Guinea-Bissau

History

• Mandinka Kingdom

  The Mandinka are the descendants of the Mali Empire, which rose to power in the 13th century under the rule of king Sundiata Keita who founded an empire which would go on to span the large part of West Africa. They migrated west from the Niger River in search of better agricultural lands and more opportunities for conquest. The Mandinka people live primarily in West Africa in Mali, The Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Mauritania and Ivory Coast. Although widespread, in most countries the Mandinka are not the largest ethnic group, except in The Gambia and Guinea where they constitute the largest ethnic group. Most Mandinka lives in family-related compounds in traditional rural villages. Their traditional society has featured socially stratified castes. Mandinka communities have been fairly autonomous and self-ruled, being led by a chief and group of elders. Mandinka has been an oral society where mythologies, history, and knowledge are verbally transmitted from one generation to next. More than 99% of Mandinka in contemporary Africa are Muslim.

  The Mandés was initially a part of many fragmented kingdoms that formed after the collapse of Ghana empire in the 11th century. During the rule of Sundiata Keita, these kingdoms were consolidated, and the Mandinka expanded west from the Niger River basin under Sundiata’s general Tiramakhan Traore. This expansion was a part of creating a region of conquest, according to the oral tradition of the Mandinka people. This migration began in the later part of the 13th century. Another group of Mandinka people, under Faran Kamara – the son of the king of Tabou – expanded southeast of Mali, while a third group expanded with Fakoli Kourouma.

  In 1324, Sultan Mansa Musa who ruled Mali went on Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca with caravan carrying gold. Shihab al-Umari, the Arabic historian, described his visit and stated that Musa built mosques in his kingdom, established Islamic prayers and took back Maliki school of Sunni jurists with him. According to Richard Turner – a professor of African American Religious History, Musa was highly influential in attracting North African and Middle Eastern Muslims to West Africa. The Mandinka people of Mali converted early, but those who migrated to the west did not convert and retained their traditional religious rites. One of the legends among the Mandingo of western Africa is that the general Tiramakhan Traore led the migration because people in Mali had converted to Islam and he did not want to. Another legend gives a contrasting account and states that Traore himself had converted and married Muhammad’s granddaughter. The Traore’s marriage with Muhammad’s granddaughter, states Toby Green, is fanciful, but these conflicting oral histories suggest that Islam had arrived well before the 13th century and had a complex interaction with the Mandinka people.

• The Kaabu Empire

  The Kaabu Empire (1537–1867), also written Gabu, Ngabou, and N’Gabu’, was a Mandinka empire of Senegambia centered within modern northeastern Guinea-Bissau, Larger parts of today’s Gambia; Kingdom of Saloum, extending into Koussanar, Koumpentoum regions of South Eastern Senegal, and Casamance in Senegal. It rose to prominence in the region thanks to its origins as a former imperial military province of the Mali Empire. After the decline of the Mali Empire, Kaabu became an independent Empire.

  The Mandinka arrived in Guinea-Bissau around the year 1200. One of the generals of Sundiata Keita, Tirmakhan Traore, conquered the area making Kaabu one of Mali’s western Tinkuru, or provinces in the 1230s. By the beginning of the 14th century, much of Guinea-Bissau was under the control of the Mali Empire and ruled by a Farim Kaabu (Commander of Kaabu) loyal to the Mansa of Mali. As in many places that saw Mandinka migrations, much of Guinea-Bissau’s native population was dominated or assimilated. Resisters being sold into slavery via the trans-Sahara trade routes to Arab buyers. Although the rulers of Kaabu were Mandinka, many of their subjects were from ethnic groups who had resided in the region before the Mandinka invasion.

  After the middle of the 14th century, Mali saw a steep decline due to raids by the Mossi to their south and the growth of the new Songhai Empire. During the 16th century, Mali lost many of its provinces reducing it to not much more than the Mandinka heartland. Succession disputes between heirs to Mali’s throne also weakened its ability to hold even its historically secure possessions in Senegal, the Gambia, and Guinea-Bissau. Free of imperial oversight, these lands splintered off to form independent kingdoms. The most successful and longest lasting of these was Kaabu, which became independent in 1537. Kaabu’s governor, Sami Koli, became the first ruler of an independent Kaabu. He was the grandson of Tiramakhan Traore.

