The history of Guinea

Guinea stretches in an arc from the mangrove coast of the Atlantic through the highlands of the Futa Jallon, where the Niger, Senegal and Gambia rivers rise, to the savannahs of Upper Guinea and the rainforests of the south-east. Upper Guinea was part of the Manding heartland of the Mali Empire and its goldfields helped make Mali famous. In the 18th century Fula clerics founded one of West Africa's great Islamic states in the Futa Jallon, and in the 19th Samori Touré built an empire that fought France for almost two decades. After sixty years of French rule, Guinea was the only French colony in Africa to reject de Gaulle's offer of a place in the French Community in 1958, and became independent under Sékou Touré, whose long dictatorship was followed by military rule, a brief democratic opening and a new period of military government since 2021.

Stone tools show that people have lived in what is now Guinea for many thousands of years, and the forest and savannah were home to farming and iron-working communities long before written records. The oldest established populations are generally thought to be those of the coast and the forest: on the coast and its estuaries the Baga, Nalu and Landuma, who grew rice in the mangrove swamps and made the carved masks for which the Baga are still known; in the forests of the south-east the Kissi, Kpelle and Loma, who lived in independent villages and chiefdoms tied together by initiation societies. These peoples did not build large empires, but they were linked by trade in kola, salt, iron and dried fish to the savannah to the north.

The savannah of Upper Guinea lay on the southern edge of the world of the Ghana Empire, the first great state of the western Sahel, which grew rich on the trans-Saharan gold trade. After Ghana declined in the late 11th century, under pressure from the Almoravid dynasty and from drought, the Sosso kingdom rose to dominate the region in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. The Susu people of coastal Guinea trace their origins to this kingdom.

According to the epic preserved by Mande griots, the Sosso king Soumaoro Kanté conquered the small Manding chiefdoms of the upper Niger until a prince of the Keita clan, Sundiata Keita, returned from exile and defeated him at the battle of Kirina around 1235. Sundiata's homeland, the Manding, straddled what are now the borders of Guinea and Mali, and some historians place Mali's capital, Niani, on the Sankarani River in present-day Guinea, although the question is unsettled. The goldfields of Bouré, around Siguiri in Upper Guinea, were among the most important sources of the gold that financed the empire and that Mansa Musa famously spent on his pilgrimage through Cairo in 1324. Mande traders and Muslim clerics spread Islam and the Maninka language through the region. As Mali weakened from the late 14th century, it lost its northern provinces to the Songhai Empire, but small Maninka chiefdoms survived in Upper Guinea, and towns such as Kankan, ruled from the 17th or 18th century by the Muslim Kaba family, became centres of learning and trade.

Portuguese ships explored the Guinea coast from the 1450s and 1460s, and the name Guinea, used by Europeans for much of West Africa, eventually stuck to this stretch of shore. The Portuguese Empire and Cape Verdean traders were followed by English, French and other merchants, who bought ivory, hides, beeswax and above all captives. The river estuaries of the Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo became notorious slaving centres, where Euro-African trading families and local rulers supplied ships for the Atlantic slave trade, which continued illegally well into the 19th century after Britain banned it in 1807. Many of those sold were captured in the wars of the interior, especially those waged by and against the Futa Jallon. Susu and Fula migrants from the interior moved towards the coast during these centuries, absorbing or displacing earlier coastal peoples.

Fula herders had moved into the cool Futa Jallon highlands from the 15th and 16th centuries, living alongside the Yalunka farmers who held power there. In the early 18th century Muslim Fula, joined by some Maninka, rose against their non-Muslim neighbours. Their first leader, Alfa Ba, was killed in 1725, but his son Ibrahima Sambegu, known as Karamokho Alfa, won the decisive battle of Talansan in 1727 and became the first almamy, or imam, of a new Islamic state with its capital at Timbo.

The Imamate was a federation of provinces, or diwe, with Labé the most powerful, under a ruler chosen from two rival lines descended from its founders: the clerical Alfaya and the more military Soriya, named after Karamokho Alfa's successor Ibrahima Sori. After decades of succession disputes, the two agreed in the 1840s that the office would alternate between them every two years. A council of elders could advise or remove the almamy. The Futa Jallon became a famous centre of Islamic scholarship, where students learned law, theology, grammar and astronomy and poets wrote in Pular using Arabic script. It was also a slave society: non-Muslims captured in war were sold to coastal traders or settled in farming villages to work for the free Muslim population. Revolts by slaves and by the poor, including the long Hubbu movement of the 19th century, challenged the ruling families. The Imamate's armies also helped destroy the Mandinka state of Kaabu at the battle of Kansala in 1867, in what is now Guinea-Bissau.

The Futa Jallon's reform movement inspired others. Around 1849 the Tukulor cleric Umar Tall, returning from pilgrimage, settled at Dinguiraye on the edge of the Futa Jallon and built up the following with which he launched a jihad in the 1850s that created a vast empire across what is now Mali.

In the second half of the 19th century the most formidable power in Upper Guinea was the state of Samori Touré, a Maninka trader turned soldier born around 1830. Building an army of professional infantry, the sofa, he extended his authority across the Milo and upper Niger region in the 1860s and 1870s, allied with the Kaba of Kankan, seized the Bouré goldfields and by 1878 proclaimed himself faama, with his capital at Bissandugu. In 1884 he took the Islamic title almamy. His state, sometimes called the Wassoulou Empire, was run through provinces governed by relatives and trusted commanders, and his workshops copied and repaired European rifles.

