Guinea

Guinea is 245,857 km² — three times Czechia — with around fourteen and a half million people, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa between Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Six neighbours, 320 km of coast, and a highland core that supplies water to a large part of the region.

Two facts define it, and they sit uncomfortably together. First, Guinea is the water tower of West Africa: the Niger, the Senegal and the Gambia all rise inside its borders, which means a country of fourteen million effectively holds the tap for something like a hundred and fifty million people downstream. Second, Guinea sits on roughly a quarter of the world's known bauxite — the largest reserves on the planet — and is among the world's biggest exporters of it, while remaining one of the poorest countries on Earth by income per head.

The third defining fact is political. In 1958 Guinea was the one French African colony to vote NON in de Gaulle's referendum, and it took independence immediately and alone. France's retaliation was total and the country spent the next twenty-six years under Ahmed Sékou Touré, whose one-party state killed thousands at Camp Boiro and drove more than a million Guineans into exile. Since 1984 there have been two long presidencies and, in 2008 and 2021, two coups. Nothing about Guinea's politics is settled, and a visitor needs to check the current position before booking.

And yet: this is one of the most beautiful and least visited countries in West Africa. The Fouta Djallon is a genuine highland trekking region with hundreds of waterfalls and almost no tourists. Guinea is the homeland of the djembe and of the griot tradition that gave the world the Sunjata epic. It is not an easy place to travel — the roads, the paperwork, the malaria and the heat are all real — but it rewards effort in a way that few places still do.

There are four countries and one region with Guinea in the name, and confusing them is the single most common error about this country. This one — the Republic of Guinea, capital Conakry — is often called Guinea-Conakry precisely to keep it apart from Guinea-Bissau (the former Portuguese colony to the north-west), Equatorial Guinea (a Spanish-speaking oil state two thousand kilometres away on the other side of the Gulf of Guinea), and Papua New Guinea, which is in the Pacific and has nothing whatever to do with any of them.

The word itself is old and disputed. It reached Europe through Portuguese navigators of the 15th century and probably derives from a Berber or Songhay term for the lands south of the Sahara — one common suggestion is aguinaw, "black people", another traces it to the town of Djenné. What is certain is that no Guinean named the country: it is a European geographical label that was inherited at independence and kept.

Guineans divide their country into four régions naturelles, and this is not an administrative abstraction — it is how everyone here describes where they are from, what language they speak, what they eat and how they vote. Learn the four and the country becomes legible.

Physically the country is a tilted platform. The Fouta Djallon and the Guinea Highlands form a raised interior of ancient sandstone and greenstone that catches the Atlantic monsoon; from that high ground, rivers run out in every direction. The north-west lowlands are laterite and mangrove; the north-east falls away into the Niger basin; the south-east rises again to the Nimba and Simandou ranges on the Liberian and Ivorian borders.

Mount Nimba, on the triple border with Côte d'Ivoire and Liberia, reaches 1,752 m at Mont Richard-Molard and is the highest point in Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire alike. Mount Loura near Mali-ville, at about 1,515 m, is the high point of the Fouta Djallon, with the eroded rock profile known as La Dame de Mali beside it.

This is the fact about Guinea that should be better known than any other. Three of West Africa's great rivers rise inside this one country, all of them in the highlands, all within a few hundred kilometres of each other:

The strategic weight of this is easy to miss. Guinea's highland forests and their rainfall are the physical basis of agriculture from Bamako to Banjul, and deforestation on the Fouta Djallon plateau — for charcoal, cattle and cropland — is a regional problem, not a national one. Successive Guinean governments have used the phrase château d'eau de l'Afrique de l'Ouest as both a boast and a bargaining chip, and both uses are legitimate.

Guinea is tropical, and the year has two seasons rather than four. The dry season runs roughly November to April and the rains from May to October, peaking with real violence in July and August. Temperatures on the coast sit between 24 and 33 °C almost all year; the Fouta Djallon is several degrees cooler and can drop below 10 °C at night in December and January, which surprises everybody.