  Kaabu carried on the legacy of the Mali Empire much in the same way the Byzantine Empire preserved the culture and social structure of the Roman Empire. The rulers of the Kaabu Kingdom believed their right to rule came from their history as an imperial province. The kings of independent Kaabu discarded the title of Farim Kaabu for Kaabu Mansaba. Among the vast provinces of the Kabu empire included but not limited to Firdu, Pata, Kamako, Jimara, Patim Kibo, Patim Kanjaye, Kantora, Sedhiou, Pakane Mambura, Kiang, Kudura, Nampaio, Saloum, Koumpentoum, Koussanar, Barra, Niumi, Pacana etc 

• European Contact

  The Portuguese Crown commissioned its navigators to explore the Atlantic coast of West Africa to find the sources of gold. The gold trade was controlled by Morocco, and Muslim caravan routes across the Sahara also carried salt, kola, textiles, fish, grain, and slaves. The navigators first passed the obstruction of Cape Bojador in 1437 and were able to explore the West African coast as far as Sierra Leone. Other Explorer includes Nuño Tristão, a Portuguese navigator who set out in the early 1440s in search of slaves and was killed in 1446 or 1447 by coastal inhabitants who were opposed to his intrusion. Early reports of Europeans reaching this area include those of the Venetian Alvise Cadamosto’s voyage of 1455, the 1479–1480 voyage by Flemish-French trader Eustache de la Fosse, and Diogo Cão. In the 1480s this Portuguese explorer reached the Congo River and the lands of Bakongo, setting up the foundations of modern Angola, some 4200 km down the African coast from Guinea-Bissau. The Portuguese monopolized the exploration and trade along the Upper Guinea coast from the later 15th and early 16th centuries until the French, Spanish, and English began to compete for the wealth of Africa.

  Although the rivers and coast of this area were among the first places colonized by the Portuguese, who set up trading posts in the 16th century, they did not explore the interior until the 19th century. The local African rulers in Guinea, some of whom prospered greatly from the slave trade, controlled the inland trade and did not allow the Europeans into the interior. They kept them in the fortified coastal settlements where the trading took place. African communities that fought back against slave traders also distrusted European adventurers and would-be settlers. The Portuguese in Guinea were largely restricted to the ports of Bissau and Cacheu. A small number of European settlers established isolated farms along Bissau’s inland rivers.

  The gold ultimately came from the upper reaches of the Niger River and Volta River and the Portuguese crown aimed to divert the gold trade towards the coast. To control this trade, the king ordered the building of a castle, called São Jorge da Mina (now Elmina Castle), on the Portuguese Gold Coast in 1482 and other trading posts. The Portuguese government instituted the Company of Guinea to deal with the trading and to fix the prices of the goods. Besides gold, ivory, Melegueta pepper and slaves were traded. It is estimated that the Atlantic slave trade transported around 11 million people from Africa between 1440 and 1870, including 2 million from Senegambia or Upper Guinea.

• The Slave Trade

  The Portuguese Gold Coast area was the source of an estimated 150,000 African slaves transported by the Portuguese, mainly from Upper Guinea before 1500, some used to grow cotton and indigo in the previously uninhabited Cape Verde islands. Portuguese traders and exiled criminals penetrated the rivers and creeks of Upper Guinea forming a mulatto population using Portuguese-based Creole language as their lingua franca. However, after 1500 the main area of Portuguese interest, both for gold and slaves, was further south in the Gold Coast. At the start of the 17th century, the main Portuguese bases for the export of slaves were Santiago, Cape Verde for the Upper Guinea traffic, and São Tomé Island for the Gulf of Guinea. In the 1630s and 1640s, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from most of the Gold Coast, but they retained a foothold at São João de Ajuda, now called Ouidah in Benin, as they preferred to acquire slaves from the Gulf of Guinea rather than Upper Guinea before the 1750s. In the 17th century, the French at Saint-Louis, Senegal, the English at Kunta Kinteh Island on the Gambia River and Dutch at Gorée had established bases in Upper Guinea.

  The very weak Portuguese position in Upper Guinea was strengthened by the first Marquess of Pombal who promoted the supply of slaves from this area to the provinces of Grão-Pará and Maranhão in northern Brazil, and between 1757 and 1777, over 25,000 slaves were transported from the “Rivers of Guinea”, which approximates Portuguese Guinea and parts of Senegal, although this area had been largely neglected by the Portuguese for the previous 200 years. Bissau, founded in 1765, became the center of Portuguese control. Further British interest in the area led to a brief attempt in the 1790s to establish a base on the island of Bolama, where there was no evidence of any continuous Portuguese presence.

  Between the retreat of the British settlers in 1793 and the official Portuguese occupation of the island in 1837, there were several attempts to establish a European presence on the island. Even after the Portuguese had asserted their claim in 1837, Afro-Portuguese lived and worked there alongside Afro-British from Sierra Leone, since Britain did not relinquish its claim to Bolama until 1870. The abolition of the slave trade by Britain in 1807 presented the slave traders of Guinea with a virtual monopoly of the West Africa slave trade with Brazil. Despite the Brazilian and Portuguese governments agreeing to stop this traffic in the 1830s, it probably continued at 18th-century.

