The history of Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau is a small country of mangrove estuaries, rice fields and the islands of the Bijagós archipelago, lying between Senegal and Guinea. Its peoples include long-established rice-farming societies such as the Balanta, Papel, Manjak and Jola, and the Mandinka and Fula of the interior, where the Mandinka empire of Kaabu, an offshoot of the Mali Empire, held sway for centuries. Portugal claimed the coast from the 15th century but for four hundred years controlled little beyond a few fortified trading posts, and conquered the mainland only between 1912 and 1915. Under Amílcar Cabral, the PAIGC fought one of Africa's most successful wars of liberation, winning independence in 1974, but the country has since been shaken by repeated coups, a civil war in 1998 and 1999 and drug trafficking.

The archaeology of Guinea-Bissau is still little studied, and much of its early history comes from oral tradition and from the reports of later visitors. Hunter-gatherers were joined by iron-using farmers, and over many centuries the coastal peoples developed a remarkable system of wet-rice cultivation, building dykes to reclaim mangrove swamps from salt water. The Balanta and Jola lived in societies without kings, organised by village, lineage and age group, while the Papel, Manjak, Biafada and Bainuk had kingdoms and chiefdoms with elaborate court ceremonies. A Bainuk kingdom is remembered as ruling the lands between the Gambia and Cacheu rivers before the Mandinka arrived.

Trade linked the coast to the interior. Salt and dried fish from the estuaries were exchanged for kola from the southern forests, iron from the savannah edge and cotton cloth woven by the Mandinka, at periodic markets that could draw thousands of people. The Bijagós islanders, skilled builders of seagoing canoes, became famous for raiding the mainland; their society gave women unusual authority, including the right to choose their husbands, and the islands remained effectively independent until the 1930s.

In the 13th century the Mali Empire of Sundiata Keita extended its reach to the Atlantic. Mandinka tradition credits his general Tiramakhan Traore with crossing the Gambia, defeating the Bainuk and settling his followers in the lands that became Kaabu, centred in what is now eastern Guinea-Bissau. Many historians think Mande-speaking groups had been present for centuries before this, and that what followed was a slow process of Mandinkisation, in which the Mandinka language, institutions and ruling lineages spread among the older population through conquest, intermarriage and the prestige of Mali.

Kaabu was ruled by a warrior aristocracy, the Nyancho, who traced their descent to Tiramakhan and were renowned cavalrymen. At its head was the mansaba at Kansala, but power was spread among provinces and dozens of royal towns stretching into the Casamance and the south bank of the Gambia. As Mali's power faded in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Fula warlord Koli Tenguella cut its western provinces off from the heartland, Kaabu became independent, by convention from around 1537, and the strongest Mandinka state on the Atlantic coast. Its wealth rested above all on war and the slave trade: captives taken in raids on neighbouring peoples were exchanged for cloth, beads, metalware, horses and firearms, first with traders heading north and then with Europeans on the coast.

Portuguese caravels reached the coast in the 1440s and 1450s, and in 1455 and 1456 the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto and the Portuguese Diogo Gomes explored its rivers. The region, which the Portuguese called the Rivers of Guinea of Cape Verde, was governed loosely from the Cape Verde islands, where the Portuguese Empire built plantations worked by enslaved Africans brought from this coast.

The crown wanted to control trade through licences, but in practice it was carried on by lançados, Portuguese and Cape Verdean traders, many of them exiles, New Christians or people of Jewish origin, who settled among African communities, married local women and lived under the authority of African rulers. With their African and Afro-Portuguese descendants and the grumetes, African sailors and workers, they created a creole society whose Portuguese-based Kriol language is today the country's main lingua franca. Their settlements at Cacheu, Bissau and Guinala, on the Rio Grande de Buba, traded salt, cloth and iron for wax, ivory, hides, gold and captives. African kings decided who could trade and where, and could expel or tax the newcomers; the Portuguese abandoned several posts under local pressure in the 1580s and built a fort at Cacheu in 1590, which the Manjak tried to storm soon after.

