° Benin
° Cameroon
° Congo
° Cote d'Ivoire
° Gabon
° Ghana
° Guinea
° Kenya
° Liberia
° Mauritania
° Mozambique
° Nigeria
° Senegal
° Sierra Leone
° Somalia
° Tanzania
° Zanzibar
The area occupied by Guinea today was included in several large West African political groupings, including the Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires, at various times from the 10th to the 15th century, when the region came into contact with European commerce.
This is an area richly endowed with minerals; Guinea possesses over 25 billion metric tons of bauxite (aluminum ore)—perhaps up to one half of the world's reserves. In addition, Guinea's mineral wealth includes more than 4 billion tons of high-grade iron ore, significant diamond and gold deposits, and undetermined quantities of uranium.
The country is also is poised for agricultural and fishing. Soil, water, and climatic conditions provide opportunities for large-scale farming.
Guinea's colonial period began with French military penetration into the area in the mid-19th century. French domination was assured by the defeat in 1898 of the armies of Almamy Samory Touré, warlord and leader of Malinke descent, which gave France control of what today is Guinea and adjacent areas.
France negotiated Guinea's present boundaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with the British for Sierra Leone, the Portuguese for their Guinea colony (now Guinea-Bissau), and the Liberia.
Under the French, the country formed the Territory of Guinea within French West Africa, administered by a governor general resident in Dakar. Lieutenant governors administered the individual colonies, including Guinea.
It's early history included slave trading. In the 1700s, Dutch sea Captain Willem Bosman described the trade in Guinea by first explaining that while it is imaged that parents sell children and husbands sell wives out of necessity, it was not so:
Most of the slaves that are offered to us, are prisoners of war, sold by the victors as their booty. These slaves are in prison all together; and when we treat concerning buying them, they are all brought out together in a large plain; where, by our surgeons, whose province it is, they are thoroughly examined, even to the smallest member, and that naked both men and women, without the least distinction or modesty . . . a burning iron, with the arms or name of the companies, lies in the fire, with which ours are marked on the breast. This is done that we may distinguish them from the slaves of the English, French, or others (which are also marked with their mark), and to prevent the Negroes exchanging them for worse, at which they have a good hand.
I doubt not but this trade seems very barbarous to you, but since it is followed by mere necessity, it must go on; but we yet take all possible care that they are not burned too hard, especially the women, who are more tender than the men. We are seldom long detained in the buying of these slaves, because their price is established, the women being one fourth or fifth part cheaper than the men.
They were paid for in boesies [cowry shells], the money of this country. Those slaves which are paid for in boesies, cost the company one half more than those bought with other goods. Once purchased, the slaves are returned to their prison; . . . their cost is two pence a day a slave, which allows bread and water. To save charges, their captors sent them on board at the first opportunity, before which their masters strip them of all they have on their backs. Generally the shipmaster is not "charitable" and the slaves remained naked. On board this Dutch ship, slaves were fed three times a day "with indifferent good victuals."
October 6, 1875, The Indiana Progress
Indiana, Pennsylvania, USA
Dumb Dogs.
What's the use of a dog that can't bark? It seems that on the Guinea Coast there is a race of dogs that are absolutely dumb. The bird that told me does not know whether or not they are good watch dogs. Guesses not. Perhaps they don't bark because they've nothing to watch! I heard a sailor say that once a few dogs of the barking kind were left on the desert island of Juan Fernandez. Thirty-three years afterward, when the original dogs were dead, and their descendants had all grown wild, not one of the wild dogs could bark. Then some of them were taken away to another country by sailors, and behold! after a time they began to gain their voices, and bark like common dogs. This sounds like a hard story, and I'll not say yea or nay to it, though it was told to me as a truth that had been indorsed by Mr. Darwin.
—St. Nicholas for September.
Middle Passages: African American Journeys To Africa, 1787-2005: Many works of history deal with the journeys of blacks in bondage from Africa to the United States along the middle passage, but there is also a rich and little examined history of African Americans traveling in the opposite direction. In Middle Passages, award-winning historian James T. Campbell recounts more than two centuries of African American journeys to Africa, including the experiences of such extraordinary figures as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, Malcolm X, and Maya Angelou. A new series under presiding editor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