Conakry is one of the wettest capital cities in the world. It receives on the order of 3,800 mm of rain a year — five times Prague — and the great majority of it falls in July and August, when the city floods, roads dissolve and flights get interesting. This is not exaggeration for effect: the wet season on the Guinean coast is among the heaviest anywhere outside the monsoon belt of Asia.

Guinea sits between about 7° and 12° north, curving around the top of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Conakry is on the tip of the Kaloum peninsula on the Atlantic; Labé, the Fouta Djallon's capital, is 450 km inland by road; Kankan is 650 km east; N'Zérékoré, in the forest region, is close to 1,000 km from Conakry and effectively a separate country in terms of travel time.

Plan by time, not by distance. Conakry to Labé is a full day on a road that alternates between decent tarmac and craters. Conakry to N'Zérékoré is two days by road in the dry season and a bad idea in the wet, which is why the internal flights that do exist matter. Nothing in Guinea takes as long as the map suggests — it takes longer.

Upper Guinea is part of the Mandé heartland — the cultural region straddling today's Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Gambia and Côte d'Ivoire that produced the Mali Empire and, with it, one of the great political traditions of the medieval world. This is not local colour. It is the reason Guinean music, social structure and oral history look the way they do.

The empire's founding story is the epic of Sunjata Keita, who around 1235 defeated Sumanguru Kanté at Kirina and united the Mandé chiefdoms. What followed, according to tradition, was the Kurukan Fuga — an assembly at which a charter was proclaimed setting out the division of clans, the rights of women, rules of war, the protection of strangers and the prohibition of unnecessary cruelty. It is transmitted orally by the griots, it was inscribed by UNESCO on the intangible heritage list in 2009, and Guineans, Malians and Senegalese all argue about where exactly it happened.

Niani, on the Sankarani river near Siguiri in Upper Guinea, is traditionally identified as a capital of the Mali Empire and has been excavated since the 1960s. The identification is contested by some archaeologists and defended fiercely in Guinea, and there is not much to see on the ground — but the fact that Guinea claims one of the capitals of medieval West Africa's greatest state is a live part of its self-image.

From 1725 to 1896 the Fouta Djallon highlands were an independent Islamic state — one of the earliest and most durable of the West African jihad states, and a polity that produced its own literature, its own constitutional arrangements and its own contradictions.

Fulani pastoralists had been moving into the highlands for centuries, herding cattle among a largely non-Muslim Jalonke population. In 1725 a coalition of Muslim Fulani scholars under Karamokho Alfa declared jihad; his successor Ibrahima Sori completed the military work. The result was a federation of nine provinces (diwe) under an almamy ruling from Timbo, with a council of elders and a remarkable rule: the office alternated between the two founding lineages, the Alfaya and the Soriya, every two years.

That rotation is genuinely unusual — a deliberate constitutional device to stop either family monopolising power — and it worked, more or less, for a century and a half, though the handovers were often violent. The state was literate in Arabic and in Ajami Pular, Fula written in Arabic script, and produced a body of religious poetry that is still recited. It was also built on slave labour: the runde, servile villages, farmed for the free Fulani, and the Fouta Djallon was a significant supplier to the Atlantic trade.

The French took the Fouta piece by piece and finished the imamate at the battle of Porédaka in 1896, where the almamy Bocar Biro's army was destroyed by machine guns. The Fouta remains the most self-consciously distinct part of Guinea, the base of the country's largest ethnic group, and — since the almamys' descendants were on the wrong side of Sékou Touré — the region with the longest record of political grievance.

Samori Touré (c. 1830–1900) is the reason Guinean children still learn that resistance was possible. A Malinké trader turned soldier from Sanankoro in Upper Guinea, he built the Wassoulou Empire across what is now eastern Guinea, southern Mali and northern Côte d'Ivoire, and then held off the French army for sixteen years, from 1882 to 1898.