When the crowns of Portugal and Spain were united between 1580 and 1640, Spanish, French, English and Dutch ships traded freely on the coast, and the rivers became a major source of captives for the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean, with thousands a year shipped from Guinala alone at its peak. Later, captives were sent above all to Portuguese Colonial Brazil.

Guinea-Bissau was among the first regions of Africa drawn into the Atlantic slave trade. People were enslaved as prisoners of war, as punishment for crimes, through debt and famine, or by kidnapping, and the trade enriched kings and nobles while ordinary people bore the insecurity of constant raiding. Kaabu, the Biafada kingdoms and the Bijagós raiders were major suppliers, while the Balanta and Jola largely refused to take part and defended their villages. Portuguese companies such as the Cacheu and Cape Verde Company, which collapsed in 1706, struggled to enforce monopolies against foreign competitors. In the early 18th century the people of Bissau killed the Portuguese captain-major and the Portuguese withdrew for decades, returning in the 1750s to build the fortress of São José da Amura.

From the 18th century the Islamic Imamate of Futa Jallon, in what is now Guinea, waged wars against non-Muslim neighbours, including Kaabu, that fed the export trade with captives. Tensions grew inside Kaabu too, as Fula herders living under Mandinka rule rebelled against the Nyancho. In 1867 an army from the Futa Jallon, joined by local Fula under Alfa Molo, besieged Kansala for eleven days. Facing defeat, the mansaba Janke Waali ordered the powder stores to be set alight, killing defenders and attackers alike. The battle of Kansala ended Kaabu's dominance and gave rise to the Fula kingdom of Fuladu, although smaller Mandinka states survived. Britain's abolition campaign reduced the Atlantic trade during the 19th century, but it continued illegally for decades, and Portugal only abolished slavery in its empire in 1869, replacing it with forced and contract labour.

Rivalry with other European powers forced Portugal to make good its claims during the Scramble for Africa. A dispute with Britain over the island of Bolama was settled in Portugal's favour in 1870 by the arbitration of US President Ulysses S. Grant, and in 1879 Portuguese Guinea was separated from Cape Verde as a colony in its own right, with its capital at Bolama. In 1886 Portugal gave up the Casamance to France, fixing the northern border roughly where it is today.

Most of the country, however, remained under African rule. The kingdom of Bissau defeated Portuguese forces in 1891, 1894 and 1904, and the Balanta, Papel, Manjak and others resisted taxation. Between 1912 and 1915 Captain João Teixeira Pinto, with a large irregular army led by the Senegalese warlord Abdul Injai, carried out brutal "pacification" campaigns that burned villages and broke resistance on the mainland. The Bijagós islands were subdued only in further campaigns ending in 1936. Under the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in Portugal, Portuguese Guinea was a neglected colony with few schools or roads, governed through appointed chiefs, with forced labour and compulsory cultivation of groundnuts for export. The capital moved to Bissau in 1941, and in 1951 Portugal relabelled its colonies as overseas provinces to deflect criticism at the United Nations.

In 1956 Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist born in Bafatá to Cape Verdean parents, founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, the PAIGC, with a small group of activists in Bissau. On 3 August 1959 police and soldiers fired on striking dockworkers at the Pidjiguiti quay, killing dozens. The massacre convinced the party that peaceful protest was futile. Working from Conakry, with the support of Sékou Touré's Guinea, Cabral spent years training cadres to mobilise the rural population, especially the Balanta, and in January 1963 the PAIGC opened its armed struggle.

