History
Though the Kingdom of Portugal had claimed the area four years earlier, Portuguese explorer Nuno Tristão sailed around the coast of West Africa, reaching the Guinea area in about 1450. Like in many other regions across Africa, powerful indigenous kingdoms along the Bight of Benin relied heavily on a long established slave trade.
The slaving network quickly expanded deep into the Sahel, where the Mossi diverted an ancient slaving trade away from the Mediterranean towards the Gold Coast. With the help of local tribes in about 1600, the Portuguese, and numerous other European powers, set up a thriving slave trade along the West African coast. However, the local black African rulers in Guinea had no interest in allowing the white Europeans any further inland than the fortified coastal settlements where the trading took place. The Portuguese presence in Guinea was therefore largely limited to the port of Bissau and Cacheu. For a brief period in the 1790s the British attempted to establish a rival foothold at Bolama. But by the 19th century the Portuguese were sufficiently secure in Bissau to regard the neighbouring coastline as their own territory.
According to the estimates of Hugh Thomas, a total of 11,128,000 African slaves were delivered live to the New World, including 500,000 to British North America; therefore, only 4.5% of the total African slaves delivered to the New World were delivered to British North America. Also from Hugh Thomas, the major sources of the 13 million slaves departing from Africa were Congo/Angola (3 million), Gold Coast (1.5 million), Slave Coast (2 million), Kingdom of Benin to Calabar (2 million), and Mozambique/Madagascar on the east coast of Africa (1 million). A large part of all slaves imported from Africa were bound for the Brazilian colonies. Cacheu, in Guinea-Bissau, was one of the largest slave markets in Africa for a time. After the abolition of slavery in the 1830s, the slave trade went into serious decline, though a small illegal slaving operation continued. Bissau, founded in 1765, became the capital of Portuguese Guinea. Though the coast had been under firm Portuguese control for the past four centuries, it was not until the Scramble for Africa that any interest was taken in the inland part of the colony. The remains of the Kaabu kingdom were under Fula control until the Portuguese suppression of the kingdom around the turn of the 20th century. However, a large tract of land that was formerly Portuguese was lost to French West Africa, including the prosperous Casamance River area, which had been a large commercial centre for the colony. Britain tried to take control of Bolama, which led to an international dispute that came close to war between Britain and Portugal until U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant intervened and prevented a conflict by ruling that Bolama belonged to Portugal.
As with the other Portuguese territories in mainland Africa (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), Portugal exercised control over the coastal areas of Portuguese Guinea when first laying claim to the whole region as a colony. For the next three decades there are costly and continuous campaigns to suppress the local African rulers. By 1915 this process was complete, enabling Portuguese colonial rule to progress in a relatively unruffled state - until the emergence of nationalist movements all over Africa in the 1950s.
Portuguese Guinea was administered as part of the Cape Verde Islands colony until 1879, when it was separated from the islands to become its own colony. At the turn of the 20th century, Portugal began a campaign against the animist tribes of the interior, with the help of the coastal Islamic population. This began a long struggle for control of both the interior and remote archipelagos: it would not be until 1936 that areas like the Bijagos Islands would be under complete government control. In 1951, when the Portuguese government overhauled the entire colonial system, all Portugal's colonies, including Portuguese Guinea, were renamed Overseas Provinces (Províncias Ultramarinas).
The fight for independence began in 1956, when Amílcar Cabral founded the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (Portuguese: African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), the PAIGC.
In 1961, when a purely political campaign for independence had made little progress, the PAIGC adopted guerrilla tactics. Although heavily outnumbered by Portuguese troops (approximately 30,000 Portuguese to some 10,000 guerrillas), the PAIGC had the great advantage of safe havens over the border in Senegal and Guinea, both recently independent of French rule. Several communist countries supported the guerrillas with weapons and military training.
In 1972 Cabral sets up a government in exile in Conakry, the capital of neighbouring Guinea. It was there, in 1973, that he was assassinated outside his house - just a year before a military coup in Portugal dramatically altered the political situation.
By 1973 the PAIGC controlled most of the interior of the country, while the coastal and estuary towns, including the main populational and economic centres remained under Portuguese control. The town of Madina do Boe in the southeasternmost area of the territory, close to the border with neighbouring Guinea, was the location where PAIGC guerrillas declared the independence of Guinea-Bissau on September 24, 1973.
The conflict in Portuguese Guinea involving the PAIGC guerrillas and the Portuguese Army was the most intense and damaging of all Portuguese Colonial War. Thus, during the 1960s and early 1970s, Portuguese development plans promoting strong economic growth and effective socioeconomic policies, like those applied by the Portuguese in the other two theaters of war (Portuguese Angola and Portuguese Mozambique), were not possible.
The war in the colonies was increasingly unpopular in Portugal itself as the people got weary of war and balked at its ever-rising expense. The war began to turn against the Portuguese, and following the coup d'état in Portugal in 1974, the new left-wing revolutionary government of Portugal began to negotiate with the PAIGC. As his brother Amílcar had been assassinated in 1973, Luís Cabral became the first president of independent Guinea-Bissau after independence was granted on September 10, 1974.
Read more about this topic: Portuguese Guinea
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