StapleGuinea
Fouti
Fonio steamed to a light, fine grain and served with sauce. Fonio is one of the oldest cultivated cereals in West Africa and grows on the Fouta Djallon where little else will.
Serves 6 · 40 minutes
Susu (Soso)
The coastal Mande of Guinea — traders and rice farmers of the Conakry littoral whose language is the capital's lingua franca, and whose ancestors ruled the Soso kingdom that Sundiata Keita destroyed at Kirina in 1235.
Susu (Soso) people
Susu Griot, circa 1910, Conakry, Guinea.jpg · Wikimedia Commons
Identity
Population: Around 2.5 million, mostly in Guinea's Basse-Côte
Location: The Guinean coast from Conakry to the Sierra Leone border — Coyah, Forécariah, Boffa and Dubréka
Language: Susu (Sosoxui), the lingua franca of Conakry and coastal Guinea
Language family: Niger-Congo → Mande
Traditional governance: Village chiefs and lineage elders; historically small coastal polities trading with Europeans; Guinean prefectural administration today.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Coastal Susu
Rice farmers and traders of the mangrove littoral.
Conakry Susu
The urban population of the capital, where Susu functions as the common language.
Sierra Leonean Susu
Communities across the border in Kambia district.
Gallery
1 images
Culture
Clothing: Boubous and embroidered gowns; women's wrappers and headties with gold; Islamic dress predominant.
Food: Rice grown in mangrove-reclaimed paddies, with palm oil, fish and the sauces of the coast; the coastal rice systems are among West Africa's most sophisticated.
Ceremonies: Islamic festivals; weddings with days of drumming and the balafon; rice-planting and harvest work parties; the yankadi and macru dances.
Marriage customs: Islamic marriage with bridewealth; cousin marriage common; urban Conakry practice increasingly diverges from rural.
Initiation rites: Quranic school; circumcision with celebration; agricultural competence in the demanding mangrove rice system.
Food & Recipes
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Guinea, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, at national rather than community level — 22 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Guinea
8 dishes
National dishGuinea
Riz Sauce Feuille
Rice with a dark sauce of pounded cassava leaves, palm oil and smoked fish. The most-eaten dish in Guinea, cooked in every household in Conakry and the Fouta alike.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
National dishGuinea
Soupou Kandia
also Okra and palm oil sauce
Okra cooked into red palm oil with smoked fish and meat until thick and glossy, poured over rice. The Guinean and Casamance sauce, deliberately viscous.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodGuinea
Poulet Yassa
Chicken marinated in lemon and mustard, grilled and finished in a mass of slow-cooked onions. Casamance in origin and eaten from Dakar to Conakry, served over rice.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus 4 hours marinating
Festival & feastGuinea
Konkoé Fumé
Smoked catfish stewed in a tomato and palm oil sauce, the celebration fish of coastal Guinea. The smoking is done over green wood for a full day before the cooking starts.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Regional specialityGuinea
Lafidi
Rice noodles or fine pasta with groundnut sauce, from the Fouta Djallon. A Fula dish adapted to whatever grain or pasta is available, and eaten at Friday gatherings.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Regional specialityGuinea
Fonio au Poulet
also Fonio with chicken
Fonio, the tiny fast-growing Sahelian grain, steamed and served with chicken and onion sauce. The Fouta Djallon's grain and now a global health-food export.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Drink & sweetGuinea
Jus de Gingembre
Raw ginger blended, steeped and strained into a fierce cold drink, sweetened and sold in frozen sachets. Guinean ginger is strong enough to make a first-timer cough.
Serves 8 · 30 minutes, plus 4 hours steeping
Sierra Leone
8 dishes
StapleSierra Leone
Fufu with Plasas
Fermented cassava fufu with a leaf sauce, the everyday meal across Sierra Leone. The fufu is sourer than the Ghanaian version and comes wrapped rather than pounded to order.
Serves 6 · 1 hour, plus 3 days fermenting
StapleSierra Leone
Binch
also Beans stew, Bean sauce
Black-eyed beans stewed with palm oil, onion and smoked fish, eaten with rice or bread for breakfast across Sierra Leone.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus soaking
National dishSierra Leone
Cassava Leaf Stew
Finely pounded cassava leaves cooked slowly with palm oil, meat and fish into a thick dark green stew over rice. Sierra Leone's national dish by common consent.
Serves 8 · 2 hours
Street foodSierra Leone
Binch Akara
Black-eyed pea fritters sold in bread with pepper sauce at Freetown's morning stalls, eaten on the way to work with a cup of sweet tea.
Serves Makes 20 · 40 minutes, plus 4 hours soaking
Festival & feastSierra Leone
Sierra Leonean Jollof
Rice cooked in a tomato and pepper base with beef and chicken, made for weddings and Christmas. Sierra Leoneans add a spoon of palm oil that neither Ghana nor Nigeria would allow.
