Guinea
Capital: Conakry · West Africa
Source of the Niger River and seat of the Mande heartland — the epic of Sundiata lives on among its jeli (griots), and Fouta Djallon was a center of Fulbe Islamic scholarship.
Ethnic communities
- Maninka (Malinke)Core of the old Mali Empire; griot music capital Kankan-Niagassola
- Fulbe of Fouta DjallonTheocratic imamate; poetry in Pular
- SusuCoastal traders and farmers
- Forest peoples (Kissi, Toma, Guerzé)Mask societies of the southeast
More communities of Guinea
- Kissi · Forest rice farmers with stone-figure shrines
- Toma (Loma) · Poro-mask forest people of the southeast ridges
- Guerzé (Kpelle) · Forest cultivators spanning the Liberian line
- Kono & Kouranko · Upper-forest Mande farmers and hunters
- Yalunka · Futa's Mande neighbors keeping farming traditions
- Baga · Coastal rice people of the great Nimba masks
- Nalu & Landuma · Rio Nunez coast farmers of mask heritage
- Tenda (Bassari, Coniagui) · Initiation-rich borderland cultivators
- Jakhanke · Clerical Mande diaspora of peaceful teaching
- Lélé & Mikhiforé · Smaller Mande communities of the middle belt
- Bambara communities · Eastern farm settlements of Mali kin
Languages
Major languages: Maninka, Pular, Susu, French
Language families: Niger-Congo (Mande, Atlantic)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Mali Empire (heartland)
- • Imamate of Futa Jallon
- • Wassoulou Empire of Samori Touré
Heritage sites
- • Sosso Bala sacred balafon (UNESCO intangible)
- • Mount Nimba Reserve
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Guinea
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Politics & liberation1922–1984
Ahmed Sékou Touré
Independence
Led the only French territory to vote non to de Gaulle's 1958 community, choosing immediate independence. His later rule was marked by severe repression, including the Camp Boiro detentions.
- Music & the arts1928–1980
Camara Laye
Literature
His memoir The African Child, written in a Paris factory hostel, is among the founding works of francophone African literature.
- Music & the arts1950–2020
Mory Kanté
Music
The electric griot, whose Yé Ké Yé Ké in 1987 became the first African single to sell a million copies.
- Sportb. 1995
Naby Keïta
Football
Guinea's most prominent modern footballer, a Bundesliga and Premier League midfielder and Champions League winner.
Deep-dive community profiles
Baga
The mangrove rice farmers of the Guinean coast — carvers of the Nimba, the great shoulder mask of motherhood that Picasso's generation collected, and whose sacred objects were burned by their own government in the 1950s.
Open deep profile →Bassari
The people of the south-eastern hills — one of West Africa's least assimilated communities, whose age-grade initiations and masked wrestling matches take place in a landscape UNESCO listed precisely because the way of life is still being lived.
Open deep profile →Dan (Yacouba)
The forest people of the Ivorian west — carvers of the serene, polished masks that Modigliani's generation studied, keepers of the leopard society, the stilt-dancers who tower over festivals, and a culture where every mask is a spirit with a name and a temper.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Kissi
The rice farmers of the three-border forest — a people split across Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia whose ancestral stone figures are dug from their own fields, and whose region was where the 2014 Ebola epidemic began.
Open deep profile →Kono
The people who live on the diamonds — farmers of Sierra Leone's eastern highlands whose district produced some of the largest stones ever found, and who have almost nothing to show for a century of extraction.
Open deep profile →Kpelle (Guerzé)
Liberia's largest people — rice farmers of the forest interior whose Poro and Sande societies school every generation, whose 'moot' house-palavers became a model of restorative justice, and whose talking drums carry the forest's news.
Open deep profile →Kuranko
A Mande people of the northern hills whose chiefdoms sit on the Guinea border, whose hunters' associations and finaba praise-singers hold authority no chief can override, and whose oral tradition was recorded across four decades by a single anthropologist.
Open deep profile →Mandinka
The westernmost great branch of the Mandé world — heirs of the Mali Empire whose griots, kora harpists and farming villages carried Sunjata's legacy to the Atlantic, from the Gambia River to the Guinea highlands.
Open deep profile →Nalu
The coastal people of the Cacine and Compone rivers — mangrove rice farmers whose banda mask, a long horizontal composite of crocodile, antelope and serpent, is among the most extraordinary sculptures in West Africa.
Open deep profile →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.
Open deep profile →Toma (Loma)
The forest people of the Guinea-Liberia border — makers of the great horned landai mask of the Poro society, inventors of an indigenous syllabary in the 1930s, and farmers of one of the last patches of Upper Guinean rainforest.
Open deep profile →