Guinea-Bissau

By: Eric Young

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Guinea-Bissau

Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world. Its poverty derives from a long history of slave trading, Portuguese colonial neglect, an eleven-year war for independence, post-independence economic mismanagement, and a lack of natural resources. The small, lineage-based communities of Guinea-Bissau have resisted domination by a series of overlords, including the precolonial kingdom of Kaabu, European slave traders, Fulani marauders, Portuguese colonialists, and finally the Cape Verdean elite of the nationalist movement. This strong tradition of resistance has been a unifying theme in Guinea-Bissau’s history.

Early History

Guinea Bissau

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Archaeologists believe that small groups of hunters, gatherers, and fishing people occupied the region by 9000 B.C.E. A more pronounced migration toward the coast came around 900 C.E.., when wars, poverty, and climatic shifts pushed new groups into the region from points further east. They were primarily agriculturists and hunters, though some raised cattle on the eastern savanna. The low alluvial plains and mangrove swamps along the coast and rivers sustained salt extraction and tidal agriculture. Over time chiefdoms proliferated. Lineages held land communally and worshiped local gods in addition to their own ancestors.

The Mandinka were one of the last groups to arrive in the region. Their kingdom of Kaabu, the region’s first real kingdom, emerged in present-day northeastern Guinea-Bissau around 1250, originally as a tributary of the Mali empire. Kaabu remained powerful for the next six centuries, as it conquered small chiefdoms throughout the region and enslaved their inhabitants. Many groups fled south and west from Kaabu to the coastal lowlands. Others, such as the Balanta, literally “those who refuse,” and the Bijagó of the islands, resisted Kaabu ascendancy and Mandinka dominance. Even when the Balanta were forced to pay tribute to the Mandinka, their adherence to traditional patrilineal succession limited the ability of the Mandinka empire to incorporate them. Kaabu expanded during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Songhai assaults on the Mali empire, and trade with the Portuguese enabled Kaabu to exercise greater autonomy.

The Slave Trade and Foreign Domination

In 1446 the Portuguese explorer Nuño Tristão sailed into the Bijagós Archipelago and up some of the rivers, though he died on his return trip. It was not until ten years later that Diogo Gomes returned to Portugal to tell of the “Rivers of Guinea.” The estuaries facilitated trade, and the coastal market town of Cacheu was the commercial center of the region from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century. At first, the small Portuguese population remained confined to a few coastal settlements, where they paid tribute to local chiefs or kings for the right to stay.

Portuguese and mestiços, or those of indigenous and European descent, traded alcohol, horses, manufactured goods, textiles, and weapons, for copra (coconut flesh, containing the oil), gold, ivory, palm oil, and, increasingly, slaves. Kaabu and other chiefdoms and kingdoms had long been involved in the Arab trans-Saharan slave trade and they simply shifted some of this trade to the Portuguese on the coast. Some groups such as the Balanta, Nalu, Felupe, Manjaco, and others resisted these slave raiding parties. Nevertheless, scholars estimate that from the coming of the Portuguese to the end of the eighteenth century around 600,000 people were sent down the rivers of Guinea to the international slave market. The Portuguese sent slaves to their Cape Verde Island territory, where they were put to work on sugar plantations or shipped to the Americas.

As the Transatlantic slave trade shifted further south during the eighteenth century, Portuguese immigrants, mestiços, and Cape Verdeans began establishing larger agricultural estates, or feitorias, along the rivers, and growing peanuts, coffee, sugarcane, and cotton. In the interior, Kaabu, socially stratified and intimately involved in the slave trade, had reached its height, with forty-four provinces providing troops and tribute. When Portugal outlawed the slave trade in 1837, competition in the illicit slave trade increased. Kaabu provincial governors contended for power and control of the trade in intradynastic feuds.

The Islamic Fulani people, who had been subject to heavy Kaabu taxation for generations, eroded the power of the war-torn kingdom through religious conversion and jihads, or holy wars. Often supplied with firearms by the Portuguese, Fulani from the area presently known as Guinea began pushing north in the mid-1800s. The wars between the splintering Kaabu kingdom and the Fulani culminated in 1867 when soldiers loyal to the Fulani marabout (religious leader) Timbo Adbul Khudus forced the surrender of Kaabu, though internal rivalries kept the Fulani from consolidating their rule. However, the fall of Kaabu enabled Portugal to divide the peoples of the region and to rule them through pliable chiefs. In the 1870s and 1880s, Fulani slaves, uncompensated by their Fulani masters for fighting against the Mandinka, revolted. The Portuguese granted the rebellious slaves sanctuary, and in return many of them assisted in Portugal’s “pacification” campaigns to subdue the indigenous population.