What made him formidable was organisation rather than numbers. He created a standing professional army of infantry (sofa) and cavalry, drilled in European-style formations; he bought breech-loading rifles through Sierra Leone; and — the detail that impresses military historians — he set up workshops that repaired and eventually manufactured copies of French rifles, in a state with no industrial base whatever. When the French pressed him, he executed a scorched-earth withdrawal of his entire empire hundreds of kilometres east, moving the population with it.

He was captured on 29 September 1898 in the forest of Guélémou, deported to Ndjolé in Gabon, and died there in 1900. His resistance is claimed across three countries; in Guinea it is national scripture, not least because Ahmed Sékou Touré, the country's first president, was his descendant and made the connection central to his own legitimacy.

In September 1958 Charles de Gaulle put a new French constitution to a referendum across the empire. African territories were offered membership of a Franco-African Communauté — internal autonomy inside a French-run bloc — with a NO vote meaning immediate independence and, de Gaulle made clear in Conakry on 25 August, immediate withdrawal of French support.

On 28 September 1958, Guinea voted NON, by around 95%. It was the only territory in French Africa to do so. Ahmed Sékou Touré's formulation — "Nous préférons la pauvreté dans la liberté à la richesse dans l'esclavage", we prefer poverty in freedom to riches in slavery — became one of the defining sentences of African decolonisation. Independence was declared on 2 October 1958.

France's response was immediate and comprehensive. Within two months essentially all French administrators, teachers, doctors and technicians were withdrawn. Accounts by Guinean and French sources describe files burned, telephone wiring pulled out, medicines destroyed, equipment removed or smashed, and the new state cut off from the franc zone and from French aid. Whether every widely repeated anecdote is accurate is debated by historians; that the withdrawal was punitive, rapid and designed as a warning to other territories is not.

Ahmed Sékou Touré ruled Guinea from 1958 until his death in 1984, and the honest account has to hold two things at once. He was a genuine figure of African liberation, a gifted orator and organiser who gave Guinea a place in world politics far beyond its size, championed pan-Africanism and Négritude, and protected exiled liberation movements from across the continent. He also built one of the most brutal police states in post-colonial Africa.

The mechanism was the permanent plot. From 1960 onwards the ruling PDG uncovered conspiracy after conspiracy — the teachers' plot, the traders' plot, the "fifth column", the Fulani plot — each followed by mass arrests, televised confessions extracted under torture, and executions. The Portuguese-backed seaborne raid on Conakry in November 1970, which was real, was used to justify the largest purge of all.

The instrument was Camp Boiro, a detention centre in central Conakry. Estimates of those who passed through it run to tens of thousands, with credible figures of at least 5,000 killed there and at other camps. The signature method was the diète noire, the black diet: prisoners were sealed in a cell and given neither food nor water until they died. Diallo Telli, the first Secretary-General of the Organisation of African Unity and a Guinean, died that way in 1977.

Lansana Conté ruled from 1984 to 2008 — twenty-four years of gradual economic liberalisation, deepening corruption and, in his last decade, a president too ill to govern. A general strike in January and February 2007 brought the country close to collapse; security forces killed at least 130 demonstrators. Conté died in December 2008.

Within hours a group of junior officers seized power under Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. On 28 September 2009 — the fifty-first anniversary of the referendum — the opposition held a rally in Conakry's main stadium. Security forces sealed the exits and opened fire. The UN commission of inquiry documented at least 156 people killed and more than 100 women raped, many in public, and concluded the events constituted crimes against humanity. Camara was shot in the head by his own aide-de-camp that December and left the country.

The stadium case then did something rare in West Africa: it came to trial. Proceedings opened in Conakry on the thirteenth anniversary in September 2022, and in July 2024 a Guinean court convicted Dadis Camara and seven co-defendants of crimes against humanity, sentencing Camara to twenty years. It was one of the few domestic prosecutions of a former head of state for atrocity crimes anywhere in Africa. In March 2025 the transitional authorities issued him a presidential pardon on health grounds, which victims' groups condemned and which is now part of the same argument.

