Guinea-Bissau

From the Mandinka empire of Kaabu and the coastal peoples of the Rivers of Guinea, through Portuguese slaving forts, a very late colonial conquest, and Amílcar Cabral's guerrilla war, to independence in 1973–1974 and decades of coups.

Guinea-Bissau is a small West African nation of mainland river country and the offshore Bijagós archipelago, wedged between Senegal and Guinea. Before the Europeans came, its interior lay within the reach of the Mali Empire and then of Kaabu (Gabu), a Mandinka federation of warrior nobility that long outlasted Mali, while the coast and islands were home to the Balanta, Fula, Papel, Manjaco, Biafada and the seafaring Bijagós. From the mid-fifteenth century Portuguese navigators reached the "Rivers of Guinea", and the region — administered for centuries through Cape Verde — became an artery of the Atlantic slave trade centred on Cacheu and, later, Bissau. Portugal's actual conquest of the interior came strikingly late, completed only through brutal "pacification" campaigns into the 1910s and the subjection of the Bijagós islands by 1936. Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC waged one of Africa's most effective anti-colonial guerrilla wars from 1963; Cabral was assassinated in January 1973, the party declared independence on 24 September 1973, and Portugal recognised it on 10 September 1974 after the Carnation Revolution. Independence gave way to chronic instability — a 1980 coup, the 1998–1999 civil war, repeated coups, and a notorious role as a transit point for cocaine bound from Latin America to Europe.