Portuguese Colonialism and African Resistance

When Portugal declared Portuguese Guinea a province in 1879, the Portuguese presence in the region was limited and the Africans, although divided, increasingly resisted. Suffering from tropical diseases and laboring under a lack of funding from colonial authorities on the Cape Verde Islands, the military had thus far failed in its efforts to “pacify” the region. The change in colonial status enabled the Lisbon government to allocate military resources directly to Guinea, which it declared a military district in 1892. But Portuguese pacification campaigns from the 1880s to the 1910s generally remained unsuccessful. The Africans had firearms clandestinely supplied by traders. In addition to these weapons, the Africans used their intimate knowledge of the territories along the rivers in order to hold off the Portuguese military campaigns with ease. In 1908 nearly the whole Portuguese population was forced into the fort at Bissau. In the 1910s the new republican government in Portugal placed a greater emphasis on crushing African resistance, and the colonial administration succeeded in conquering most of the land, through manipulation and force, and in gaining the support of the Fulani.

Guinea-Bissau Art.  A pair of carved wooden figurines with horned headpieces and girdles. The figures depict members of the Bidjogo tribe of Guinea-Bissau.

(Private Collection/Bonhams, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library International Ltd.)

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Under a fascist dictatorship from the 1920s until 1974, Portugal centralized administrative control over the territory and instituted a harsh system of forced labor and heavy taxation. The Portuguese controlled the administration, and mestiços and Cape Verdeans held over 70 percent of the administrative posts. Appointed regulos, or “chiefs,” almost all of whom were Fulani, implemented forced labor on oil palm, rice, and peanut plantations. The lack of capital investment under the Portuguese limited the productivity of these ventures and created the basis for the country’s persistent poverty. If they were not on forced-labor plantations, many Africans worked on state-run agricultural estates for wages to pay the high taxes demanded by the colonial state. Other Africans worked as subsistence farmers, producing enough surplus to pay taxes. Through education, employment, land ownership, or military service, Africans could attain the privilege of assimilado status, or Portuguese citizenship with full rights, but few did so. Discriminatory policies as well as attempts to separate ethnic groups and place them under the control of pliable regulos proved ineffective because many Africans remained outside of the colonial state. For example, the Balanta and the Bijagó resisted colonial authority until 1936.

In 1956 AMíLCAR CABRAL founded the Partido Africano da Independência de Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC). Originally established to advocate peacefully for independence, the party led the nationalist struggle for the next eighteen years. In 1962, three years after Portuguese soldiers killed fifty striking dock workers in Bissau, the PAIGC launched a “people’s war” for independence. The southern mangrove swamps and northern forests proved favorable ground for PAIGC guerrillas. Armed with military supplies from Eastern bloc countries, the party effectively controlled two-thirds of the country by 1968, far more than their counterparts the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) would ever control in Mozambique or Angola. Even with nearly 50,000 troops, Portugal’s counterinsurgency efforts failed. The population, who hated the abuses of Portuguese colonial rule and perceived its weakness, supported the nationalists.

After Cabral’s assassination in 1973 by a political opponent, the Cape Verdean ARISTIDES PEREIRA took over the party’s leadership. The PAIGC regrouped and was so successful that it made a unilateral declaration of independence in September 1973. One year later, after a coup d’état in Portugal, Lisbon recognized Guinea-Bissau’s independence, and the PAIGC took control with LUíS CABRAL, Amílcar Cabral half-brother, as president.

Independence

The PAIGC, the only legitimate nationalist organization during the independence struggle, was divided between the Cape Verdean–dominated senior ranks and the young soldiers of various ethnic groups from the mainland, especially the Balanta. The party also imposed harsh discipline on soldiers and peasants alike. When Cape Verde became independent in 1975, leaders of both countries anticipated unification, but mainland resentment of mestiço and Cape Verdean domination stood in the way. Meanwhile, the relocation of the party leadership to the capital in Bissau widened the gap between the rural population and party officials, who acquired urban lifestyles and relied on ex-colonial civil servants for technical know-how. As the sole legal party, the PAIGC kept a tight hold on power, and bureaucratic inefficiencies multiplied.

The government tried to revitalize the war-ruined economy through an expansion of state-run agricultural projects and state trading cartels, as it had attempted to do while fighting the independence war, but this was unsuccessful. At the PAIGC’s Third Congress in 1977, the state outlined its goal of agricultural and industrial development. The state allowed individuals to own land privately, but state-run trading monopolies would conduct the trade in their agricultural goods. Furthermore, the central government would control all taxation, large-scale fishing projects, mining, forestry, and industrial development. By 1983 the government realized that state-led development schemes were failing due to corruption, inadequate technical training, and a lack of necessary foreign capital. Guinea-Bissau’s dependence on the export of a few cash crops (cashew nuts, peanuts, palm oil) compounded these difficulties, since prices for these crops fluctuated widely and tended to remain low. With the failure of the government’s heavy-handed state-centered approach to economic development, the informal economy flourished.