• Colonial Portugal

  In Guinea-Bissau and neighboring territories, slaves were captured among the coastal peoples or among interior groups at war. While Kaabu was ascendant, the Fulani were common victims. In 1867 the kingdom of Kaabu was overthrown by the Fulani, after which the numbers of Mande increased on the slave ships’ rosters. Groups of slaves were bound together in coffles and driven to the coastal barracoons (temporary enclosures) at Cacheu, Bissau, and Bolama by Grumetes (mercenaries). There the prices were negotiated by tangomãos (who functioned as both translators and mediators), and slaves were sold to the lançados and Senhoras (slave-trading women of mixed parentage).

  Despite the five centuries of contact between Guineans and the Portuguese, one cannot truly speak of a deeply rooted colonial presence until the close of the 19th century. The long-lasting joint administration of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau was terminated in 1879 and both became separate colonial territories: Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea. However, the European rivalries for control of the larger Guinea region only intensified. Long-term Anglo-Portuguese bickering over the ownership of Bolama was finally resolved when U.S. Pres. Ulysses S. Grant adjudicated the dispute in Portugal’sfavorr in 1870. The Franco-Portuguese conflict over the Casamance region, however, was resolved in France’s favour in May 1886.

  The struggle for dominance around Guinea-Bissau fell within the context of the greater scramble for Africa that characterized the 1884–85 Berlin Congress, which saw English demands for Guinean territories to the south and French demands along the north and east. The Guinean people were certainly not consulted about such matters, and they resisted, revolted, and mutinied by any available means whenever possible. The Berlin Congress had called for the demonstration of “effective occupation,” though, and, in an attempt to satisfy this condition, the brutal “pacification” campaign of Capt. João Teixeira Pinto—with the employed support of an African mercenary force—was conducted from 1913 to 1915. The killings and severe punitive measures exacted by the Portuguese and their mercenaries brought a widespread outcry. Nevertheless, the Portuguese continued their pacification efforts against the Guinean population, especially the coastal peoples, and launched three more major campaigns of pacification, the latest of which was undertaken in January 1936.

• Struggle For Independence

  Portuguese Guinea (as well as the nearby Cape Verde archipelago) had been claimed by Portugal since 1446 and was a major trading post for commodities and African slaves during the 18th century before the former had been outlawed by the Portuguese authorities. The interior was however not fully controlled by the Portuguese until the latter half of 19th century. Sporadic fighting continued during the early 20th century and the Bijagós Islands were not pacified under Portuguese rule until 1936. Portuguese Guinea was dependent from the government of Cape Verde until 1887 when it gained the status of a separate overseas province of Portugal. In 1892, it received the status of the autonomous district, becoming again a province in 1896. At the beginning of the 20th century, Portuguese Guinea started to be referred to as “colony”, despite still having the generic status of the overseas province. With the effectiveness of the Portuguese Colonial Act of 1930, the designation “colony” fully replaced that of “province”.

  In 1952, by a constitutional amendment, Portuguese Guinea became again referred as an overseas province, losing the status of “colony”. While there had always been local resistance it was not until 1956 the first liberation movement was founded by Amílcar Cabral and Rafael Barbosa, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The first major activity of the PAIGC was a strike by dock-workers in Bissau on August 3, 1959. The colonial police violently repressed the strike and more than 50 people died, the incident became known as the Pijiguiti Massacre. The massacre led to a major upswing of popular support for the PAIGC. By 1960, it was decided to move headquarters to Conakry in neighboring Republic of Guinea (former French Guinea) in order to prepare for an armed struggle.

  Open hostilities broke out in January 1963 when guerrillas from the PAIGC attacked the Portuguese garrison in Tite, near the Corubal River, south of Bissau, the capital of Portuguese Guinea. Similar guerrilla actions quickly spread across the colony, mainly in the south. The geography, dense forests with numerous waterways, were favorable to guerrilla activity. In 1964 PAIGC opened their second front in the north. In April 1964 the Portuguese launched a counter-offensive. They attacked the PAIGC held island of Como in the south of the country. 3,000 Portuguese, with air support, were involved but after 65 days were forced to withdraw. In 1965 the war spread to the eastern part of the country; that same year the PAIGC expanded its attacks in the northern area of the country, where at the time only the Front for the Liberation and Independence of Guinea (FLING), a minor insurgent force, was operating. By this time, the PAIGC, led by Amílcar Cabral, began openly receiving military support from the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba.

