency and repeated reports of coups and counter-coups — a pattern of instability that makes any snapshot of who holds power quickly go out of date.
Cashews, islands and gumbe
For all its troubles, Guinea-Bissau has a vivid culture and an economy resting almost entirely on one crop: cashew nuts, which supply the great bulk of its exports and leave it painfully exposed to a single world price. Rice, grown in the coastal paddies, is the staple most people actually live on.
Its music, gumbe, fuses the country's many ethnic rhythms into a national sound, and its Kriol lingua franca binds a small, plural population. Offshore, the Bijagós archipelago — a biosphere reserve of some eighty islands, most of them uninhabited — shelters sea turtles, saltwater hippos and a matrilineal island society whose sacred forests and masked initiations have kept the outside world at arm's length for centuries.