Conakry exploded from fifty thousand to millions
Guinea's capital began on little Tombo Island and spread along the narrow Kaloum Peninsula. At independence in 1958 it held about 50,000 people; by 1980 some 600,000 lived there, and the 2025 census counted 3,407,327, roughly a fifth of the country's population.
In 1885 the island villages of Conakry and Boubinet had under 500 inhabitants between them. The city really dates from 1887, when Britain handed the island to France, and it became capital of French Guinea in 1904. A railway to Kankan, now closed, opened the interior and turned the port into a major exporter of groundnuts. Today the peninsula is about 36 kilometres long and between 0.2 and 6 kilometres wide, and the city covers all of it. That cramped, isolated site suited colonial rulers but has strained infrastructure since independence.
Its modern history is often violent. In 1970, amid the war in neighbouring Portuguese Guinea, some 350 Portuguese troops and Guinean loyalists landed near the city, freed 26 Portuguese prisoners held by the PAIGC independence movement and withdrew without toppling the government. Camp Boiro, the feared prison camp of Sekou Touré's rule, stood in Conakry. A general strike in early 2007 left over a hundred dead when the army confronted protesters, and on 28 September 2009 the military junta fired on a huge crowd, killing 157 people according to rights groups.
Power and water cuts have been a daily burden since 2002. Officials blamed the 2001 drought and ageing machinery; critics cited mismanagement, corruption and the exit of the power company's French partner. The port handles alumina and bananas, and local industry makes food, cement, metal goods and fuel.
The climate is tropical monsoon: the harmattan keeps December to April almost rainless, while July and August each average over 1,100 millimetres, for nearly 3,800 a year. Once split into five communes, the city now has thirteen, and it is more than eight times the size of Kankan, Guinea's next-largest city.
Source: Conakry