The war became one of the most successful liberation struggles in Africa. Supplied with weapons by the Soviet Union, China and others, and helped by Cuban doctors, artillery specialists and instructors from Cuba, the guerrillas took control of large parts of the countryside, where they set up schools, clinics, people's stores and village courts. Cabral became an internationally respected theorist of national liberation, arguing that culture and the political education of the peasantry were as important as weapons, and his thought was part of the broader anti-colonial movement of the Cold War era. Portugal answered with some 30,000 troops, aerial bombing and napalm, and under General António de Spínola, governor from 1968, a programme of development and African militias. In November 1970 Portuguese forces raided Conakry to try to destroy the PAIGC's leadership, without success.

On 20 January 1973 Cabral was assassinated in Conakry by members of his own party, in a plot widely believed to have had Portuguese backing. The PAIGC, now with surface-to-air missiles that challenged Portuguese air power, fought on, and on 24 September 1973 its assembly, meeting in the liberated region of Boé, proclaimed the independent Republic of Guinea-Bissau. In November the UN General Assembly welcomed the new state by 93 votes to 7. The war helped bring down the Portuguese dictatorship itself: in the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, officers weary of the colonial wars, many of them veterans of Guinea, overthrew the Estado Novo in Lisbon, and on 10 September 1974 Portugal recognised Guinea-Bissau's independence, a landmark in the decolonisation of Africa.

Luís Cabral, Amílcar's half-brother, became the first president of a one-party socialist state. The PAIGC governed both Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, which became independent in 1975, with the aim of uniting the two. Many Africans who had served in Portuguese units were executed after independence, a grim legacy that has received little official acknowledgement. The economy faltered, and resentment grew among mainland Guineans at the prominence of Cape Verdeans in the leadership. On 14 November 1980 the prime minister and war hero João Bernardo Vieira, known as Nino, overthrew Luís Cabral. Cape Verde's branch broke away to form its own party, and the union project was abandoned. Vieira ruled through the military and the PAIGC, crushed alleged plots and from the late 1980s moved towards a market economy. Multiparty politics was legalised in 1991, and Vieira narrowly won the first contested elections in 1994.

In June 1998 Vieira dismissed the army chief, Brigadier Ansumane Mané, over allegations of arms smuggling to separatist rebels in Senegal's Casamance. Mané's troops rebelled, and Senegal and Guinea sent forces to support the president. The war displaced hundreds of thousands of people and wrecked Bissau, and in May 1999 Vieira was ousted and went into exile in Portugal. Kumba Ialá of the Party for Social Renewal, drawing strong support among the Balanta, won the presidency in 2000 but was overthrown by the army in 2003.

Vieira returned and won the 2005 election, but on 2 March 2009 soldiers killed him at his home, hours after the army chief of staff, his rival Batista Tagme Na Waie, died in a bomb blast. His successor Malam Bacai Sanhá died of illness in 2012, and in April that year the army seized power again before the run-off of a presidential election. During these years Latin American cartels used the country's islands and creeks to move cocaine to Europe, and senior officers were accused of involvement, leading a UN official to warn of a narco-state. Most Bissau-Guineans live by farming, and cashew nuts became the main export.

José Mário Vaz, elected in 2014, became the first elected president to complete a full term, despite constant clashes with his own party's governments. Umaro Sissoco Embaló, a former prime minister, won the 2019 election and took office in 2020 as the first president elected without PAIGC backing. He survived an attack on the government palace in February 2022, which he called a coup attempt, and after clashes in Bissau in December 2023 he dissolved the opposition-controlled parliament.

General elections were held on 23 November 2025, with the PAIGC barred from the presidential contest. Both Embaló and the opposition-backed candidate Fernando Dias claimed victory. On 26 November, the day before results were due, officers announced that they had taken total control, suspending the electoral process, closing borders and arresting Embaló, Dias's ally Domingos Simões Pereira and senior officials. General Horta Inta-A Na Man was proclaimed head of a transitional military government, and Embaló was allowed to leave for Senegal. Opposition figures, civil society groups and some regional observers accused Embaló's camp of staging the takeover to prevent the publication of results, a charge his allies rejected. ECOWAS and the African Union suspended the country, and in January 2026 the junta set presidential and legislative elections for 6 December 2026.