French Guinea kept the regional name after 1958 independence
The Republic of Guinea faces the Atlantic between Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Independent from France in 1958, it cycled through coups, a first democratic election in 2010, and AU suspension after 2021 before reinstatement in January 2026.
Guinea is sometimes called Guinea-Conakry, after its capital, to tell it apart from its namesakes. The name comes from the wider Guinea region along the Gulf of Guinea; English took it from Portuguese Guiné, a mid-15th-century term for the lands of peoples south of the Senegal River. From 1978 the state was the People's Revolutionary Republic of Guinea, reverting to Republic of Guinea in 1984. About 90 percent of the population is Muslim.
The territory lay on the edge of successive empires: Ghana, weakened by Almoravid incursions, in the era when Islam arrived with North African traders; the Sosso in the 12th and 13th centuries; then Mali, and Songhai, which rose around 1460 and fell to Moroccan invaders in 1591. France declared a colony on 17 December 1891, occupied Timbo, capital of the Fouta, in 1896, and ran the territory from Dakar within French West Africa, fixing borders with British Sierra Leone, Portuguese Guinea and Liberia.
When France offered its colonies a choice on 28 September 1958, Guinean voters picked outright independence by a huge margin over a place in a new French Community, and on 2 October Sékou Touré became president. France's Jacques Foccart planned Opération Persil to flood the country with forged francs, but the plot leaked. Touré made his PDG the only legal party in 1960 and was re-elected unopposed four times. In November 1970 Portuguese forces raided Conakry in Operation Green Sea, hoping to seize him for backing PAIGC rebels, and in 1977 women traders at Madina Market led riots against a ban on private commerce.
Touré died in March 1984 after heart surgery in the United States; army colonels, Lansana Conté among them, seized power hours before the party could choose a successor, then freed 250 political prisoners and abandoned socialism. Conté ruled until his death in December 2008, when Moussa Dadis Camara took over in a coup; on 28 September 2009 his soldiers killed 157 protesters.
Source: Guinea
