Guinea - Arrival of the Europeans
From the point of view of contact with the Europeans, it can be said that the Portuguese were the first to approach the Guinean coasts. They were later to be ousted by the English and the French, who were to become the principal animators of the slave trade.
Colonization preceeded from the 15th century with the penetration of Europeans (Portuguese, French, English). Early immigrants were more or less trained adventurers, pirates, or non-government-mandated individuals. It is from the 15th century that Portuguese travelers begin to discover the coasts of Africa. One of the first of these is the Nuño Tristao, which, although probably never reached it, gave its name to Rio Nuñez and Tristao Island (around 1450). Watt and Timberson, two Englishmen from Freetown, reached Timbo (then the capital of the Fouta Djallon), from the Rio Nuñez.
During the 1500s British and French business ventures occasionally sought trade along the West African coast; but by the latter part of the century the plundering of Spanish shipping from the New World proved more profitable, and West African trade was left largely to the Portuguese. The principal exception was filling the need for slaves for the new West Indian plantations, which resulted in some British and French activity. During the century Portuguese trading posts were established at various points along the Guinean coast, but few records of their early operations remain. It is known, however, that from sometime in the 1500s slaves and ivory were being sent out via the Rio Nunez estuary.
The seventeenth century was a period of intense commercial competition between the Dutch, British, and French. Much of Portuguese authority along the West African coast disappeared during this time. The Dutch, initially strong, were eliminated from that coast by about the end of the century, and the area from present-day Sierra Leone to north of Senegal was generally under French domination.
The British eventually settled without too much difficulty in Sierra Leone. Then, in about forty years, French imperialism supplanted its rivals in the region by extending its zone from the sea coast towards Fouta-Djallon and Upper Guinea. The indigenous people first knew writing only through the Arabic alphabet: a transcription of the Arabic language in Arabic appeared during the eighteenth century, but this arrival in the writing world was slowed seriously by The invasion of colonial forces.
It was at the beginning of the XIXth century that France clearly showed its intentions on Guinea. The Treaty of Paris of 1814 returned France's West African holdings and established equal French trading rights with the British and the Portuguese. Until the mid-1800s, however, British economic influence was dominant all along the coast of Guinea, and there was considerable sentiment in Sierra Leone for annexation of the coastal zone, but the idea received little support from the home government. In 1818 the British obtained the Iles de Los by treaties with local chiefs, although for other purposes, and continued to hold them until 1904. In 1816 the British had also attempted, unsuccessfully, to establish political and trade ties with the Fouta Djallon.
Thus, following compromise between the rival powers on the one hand and numerous agreements, treaties and conventions concluded with the traditional chiefs, France actually occupied the "Rivières du Sud" from 1875. The territorial limits of the French Guinea were definitively fixed on July 1, 1912, by a Franco-English treaty which defined its borders with respect to the English colony of Sierra Leone. Colonial penetration encountered, everywhere in Guinea, the resistance of the populations. The most fierce opposition was led under the leadership of the Almamy Samory Touré whose troops struggled for eighteen years against the French invaders.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