The West African Ebola epidemic of 2013–2016 — by far the largest in the disease's history — began in Guinea, in a village called Meliandou near Guéckédou in the forest region. The index case is believed to have been a two-year-old boy, Emile Ouamouno, who fell ill in December 2013 and died within days; the likely source was contact with insectivorous bats roosting in a hollow tree the village children played in.

The disease was not identified as Ebola until March 2014, by which time it had crossed into Liberia and Sierra Leone through the dense cross-border trade and family networks of that corner of the map. The epidemic killed more than 11,300 people across the three countries, of whom around 2,500 were Guineans, and it wrecked already fragile health systems. Guinea was declared free of transmission in June 2016; a small flare-up in 2021 was contained in four months.

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, Ebola is not a current risk to visitors to Guinea, and has not been for years; the country's routine health risks are malaria, road accidents and food-borne illness, in that order. Second, the epidemic left a real legacy: a much better network of treatment centres and laboratories, a trained epidemiological corps, and a population with hard-won experience of outbreak response — which is why Guinea contained a first-ever West African case of Marburg virus in 2021 within weeks.

Guinea holds the largest bauxite reserves on Earth — on the order of 7.4 billion tonnes, roughly a quarter of the world total — and is among the top two producers, sending well over a hundred million tonnes a year, overwhelmingly to China's aluminium smelters. Bauxite is the ore from which alumina and then aluminium are made: without Guinea, a substantial fraction of the world's aluminium does not exist.

The economics are the country's oldest grievance. Guinea exports the raw ore. The value is added elsewhere — alumina refining and smelting happen in China, the Gulf and Europe — so the country captures a small fraction of what its own rock is ultimately worth. Every government since 1958 has promised domestic refining; a handful of projects have been announced and few have been built. Meanwhile the mines in the Boké region have displaced villages, dried up wells and coated farmland in red dust, and the resulting protests have been a recurring cause of unrest.

The question underneath all of it is the one every resource-rich poor country faces: whether the rents can be turned into schools, clinics and roads before they are turned into villas and Swiss accounts. Guinea's record so far is bad. The Souapiti and Kaleta dams are a genuine counter-example — mining revenue that became electricity — and are cited by every Guinean who wants to argue that the pattern can be broken.

Around fourteen and a half million people, more than forty ethnic groups, and a rough correspondence between people and natural region that is the first thing to learn about Guinean society — and the first thing that Guinean politicians exploit.

French is the sole official language and the language of the state, the courts and secondary education, but real fluency is much less universal than the official status implies — perhaps a quarter to a third of adults are comfortable in it, with a strong urban and male skew. In practice you will get much further in Conakry with a few words of Susu, in the Fouta with Pular, and in the east with Maninka. Guineans are generous about attempts and will teach you.

Guinea also does a version of something distinctly West African: the joking relationship (sanankuya / cousinage à plaisanterie), a formalised licence between certain clans and ethnic groups to insult each other freely and to be obliged to reconcile. A Diallo and a Keïta who have never met will trade fluent abuse about who eats beans and who steals cattle, then help each other. It is a real conflict-management institution, and being taken into it is a compliment.

Guinea is around 85–90% Muslim, overwhelmingly Sunni of the Maliki school, with a strong Sufi inheritance — the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya brotherhoods, whose networks run across the Sahel. Christians are perhaps 7–8%, mostly Catholic and concentrated in Conakry and the forest region, and traditional practice persists everywhere, often alongside rather than instead of the other two.

Islam arrived by trade rather than conquest, and its Guinean form reflects that. The Fouta Djallon imamate produced a literate religious culture with its own poetry in Ajami Pular; the Mandé east absorbed Islam into an existing social order held together by the griots and the age grades. What you get is a Muslim country that is markedly relaxed by regional standards: alcohol is sold openly in Conakry, women's dress varies enormously, and inter-religious marriage and mixed families are ordinary.

