Null Island sits where Equator meets the Prime Meridian
The Gulf of Guinea is the tropical Atlantic’s northeastern corner, stretching from Cape Lopez in Gabon round to Cape Palmas in Liberia. Null Island—the cartographic point at 0° latitude and 0° longitude—falls inside this gulf, while the Niger and Volta empty into its bights.
The International Hydrographic Organization fixes the southwestern limit with a line from Cap Lopez out to the islet of Ilhéu das Rôlas, then on to Cape Palmas at about 4°22′N. Two bights, Benin and Bonny, indent the shore, and the Niger is the chief river pouring into it. Offshore, the biggest islands run in a southwest-to-northeast chain belonging to the volcanic Cameroon line. Bioko, Annobón, Corisco and the two Elobey islets fall under Equatorial Guinea, while São Tomé and Príncipe, about 140 kilometres apart on an extinct volcanic range, won independence from Portugal in 1975.
Where the word Guinea came from is disputed. One common story makes it a Portuguese garbling of Ghana, but the historian Bovill rejected that, noting the name circulated in North Africa and Europe before Prince Henry. A Genoese chart of around 1320 by Giovanni di Carignano shows Gunuia, and the Catalan atlas of 1375 writes Ginyia; Leo Africanus hints instead at Jenne, the old market city on the Niger. Upper and Lower Guinea once labelled coasts north and east, and the word now appears in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and faraway Papua New Guinea.
Eighteen coastal states share the security problem, overseen by ECOWAS, ECCAS and the Gulf of Guinea Commission. Crew kidnappings rose by half between 2018 and 2019, leaving the region with 90 percent of seaborne kidnappings worldwide. Oil-bunkering thieves siphon cargoes mostly in Nigerian waters, and cocaine moves through from South America toward Europe. Researcher Tayo Akinpelumi estimated about US$400,000 in Nigerian ransoms from mid-2022 to mid-2023, and in December 2025 raiders boarded the Portuguese-flagged gas carrier CGAS Saturn bound for Malabo.
Unregulated fishing feeds the violence. Reported catches climbed from 212,800 tons in 2000 to 232,200 tons in 2012, and aging, rusty boats strip stocks that coastal families eat. The Environmental Justice Foundation documented workers held at sea for months, some on two-year contracts, paid in boxes of by-catch. Pirate gangs recruit jobless fishermen, some of whom have sold their own boats to raiders.
Source: Gulf of Guinea
