Portuguese Guinea
Portuguese Guinea was the name for what is today
Guinea-Bissau from
1446 to
September 10,
1974.
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The flag of the Guinea Company, a Portuguese company that traded in slaves around the Guinea coast in the early 1500s |
Though the country had claimed the area four years earlier,
Portuguese explorer
Nuno Tristão sailed around the coast of
West Africa, reaching the Guinea area in about
1450, searching for the source
gold, other valuable commodities, and
slaves, that had slowly been trickling up into
Europe via land routes for the preceding half century.
Guinea-Bissau had been part of the
Sahel Empire, and the local
Landurna and
Naula tribes traded in
salt and grew
rice.
With the help of local tribes in about
1600, the Portuguese, and numerous other European powers, including
France,
Britain and
Sweden, set up a thriving slave trade along the West African coast.
It will never be known exactly how many human lives were bought and sold in the slave markets along the Guinea coast (mostly by the Portuguese; 37% of all slaves imported from
Africa were bound for the
Brazilian colonies), but it is today approximated at 10 million.
Cacheu, in Guinea-Bissau, was one of the largest slave markets in Africa for a time.
After the
abolition of slavery in the late
1800s, the slave trade went into serious decline, though a small illegal slaving operation continued.
Bissau, founded in
1765, became the Portuguese Guinea colony's capital.
Though the coast had been under firm Portuguese control for the past four centuries, it was not until the
Scramble for Africa that any interest was taken in the inland part of the colony.
A large tract of land that was formerly Portuguese was lost to
French West Africa, including the prosperous
Casamance River area, which had been a large commercial centre for the colony. Britain tried to take control of
Bolama, which lead to an international dispute that came close to war between Britain and Portugal until president
Ulysses S. Grant intervened and prevented a conflict by ruling that Bolama belonged to Portugal.
Portuguese Guinea was administered as part of the
Cape Verde Islands colony until
1879, when it was separated from the islands to become its own colony.
At the turn of the
20th century, Portugal began a campaign against the
animist tribes of the interior, with the help of the coastal
Islamic population. This began a long struggle for control of both the interior and remote archipelagos: it would not be until
1936 that areas like the
Bijagos Islands would be under complete government control.
In
1951, when the Portuguese government overhauled the entire colonial system, all Portugal's colonies, including Portuguese Guinea, were renamed "overseas provinces".
The fight for independence began in
1956, when
Amílcar Cabral founded the
Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (
Portuguese: African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), the PAIGC. The PAIGC was a relatively peaceful movement until
1961, when it launched a full scale
guerrilla war against the Portuguese, declaring the overseas province independent and renaming it Guinea-Bissau.
The war began to turn against the Portuguese, and following the
coup d'état in Portugal in
1974, the new government began to negotiate with the PAIGC. As his brother Amílcar had been assassinated in
1973,
Luís Cabral became the first president of independent Guinea-Bissau after independence was granted on
September 10, 1974.
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Colonial Heads of Portuguese Guinea