Serves 8 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Regional specialitySierra Leone
Groundnut Stew
Chicken or beef in a groundnut sauce made with roasted peanuts ground fresh, thickened and eaten over rice. Every household claims a slightly different balance of tomato to nut.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Regional specialitySierra Leone
Pepper Soup
also Fish pepper soup
A thin, ferociously peppery broth of fish or goat with country spices, drunk as much as eaten and prescribed for colds, hangovers and childbirth.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes
Drink & sweetSierra Leone
Poyo
also Palm wine
Palm sap tapped at dawn and drunk the same day, sweet in the morning and increasingly sharp and alcoholic as the hours pass. Drunk in poyo bars from a shared calabash.
Serves Varies · Tapped daily; drunk within hours
Guinea-Bissau
6 dishes
StapleGuinea-Bissau
Arroz de Jaguacida
Rice cooked with fish, palm oil and lime in a single pot, the everyday meal of the coast and the Bijagós islands. Plainer than jollof and built entirely on the fish.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
National dishGuinea-Bissau
Caldo de Mancarra
Groundnut stew with meat or fish and palm oil, served over rice. Bissau-Guinean cooking runs on rice, groundnut and palm oil, and this dish uses all three.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Street foodGuinea-Bissau
Caldo Branco
A pale broth of fish or chicken with cassava and sweet potato, no palm oil and no tomato, sold at market stalls in Bissau. The white soup, and the one served to the unwell.
Serves 6 · 50 minutes
Festival & feastGuinea-Bissau
Siga
Chicken cooked with palm oil and lime and served on rice, made for weddings and for the return of a relative. Simple in construction and judged on the quality of the bird.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 15 minutes
Regional specialityGuinea-Bissau
Bianda with Cashew Fruit
Rice with a sauce made from cashew apples, which the country produces in enormous quantity and mostly discards while exporting the nut. Tart, sharp and specific to the season.
Serves 6 · 1 hour
Drink & sweetGuinea-Bissau
Cana de Caju
Cashew apple wine and the spirit distilled from it, made in villages through the harvest. The nut is exported; the fruit stays home and becomes this.
Serves Makes about 4 litres of wine · 5 days for wine; longer for the spirit
Stories & Oral Literature
Soso Before MaliHistorical account
The Soso kingdom under Sumanguru Kanté dominated the western Sudan in the early thirteenth century, and its defeat by Sundiata Keita at Kirina in 1235 is the founding event of the Mali empire and the central episode of the Sunjata epic. Susu tradition retains its own account, in which Sumanguru is a great smith-king rather than the epic's tyrant.
Rice from the MangroveAgriculture
Coastal Susu and Baga farmers reclaim mangrove swamp for rice by building bunds, flushing salt with rainwater and managing tidal gates, in a system requiring precise timing and enormous collective labour. It produces high yields without fertiliser on land that looks like it should produce nothing, and agronomists have studied it for decades.
Proverbs
“The tide teaches patience to the farmer.”
Mangrove rice depends on timing you do not control.
“Salt in the field is washed by rain, not by anger.”
Problems need the right remedy, not effort alone.
“The city speaks Susu even when it is not Susu.”
Conakry's linguistic reality.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: Islamic cosmology; older Mande traditions surviving in the figure of Sumanguru and in beliefs about smithing and power.
Beliefs: Sunni Maliki Islam with strong marabout traditions; belief in protective writing and charms; older water and land spirits acknowledged by farmers and fishers.
Ancestors: Lineage claims to rice land are the central form of ancestral property; Sumanguru functions as a collective ancestor in historical tradition.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
Allah
The one God
Marabouts
Islamic specialists producing amulets and blessing
Water and land spirits
Powers of the mangrove and the rice fields
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Villages of rectangular mud houses with thatch or sheet along the coastal roads; Conakry's dense urban growth on its peninsula.
Building techniques: Banco and block construction; bund and tidal gate engineering for the rice fields; mangrove timber for building and fuel.
Village layout: Village near the paddy edge with the mosque at the centre; rice fields laid out in bunded blocks below.
Artifacts
Mangrove rice bunds and gates
Agriculture
Engineering of the coastal rice system.
Balafon
Instrument
Wooden xylophone of the Mande world, central to Susu celebration.
Coastal trade textiles
Textile
Cloth of the long Atlantic trading contact.
Conakry's Susu quarters
Heritage
Urban districts where the language became the capital's common speech.
Historical Timeline
1200s
The Soso kingdom under Sumanguru dominates the western Sudan; defeat at Kirina in 1235.
1500s–1800s
Susu move to the coast; Atlantic trade with Europeans develops.
1890s–1958
French colonisation; Conakry founded and grows on Susu-speaking land.
1958–1984
Independence under Sékou Touré; Conakry becomes a Susu-speaking metropolis.
Present
Susu remains the coastal lingua franca; mangrove rice is threatened by salinity and urban growth.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: SusuEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Mangrove rice farming in West Africa — agronomic researchFAO
Premium & scholarly sources