If Guinea has one global export that is not a rock, it is music. The djembe — the goblet-shaped, rope-tuned, bare-hand drum now found in every drum circle from Berlin to Berkeley — is a Mandé instrument from the Guinea–Mali borderlands, and the great majority of the teachers who took it to the world were Guinean.

The other half of Guinean music is what happened after independence. Sékou Touré's authenticité policy banned imported repertoire and instructed the state-funded orchestras to build modern dance music out of Mandé and Fulani material instead. The results were released on the state label Syliphone between 1967 and the early 1980s and are, by wide agreement, among the finest African recordings ever made — a very rare case of a dictatorship's cultural policy producing something magnificent.

Guinea's biodiversity is concentrated at the two ends of the country: the montane grasslands and forests of the south-east, and the mangroves of the coast. Between them the savanna and the Fouta Djallon have been heavily worked for centuries and the large mammals are largely gone — elephants are down to a handful, lions are functionally extinct here.

Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve is Guinea's only UNESCO World Heritage Site — inscribed in 1981, extended into Côte d'Ivoire in 1982, and on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 1992 because of mining pressure and the arrival of refugees from the Liberian war. It holds species found nowhere else, including the viviparous toad Nimbaphrynoides occidentalis, one of very few amphibians in the world that gives birth to live young rather than laying eggs, and a distinctive population of horseshoe bats and micro-endemic plants on the summit grassland.

Guinean cooking is rice and a sauce, and the sauce is where all the interest lives. The base grammar is West African — rice, palm oil, smoked fish, chilli, groundnut, leaf — but Guinea has its own dialect of it, and two things in particular that you will not find done the same way anywhere else: sauce feuille, and the vast smoked-catfish trade that flavours half the country's cooking.

Beyond that: maffé or tigadèguèna, the groundnut stew of the Mandé world; poulet yassa, onion and mustard and lemon, borrowed from Senegal and improved on locally; grilled brochettes from street braziers everywhere; and, in the Fouta Djallon, latchiri — steamed millet or fonio couscous eaten with kossam, soured milk, which is the classic Fulani breakfast and unexpectedly refreshing at six in the morning.

The real thing uses fresh cassava leaves pounded in a mortar for the better part of an hour, which is not going to happen in a Prague kitchen. Frozen pounded cassava leaf is sold in African and Asian grocers under the names saka-saka, pondu or feuilles de manioc pilées, and it is what most Guinean cooks in Europe use. Sweet potato leaves are the closest fresh substitute; spinach is not, and produces a different and much duller dish.

Fonio (Digitaria exilis) is a millet-like grain with seeds the size of a grain of sand, cultivated in West Africa for perhaps five thousand years — quite possibly the oldest cultivated cereal in Africa. Guinea is one of the world's largest producers, and in the Fouta Djallon and Upper Guinea it is not a health-food curiosity but ordinary food.

It deserves the attention it has started to get. Fonio grows in ninety days on poor, dry soil that will support nothing else, needs no fertiliser, is drought-tolerant to a degree that matters enormously in a warming Sahel, and is gluten-free with a good amino acid profile. It cooks in five minutes, tastes faintly of couscous and hazelnut, and takes sauce beautifully.

Guinea is hot, and the drinking culture is built around it. The non-alcoholic side is excellent and ubiquitous; the alcoholic side exists, is legal, and is discreet outside Conakry and the forest region.

The water itself: do not drink from the tap, anywhere, including Conakry. Bottled water is sold everywhere, as are the small sealed plastic sachets that most Guineans drink from — cheap, generally from treated supplies, and a serious plastic problem. Ice in a hotel or a proper restaurant in Conakry is usually fine; ice from a street stall is a gamble.

