Portuguese Guinea

A small, wet, difficult territory that Portugal held for five centuries and controlled for barely four decades of them. The coast and the Bijagós islands were a Portuguese trading zone from the fifteenth century, supplying captives to the Atlantic slave trade and later administered from Cape Verde, whose creole elite provided most of the officials. Separated administratively in 1879, its boundaries settled with French neighbours in 1886, the interior was nevertheless not subdued until a campaign of so-called pacification that ran to 1936 - some island and mainland communities were never fully brought under the administration at all. There was little to extract beyond groundnuts and palm products, and Portugal, itself poor, invested correspondingly little in schools, roads or hospitals. What made the territory historically decisive was the war fought there. Amílcar Cabral founded the PAIGC in 1956 and built a guerrilla movement of unusual sophistication, one that studied the country's own social structure before deciding whom to recruit and that ran schools, clinics and courts in the areas it held. By the early 1970s it controlled most of the countryside while Portugal held the towns. Cabral was assassinated in Conakry in January 1973; the PAIGC declared independence that September. The war was unwinnable and visibly so, and the exhaustion it produced in the Portuguese officer corps was a direct cause of the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in April 1974. Portugal recognised Guinea-Bissau that September, and its other African colonies followed within a year.Cape Verde, joined to Bissau in the PAIGC's own name and programme, separated from it politically after a coup in 1980. The union of the two territories that Cabral had planned lasted five years.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration