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 the Americas, especially to Cape Verde and Brazil. 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. A 1980 coup split Guinea-Bissau from Cape Verde politically; 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.

Guinea-Bissau is strikingly diverse for its size, with more than twenty ethnic groups. The Balanta are the largest, mostly rice farmers of the coast and centre; the Fula and Mandinka of the east and interior are largely Muslim; and the Bijagó of the islands keep a distinctive, partly matrilineal 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 the great national celebration: months of preparation in the neighbourhoods produce costumes, masks, and floats, and the Bijagó bring their bull and shark masks to the capital's streets.

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, which provides the bulk of the country's export earnings — 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 leaves, and with fish, which is abundant and cheap on the coast. Caldo de mancarra (groundnut stew) and jollof-style rice dishes are common.

The Portuguese legacy shows in bread, in the use of piri-piri, and in Cape Verdean-influenced cachupa-style bean dishes. Grilled oysters gathered from the mangrove roots, smoked fish, and palm wine tapped from the oil palm are island staples.

Cashew fruit, not just the nut, is used — the pressed juice is fermented into a strong local spirit — and mangoes, oranges, and bananas are plentiful. Strong sweet 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 about twenty inhabited, form a UNESCO biosphere reserve of mangrove, palm forest, sandbanks, and shallow channels. It shelters green turtles that nest in large numbers on Poilão, saltwater-tolerant hippos, manatees, migratory shorebirds, and rich fishing. Bubaque is the main island and transport hub; Orango has the hippos; and several islands are sacred and closed to outsiders.

Bissau itself has the atmospheric decay of Bissau Velho, the old Portuguese quarter, the Fortaleza d'Amura, the bustling Bandim market, and monuments to Amílcar Cabral and the liberation war. 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.