Conakry is a city of roughly two million people crammed onto the Kaloum peninsula — a finger of land 36 km long and in places barely a kilometre wide, sticking into the Atlantic. Everything in Guinea passes through it, and there is essentially one road down the middle. The traffic is not an inconvenience; it is a structural condition of the city.

It divides into three. Kaloum, at the tip, is the old colonial centre and the administrative heart: ministries, the port, the Grande Mosquée, the national museum, the Palais du Peuple, and the fuel depot whose catastrophic fire in December 2023 left the whole country short of petrol for weeks. Ratoma, further out, holds the embassies, the better hotels, the restaurants and the nightlife. Matoto and the eastern communes hold the airport, the industry and most of the population.

This is why you come. The Fouta Djallon is a sandstone massif the size of Bohemia, rising between 700 and 1,500 m, cut by rivers into a landscape of flat-topped blocks, sheer red cliffs, hanging valleys and — because it catches the full Atlantic monsoon — several hundred waterfalls. It is cool, it is green for most of the year, and it has almost no tourists.

The social unit is the tapade — a compound enclosed by a dense hedge, holding the houses and the intensively manured kitchen gardens that feed the family. It is a genuinely sophisticated smallholding system, worked mostly by women, and it is why the Fouta supports a far denser population than its thin soils should allow. Terracing, hedging and dry-stone bunding are everywhere once you know to look for them.

Guinea has more waterfalls than any country in West Africa and almost no infrastructure for visiting them, which is either the problem or the point depending on your temperament. Most require a 4×4, a local guide and a walk; almost none have a ticket office, a handrail or a café. Go in the two months after the rains, when the water is high and the tracks have dried.

East of Mamou the highlands fall away and the country opens into savanna — hot, dry from November to May, and drained by the young Niger and its tributaries. This is Malinké Guinea, the western edge of the Mandé world, and the part of the country with the deepest historical layer and the least to look at.

Kankan is the second city and the intellectual capital of Muslim Guinea, with a university, a large Friday mosque and a strong Tijaniyya tradition; it sits on the Milo river, a Niger tributary. Kouroussa, where Camara Laye grew up, is on the Niger itself and is where the river first becomes navigable. Siguiri is the gold town, surrounded by industrial and artisanal workings, and the closest point to the ruins at Niani. Faranah is the gateway to the Niger source and to the Haut Niger National Park.

Guinée forestière is the far south-east: a thousand kilometres from Conakry, wetter than anywhere else, hilly, forested where the forest survives, and culturally a different country. This is where Ebola began, where the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars spilled over in the 1990s and 2000s, and where Guinea's iron ore and much of its remaining biodiversity are.

N'Zérékoré is the regional capital and the second- or third-largest city in the country, a lively market town with a hot, wet climate and a genuine frontier feeling — Liberia and Côte d'Ivoire are both an hour away. Macenta and Guéckédou are the other centres; Lola and Beyla sit under the Nimba range; Kissidougou is the gateway from the north.

Guinea's 320 km of coast is mangrove and estuary rather than beach — a low, muddy, tidal margin cut by a dozen river mouths, extremely productive for fish and rice, and hard to travel along. The beaches that exist are mostly on the islands and on a few stretches north and south of Conakry.

The Îles de Los — Kassa, Roume and Tamara — lie a short boat ride off Conakry and are the standard weekend escape: beaches, palms, fish grilled on the sand, and a handful of simple places to stay. They were British until the Anglo-French convention of 1904 traded them to France; Tamara held a French penal colony, and the ruins are still there. The claim that they inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island is a persistent local story with no documentary basis, which does not stop it being told to every visitor.

There are no direct flights from Prague and there will not be. Conakry's Ahmed Sékou Touré International Airport (CKY), rebuilt and expanded in recent years, is served by a handful of European, North African and West African carriers, and every route from Czechia involves exactly one connection. Total journey time is 10 to 16 hours depending on the layover.