• Independent Guinea-Bissau

  Despite being confronted by large numbers of Portuguese soldiers and their accompanying military technology, the PAIGC gained control of some two-thirds of the country, with the Portuguese colonial army under Gen. António de Spínola surviving only in the major towns and heavily fortified bases. On January 20, 1973, Cabral was assassinated; nevertheless, on September 24, 1973, independence was declared. This event, compounded by the drawn-out wars in Portugal’s other overseas provinces, precipitated a crisis that led to a successful coup in Lisbon on April 25, 1974. Portugal’s new government soon began negotiating with African nationalist movements. Full independence was achieved by Guinea-Bissau on September 10, 1974; Cape Verde achieved independence the following year. The Cape Verdean revolutionary comrades Luís de Almeida Cabral (half-brother of Amílcar Cabral) and Aristides Pereira became the first presidents of Guinea-Bissau and the Republic of Cape Verde, respectively. João (“Nino”) Vieira became the commander in chief of the armed forces of Guinea-Bissau.

  In the first post-independence elections held in December 1976–January 1977, 80% of the population approved the PAIGC list of candidates for Regional Council membership. On 14 November 1980, President Cabral, a mestiço with close ties to Cape Verde, was overthrown by a group of Guinean blacks under Vieira’s command. Severe food shortages and tensions in the alliance between Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde had precipitated the bloody military coup, which led to the dissolution of the National Assembly and Executive Council, suspension of the constitution, the arrest of the president, and temporary abandonment of the goal of unification with Cape Verde. A Revolutionary Council composed of nine military officers and four civilian advisers was named on 19 November, and a provisional government was appointed the following day. Diplomatic relations with Cape Verde, suspended at the time of the coup, were resumed in June 1982.

  The National People’s Assembly, reestablished in April 1984, adopted a new constitution in May. It also elected a 15-member Council of State to serve as the nation’s executive body. As president of this council, Vieira served as both head of state and head of government. An abortive military coup took place in November 1985; in the aftermath, six persons were executed in July 1986 while another five died in detention. After ruling Guinea-Bissau as a one-party state for ten years, Vieira denounced single-party rule as elitist, inherently undemocratic, and repressive. In April 1991, Guinea-Bissau formally embraced multipartyism and adopted a new constitution. Four major opposition parties formed the Democratic Forum in January 1992 and sought to unseat PAIGC. In July 1994, Guinea-Bissau held its first multiparty legislative and presidential elections. João Bernardo Vieira was elected president, narrowly defeating Koumba Yala with 52% to 48% of the vote. The PAIGC led decisively in the Assembly elections with 46% of the vote. In October, Vieira appointed Manuel Saturnino da Costa prime minister.

• The 21st Century Guinea-Bissau

  An army uprising that triggered the Guinea-Bissau Civil War in 1998, created hundreds of thousands of displaced persons. The president was ousted by a military junta on 7 May 1999. An interim government turned over power in February 2000 when opposition leader Kumba Ialá took office following two rounds of transparent presidential elections. Guinea-Bissau’s transition back to democracy has been complicated by a crippled economy devastated by civil war and the military’s predilection for governmental meddling. In January 2000, the second round of a general election took place. The presidential election resulted in a victory for opposition leader Kumba Ialá of the Party for Social Renewal (PRS), who defeated Malam Bacai Sanhá of the ruling PAIGC. The PRS was also victorious in the National People’s Assembly election, winning 38 of the 102 seats.

  In September 2003, a military coup was conducted. The military arrested Ialá on the charge of being “unable to solve the problems”. After being delayed several times, legislative elections were held in March 2004. A mutiny of military factions in October 2004 resulted in the death of the head of the armed forces and caused widespread unrest. In June 2005, presidential elections were held for the first time since the coup that deposed Ialá. Ialá returned as the candidate for the PRS, claiming to be the legitimate president of the country, but the election was won by former president João Bernardo Vieira, deposed in the 1999 coup. Vieira beat Malam Bacai Sanhá in a run-off election. Sanhá initially refused to concede, claiming that tampering and electoral fraud occurred in two constituencies including the capital, Bissau.

  On 2 March 2009, however, Vieira was assassinated by what preliminary reports indicated to be a group of soldiers avenging the death of the head of joint chiefs of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Wai, who had been killed in an explosion the day before. Military leaders in the country pledged to respect the constitutional order of succession. National Assembly Speaker Raimundo Pereira was appointed as an interim president until a nationwide election on 28 June 2009. It was won by Malam Bacai Sanhá of the PAIGC, against Kumba Ialá as the presidential candidate of the PRS. On 9 January 2012, President Sanhá died of complications from diabetes, and Pereira was again appointed as an interim president. On the evening of 12 April 2012, members of the country’s military staged a coup d’état and arrested the interim president and a leading presidential candidate. Former vice chief of staff, General Mamadu Ture Kuruma, assumed control of the country in the transitional period and started negotiations with opposition parties. The return to democratically elected civilian rule was stalled, as legislative and presidential elections, originally scheduled to take place in 2013, were delayed. The presidential election, which was held on May 18. former finance minister José Mário Vaz emerged victorious, winning about 62 percent of the vote.

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