Guinea-Bissau

A small country whose liberation movement was studied worldwide and whose independence has been almost continuously unstable. Portugal held the coast from the fifteenth century for the slave trade and did not control the interior until the 1930s, investing almost nothing. Amilcar Cabral founded the PAIGC in 1956 and built a guerrilla movement of unusual sophistication, one that analysed the country's own social structure before deciding whom to recruit and that ran schools, clinics and courts in the areas it held; his writings on culture and national liberation are still taught. By the early 1970s the movement controlled most of the countryside. Cabral was assassinated in Conakry in January 1973, months before independence was declared, and the war's cost was a direct cause of the Portuguese revolution of 1974. The planned union with Cape Verde ended after a coup in 1980. Since then no elected president has completed a full term, and the country has become a significant transit point for South American cocaine moving to Europe, with senior officers implicated. The Bijagos archipelago is a biosphere reserve. Bissau is the capital. Portuguese creole is the common language. The country has about two million people and covers around thirty-six thousand square kilometres. Cashew nuts are overwhelmingly its largest export. The Bijagos are one of the few places where saltwater hippos are found. Portuguese is official but spoken by a minority. The country is among the world's poorest by income per head. Its coastline is a maze of mangrove creeks that made colonial control difficult.

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