Guinea-Bissau

The coast and creeks were home to the Bijagó, Balanta, Papel, and other peoples, with the Mandinka and Fula pushing in from the interior under the influence of the Mali Empire. The Portuguese established coastal trading posts from the fifteenth century, and the region became a major source of enslaved people shipped to Cape Verde and across the Atlantic. Effective Portuguese control of the interior came only in the twentieth century.

Guinea-Bissau produced one of Africa's most effective liberation movements. The PAIGC, founded by the agronomist and theorist Amílcar Cabral and fighting jointly for Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, controlled much of the countryside by the early 1970s. Cabral was assassinated in 1973; the party declared independence that year, and Portugal recognised it in 1974 after its own revolution.

Independence hopes soon gave way to instability. The 1980 coup in which João Bernardo Vieira overthrew President Luís Cabral ended the plan for union with Cape Verde, whose branch of the PAIGC became a separate party; since then the country has seen repeated coups, mutinies, and the killing of a president in 2009. From the 2000s it became a major transit point for South American cocaine bound for Europe, with senior military figures deeply implicated — a trade that has further hollowed out the state.

On 26 November 2025, three days after a general election whose results were never published, the army announced that it had taken control, and President Umaro Sissoco Embaló was detained and later flown to Senegal. A High Military Command made the army chief of staff, General Horta Inta-A Na Man, transitional president for a one-year transition, ECOWAS and the African Union suspended Guinea-Bissau's membership, and a decree in January 2026 set legislative and presidential elections for 6 December 2026. In a referendum on 30 August 2026, which opposition parties called on voters to boycott, about 70 per cent backed a new constitution that expands the president's powers.

Guinea-Bissau is strikingly diverse for its size, with more than twenty ethnic groups. The Balanta, one of the largest, are mostly rice farmers; the Fula and Mandinka of the east and interior are largely Muslim; and the Bijagó of the islands keep a distinctive society with age-grade initiation, sacred forests and islands, and elaborate zoomorphic masks.

Religion is a mix of Islam, traditional practice, and a Christian minority, often overlapping. Kriol, the shared creole, carries a strong identity of its own, along with gumbe music, which blends the country's many rhythms.

The Bissau carnival, held before Lent, is one of the country's biggest cultural events, a street festival of costumes, masks, and floats.

Around a quarter of the roughly two million people live in Bissau, a low, humid city of crumbling Portuguese colonial buildings, markets, and unpaved side streets, with frequent power cuts. The rest of the population farms — rice in the tidal paddies, and above all cashew, one of the country's main exports — or fishes the rich coastal waters.

Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world, with a state that barely functions in health, education, or policing outside the capital, and an economy vulnerable to the swing in world cashew prices. Family, the village, and the religious or age-grade group provide most of the structure of life.

On the Bijagós, life moves with the tides and the fishing and farming seasons, and the ritual calendar of initiations and ceremonies remains central.

Guinea-Bissau's cooking is West African, built on rice — the Balanta are famous rice growers — eaten with a sauce of palm oil, groundnut, or okra, and with fish, which is abundant and cheap on the coast. Caldo de mancarra (groundnut stew), caldo branco (fish stew) and sigá, a palm-oil and okra sauce with meat or fish, are common.

The Portuguese colonial past links the cooking to that of other Portuguese-speaking African countries such as Cape Verde. Palm wine, made from the fermented sap of palm trees, is widely drunk.

Cashew fruit, not just the nut, is used — the pressed juice is fermented into canjira, a cashew wine, or drunk fresh as sumo de caju — and mangoes, oranges, and bananas are plentiful. Warga, a sweet green tea, and imported soft drinks and beer round out the drinks.

The Bijagós Archipelago is the reason to come. Its 88 islands and islets, only twenty of them inhabited year-round, were made a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1996 and a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2025, a landscape of mangrove, palm forest, sandbanks, and shallow channels. It shelters green turtles that nest in large numbers on Poilão, hippos, migratory shorebirds, and rich fishing. Bubaque is the main island and transport hub; Orango has the hippos; and several islands, Poilão among them, are sacred to the Bijagó.

Bissau itself has the atmospheric decay of the old Portuguese quarter, the 18th-century Fortaleza de São José da Amura, which holds Amílcar Cabral's mausoleum, the market stalls of the Bandim quarter, and the Pidjiguiti Memorial to the dockers killed in the 1959 strike. The mainland offers the sacred forests and rice country of the Balanta, the old river port of Cacheu with its slaving fort, and, in the southeast, the Boé region and the forests of Cantanhez National Park, home to a small population of chimpanzees.

Tourism is minimal and services are basic, so Guinea-Bissau rewards travellers who are self-sufficient, flexible, and interested in the culture and the birdlife rather than comfort.