From 1882 Samori fought France's advance from the Senegal and Niger, combining set battles with mobile warfare and scorched-earth retreats. A failed siege of Sikasso in 1887 and 1888 and revolts by conquered peoples, which his armies crushed brutally, weakened him, and in 1891 French columns took Kankan and Bissandugu. Samori shifted his whole state eastward into what is now Ivory Coast and northern Ghana, where he destroyed the trading city of Kong in 1897, but in September 1898 the French surprised and captured him at Guelemou. He was exiled to Gabon and died there in 1900. In Guinea he is remembered as a hero of resistance.

On the coast, France had signed treaties with local rulers from the 1840s and created the colony of Rivières du Sud in 1882. During the Scramble for Africa this became French Guinea in 1891, with its capital at the new port of Conakry. In 1896 French troops intervened in a succession crisis in the Futa Jallon, occupied Timbo and killed the almamy Bokar Biro at Porédaka, reducing the Imamate to a protectorate; Alfa Yaya of Labé, who had first sided with the French, was later arrested and exiled. Boundaries with Sierra Leone, Portuguese Guinea and Liberia were fixed by treaty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Guinea was administered as part of French West Africa, under a governor-general in Dakar. The French ruled through appointed canton chiefs, imposed a head tax and demanded forced labour for roads, the Conakry–Niger railway, completed to Kankan in 1914, and plantations. A rubber boom around 1900 gave way to banana plantations on the coast, and in the 1950s to the mining of bauxite, the aluminium ore of which Guinea has some of the world's largest reserves, and iron ore. Thousands of Guineans served as tirailleurs in the French army in the First World War and the Second World War.

After 1945 Africans in French West Africa gained the right to elect representatives and to organise. The Guinean section of the African Democratic Rally, the Democratic Party of Guinea, became under the trade union leader Ahmed Sékou Touré a mass party with strong support among workers, youth and women, and it worked to break the power of the colonial chiefs. Touré, who claimed descent from Samori, won 56 of 60 seats in the 1957 territorial elections.

In 1958 Charles de Gaulle offered France's African territories a choice in a referendum on 28 September: autonomy within a new French Community, or immediate independence and the loss of French support. During de Gaulle's visit to Conakry in August, Touré declared that Guinea preferred poverty in freedom to riches in slavery. Guinea voted No by about 95 per cent, the only territory to do so, and proclaimed its independence on 2 October 1958. France withdrew abruptly, taking administrators, records and equipment, and later tried to destabilise the new state.

Isolated by France, Guinea turned to the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc for aid, and later also to the United States under John F. Kennedy. Touré became a leading voice of Pan-Africanism and the decolonisation of Africa, formed a short-lived union with Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana and Mali, gave Nkrumah refuge after 1966, and hosted the PAIGC guerrillas fighting Portugal in neighbouring Guinea-Bissau. In November 1970 Portuguese forces and Guinean exiles raided Conakry in Operation Green Sea, freeing Portuguese prisoners but failing to overthrow the government.

At home Touré built a one-party state in which the party and the government were fused. Claiming constant foreign plots, he purged ministers, officers, intellectuals and traders. Thousands of people were imprisoned, tortured and killed, many at Camp Boiro in Conakry, among them the former secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity, Diallo Telli, who died there in 1977. Hundreds of thousands of Guineans fled abroad. State control of trade and agriculture impoverished the country, and in 1977 market women in Conakry rioted against restrictions on private commerce, forcing a partial relaxation. Touré died in the United States in March 1984 after heart surgery.

On 3 April 1984, days after Touré's death, the army under Colonel Lansana Conté seized power. Conté released political prisoners, abandoned socialism and opened the economy, but kept power in military hands. Multiparty elections from 1993 onwards returned him to office in contests the opposition rejected. In the 1990s Guinea took in hundreds of thousands of refugees from the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in 2000 and 2001 rebels attacked across its southern borders. Conté's last years were marked by illness, corruption and a general strike in 2007 that was put down with deadly force.

Conté died in December 2008 and within hours Captain Moussa Dadis Camara took power in a coup. On 28 September 2009 soldiers attacked opposition supporters gathered in a Conakry stadium, killing at least 157 people and raping many women. After Camara was shot by an aide in December 2009, a transition led to the 2010 presidential election, the first freely contested in Guinea's history, won by the long-time opposition leader Alpha Condé.

Condé's presidency was marked by ethnic polarisation between his largely Maninka base and the mainly Fula supporters of his rival Cellou Dalein Diallo, and by deadly repression of protests. In December 2013 the Ebola virus appeared in the village of Meliandou in the forest region, starting the largest Ebola epidemic recorded, which spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone and killed more than 2,500 people in Guinea before it ended in 2016. In 2020 Condé used a new constitution to win a disputed third term amid protests in which many people were killed.

On 5 September 2021 special forces under Colonel Mamady Doumbouya overthrew Condé. The junta was suspended from the Economic Community of West African States and faced protests over its delays in returning to civilian rule, while bauxite exports, much of them to China, kept Guinea central to global mining. A new constitution was approved by referendum on 21 September 2025, and Doumbouya won the presidential election of 28 December 2025 with about 87 per cent of the vote, a result the Supreme Court confirmed in January 2026, after which ECOWAS lifted Guinea's suspension.