GuineaGuinée

Upper Guinea lay at the heart of the Mali empire: Sundiata Keita, its 13th-century founder, came from the Maninka lands around Niani, near today's border. The Sundiata epic, sung by griots, remains a founding story across the region.

In the 18th century Fula Muslim clerics launched a jihad in the Fouta Djallon highlands and founded an imamate with its capital at Timbo and religious centre at Fougoumba. Power rotated between two ruling houses, and Qur'anic learning spread widely; the Fouta became a model for later Fula states.

In the late 19th century the Maninka leader Samory Touré built a large state in Upper Guinea and fought the French for nearly two decades until his capture in 1898.

In the 1958 referendum on de Gaulle's French Community, Guinea alone voted no, led by trade unionist Ahmed Sékou Touré, who said the country preferred 'poverty in freedom to riches in slavery'. France left within weeks, removing equipment and records.

Touré became a Pan-African icon and hosted liberation movements, including Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC. At home he built a one-party socialist state; at Camp Boiro and other prisons thousands of real or imagined opponents died, and many Guineans fled abroad.

After his death in 1984 the army under Lansana Conté took power and held it until 2008.

In 2008 Captain Moussa Dadis Camara seized power; on 28 September 2009 soldiers killed over 150 opposition supporters and raped scores of women in a Conakry stadium. A trial in 2022–2024 convicted Camara and others.

Alpha Condé became the first freely elected president in 2010 and led the country through the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic, which began in Forest Guinea. His push for a third term triggered the 2021 coup by Colonel Mamadi Doumbouya, whose new constitution (2025) allowed him to run; he won the December 2025 election with a large majority amid opposition criticism.

Guinea holds about a quarter of the world's bauxite and the Simandou iron-ore deposit, whose railway and port began exporting in late 2025. Mining towns like Boké and Kamsar have grown fast, with dust, displacement and protests.

Guinée Maritime is the humid coast of mangroves and rice fields, home to the Susu. The Fouta Djallon (Moyenne-Guinée) is a sandstone plateau of 1,000–1,500 m with canyons, waterfalls and Fula cattle herders; here the Senegal and Gambia rivers begin.

Upper Guinea is Maninka savanna along the upper Niger, which rises near the Sierra Leone border and flows north-east to Mali. Forest Guinea in the south-east is hilly rainforest shared with Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire, with Mount Nimba (1,752 m) and the Bossou chimpanzees, famous for using stone tools.

Conakry receives some of the heaviest rain of any capital, over 3,500 mm a year, almost all between June and October.

Guinea is a heartland of the djembe and the balafon; Mamady Keïta and Famoudou Konaté spread djembe drumming worldwide. Touré's cultural policy created state ensembles such as Bembeya Jazz National and Les Ballets Africains, which toured the world.

The Sosso Bala, a balafon said to date from the 13th century and kept by one family in Niagassola, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Mory Kanté's 'Yéké Yéké' became a global hit in 1987.

The Fula (Peul) are the largest group, followed by the Maninka and the Susu, with Kissi, Kpelle, Toma and other peoples in the forest. Ethnic identity shapes politics, and tension between groups has flared around elections.

Most Guineans are Muslim; Christians and traditional religions are strongest in Forest Guinea, where masked societies and initiation groves survive. Food is rice with sauce: cassava-leaf, peanut or okra sauces; the Fouta adds milk and fonio, and Kindia supplies mangoes, pineapples and bananas.