The simmering Cape Verdean/Guinean ethnic differences came to a boil after independence when the government proved authoritarian and inefficient. In 1980 these differences and the marginalization of the mainlander-dominated military led the former vice president and respected guerrilla commander João “Nino” Vieira to overthrow Cabral. In the short term, the influence of Cape Verdeans and mestiços declined and the government abandoned its attempt to control the economy; but the government remained authoritarian, and the economic and ethnic problems persisted. In the early 1980s the government demoted prominent Cape Verdeans and mestiços as the Balanta in the military agitated for a greater political role. Historically the Balanta, the largest ethnic group with about 32 percent of the population, were the primary cultivators of Guinea-Bissau’s staple crop of rice, but their tradition of dispersed social organization hindered their incorporation into the central government. Balanta discontentment reached its peak in the mid-1980s in the form of a messianic cult and a coup attempt.

The PAIGC sought to consolidate its control through single-party elections in 1984 and 1989. The PAIGC expanded executive powers so that Vieira could squelch the opposition. Corruption pervaded the government. A 1987 structural adjustment program, sponsored by the International Monetary Fund, moved the country away from its centrally planned economy and trade with Eastern bloc countries. Divisions over the program arose within the government, as ministries feared their reduction.

Illegal opposition political parties advocating for democratic reform—many of which were led by émigrés in Portugal or neighboring Guinea—never offered a viable alternative to the supremacy of Vieira and the PAIGC. It was only international pressure and the debate concerning the implementation of the structural adjustment program that led dissenting members of the political elite to convince Vieira in 1990 to move toward political liberalization. In 1991 the PAIGC abolished its political monopoly in Guinea-Bissau; political parties soon proliferated. Nevertheless, in the first multiparty election ever held in Guinea-Bissau, in 1994, Vieira narrowly won the presidency and the PAIGC won 62 of 92 seats in the national assembly.

Guinea-Bissau remained economically stable, but poor. In the late 1990s Guinea-Bissau’s inflation stabilized at around 15 percent. It strictly adhered to its structural adjustment program, including cuts in public spending, accelerated privatization, and a restrictive monetary policy. The nation also entered the West African monetary system and adopted the CFA franc. These steps were aimed at alleviating the severe poverty of Guinea-Bissau. Today, primary education is free and compulsory, but there are few secondary schools and no institutions of higher learning, and the illiteracy rate stands at 57 percent. Most of the country’s 1.36 million people live in the countryside as subsistence farmers. The main economic activities are small-scale agriculture, forestry, and fishing, though over 50 percent of the country’s export earnings come from cashew nuts.

Guinea-Bissau’s unexploited reserves of oil have so far caused more problems than benefits. During the mid-1980s, the country’s relations with Guinea to the south over offshore oil reserves had to be resolved at the World Court. Beginning in 1989, relations between Guinea-Bissau and Senegal also became strained over fishing and oil rights. After Guinea-Bissau agreed to only 15 percent of the oil rights, this disagreement was settled in 1993. The country’s bauxite and phosphate reserves also offer prospects for generating revenue, but the high development costs have blocked the use of these resources for economic development. Guinea-Bissau remains one of the ten poorest nations in the world.

Indigenous African religions remain prominent in Guinea-Bissau, and pilgrims from Muslim-dominated Senegal and Guinea visit the country’s many oracles and shrines. About half of the population retain indigenous African religions, and about 45 percent follow Islam; a negligible Christian population is growing slowly. Adherence to indigenous African religions is yet another form of the resistance that has characterized the history of Guinea-Bissau’s people.

In recent years, Guinea-Bissau has served as a refuge for dissidents, refugees, and pilgrims from neighboring countries. Complicating the dispute between Guinea-Bissau and Senegal over offshore natural resources was the fact that Casamance separatists from Senegal had been using Guinea-Bissau as a sanctuary. In 1993 nearly 20,000 Senegalese fled to Guinea-Bissau to avoid the violence in the Casamance region. In 1998 some units of Guinea-Bissau’s armed forces rebelled against the government after President Vieira dismissed army chief General Ansumane Mane on corruption charges. Rebelling officers were accused of smuggling arms to the Casamance separatists. The Senegalese government sent troops to help Vieira end the insurrection. Fighting between rebel troops and soldiers loyal to the government raged off and on through May 1999, when rebel forces, led by Mane, successfully overthrew Vieira. Mane turned power over to PAIGC statesman Malan Bacai Sanha, the speaker of the National People’s Assembly, who was declared acting president. Kumba Yalá of the Party of Social Renovation defeated Sanha in presidential elections, held in two rounds, in November 1999 and January 2000. Yalá soon lost popularity for dissolving the parliament and refusing to call new elections. In September 2003 army officers, led by army chief of staff Verissimo Seabra, ousted YalÁ in a coup and set up a transitional government headed by Henrique Pereira Rosa. In the elections of 2005, former president João Bernardo Vieira seized the country’s highest office. Three years later, however, Vieira was assassinated by vengeful elements of the Guinea-Bissau military (apparently in retaliation for the murder of General Batista Tagme Na Wai). New elections are scheduled for 2009. In the meantime, Raimundo Pereira of the National Assembly serves as interim president.See also Islam in Africa; Slavery in Africa; and Structural Adjustment in Africa.

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