Expect 16,000–28,000 CZK for a return from Prague, more in December and around the Eid holidays. Book the whole itinerary on one ticket if you can: Conakry departures are not frequent, and a missed connection can cost you two days.

On arrival: the airport is small and the process is slow. Have your yellow fever certificate in hand — it is checked before immigration and there is no negotiating it — plus your visa or e-visa approval letter printed, and the address of your first night's accommodation. Arrange your pickup in advance through your hotel; the arrivals hall is chaotic and unmetered taxis at 2 a.m. are not the way to start.

Guinea's roads are the single biggest constraint on any itinerary. The main paved axes — Conakry–Kindia–Mamou, Mamou–Labé, Mamou–Faranah–Kankan — range from good new tarmac to sections that have essentially reverted to laterite, and the condition changes from year to year and season to season. Everything off those axes needs a 4×4.

A realistic first itinerary is Conakry – Kindia – Mamou – Dalaba – Pita/Doucki – Labé and back, which is about ten days at a civilised pace and covers the best of the Fouta Djallon. Adding Upper Guinea and the Niger source needs another week; adding the forest region needs two, and a very flexible attitude.

Guinea is inexpensive if you travel the way Guineans travel and moderately expensive if you do not, because the small tourist-grade supply — decent hotels, hired 4×4s, guides — is priced for mining consultants and NGO staff rather than backpackers. Budget for a middle course.

A realistic figure for a Czech traveller is 1,500–3,000 CZK a day per person on a mid-range trip with a shared hired vehicle, guesthouses and local food, excluding flights. Doing it on bush taxis and street food brings that under 900 CZK; hiring a 4×4 to yourself and staying in Conakry's better hotels pushes it past 5,000.

Cash is the system. Cards work at a small number of Conakry hotels and essentially nowhere else; ATMs exist in Conakry and a few regional capitals and are unreliable. Bring euros or US dollars in clean, recent, large-denomination notes and change them at a bank or a licensed bureau — street changers give better rates and are how people lose money. Orange Money is used by everybody for everything and is worth setting up with a local SIM if you are staying more than a week.

On safety, in order of actual risk: road traffic, by a wide margin; then illness, mostly malaria and stomach; then petty theft and street crime in Conakry, which is real but ordinary and manageable with normal precautions; then the political risk of demonstrations, roadblocks and occasional curfews. Violent crime against foreigners is not common. Avoid crowds and political gatherings entirely, do not travel between towns after dark, and treat any instruction from a soldier at a checkpoint as one to be followed politely and immediately.

Guinea is a hard country to travel and an easy one to like. Nothing works on schedule, the roads punish the vehicle and the passenger equally, the paperwork is genuinely tiresome, and the heat on the coast in April is a physical fact you cannot argue with. In exchange you get a highland region as beautiful as anywhere in Africa with essentially no other visitors in it, and a level of ordinary human welcome that is difficult to describe without sounding sentimental.

The Fouta Djallon is the reason to go. Walking down into one of those canyons in the early morning, past the hedged compounds and the terraces and the women carrying water, with the cliffs going up red on both sides and a waterfall audible somewhere below — that is the thing this country has, and it has hundreds of them, and almost nobody goes.

The history is not optional and should not be skipped for comfort. The 1958 NON is one of the great moments of decolonisation and Guinea paid a price for it that is still being paid. Camp Boiro happened a kilometre from where you will be having dinner in Kaloum, and it has never been properly reckoned with. The 2009 stadium massacre produced, fourteen years later, a genuine trial and a genuine conviction — one of the very few anywhere on the continent — and then a pardon. All of this is discussed openly by Guineans and you will learn more by listening than by reading.

Practical closing advice, in order: get the yellow fever certificate and the malaria tablets before anything else; apply for the visa far earlier than you think you need to; bring cash in euros; hire a local guide in the Fouta and pay him properly; check the political situation the week before you fly; and give the country twice as long as your itinerary says it needs.