Today we’re staying in North Africa and crossing the border from Guinea to Guinea-Bissau. Guinea-Bissau is a relatively unknown country that borders Guinea to the south and Senegal to the north.
Guinea-Bissau is a tiny country, only a touch larger than Belgium. Before its independence in 1973 Guinea-Bissau was known as Portuguese Guinea, but Bissau, the name of the country’s capital city was added to the country's name to prevent confusion with Guinea, the former French colony.
Despite Portuguese being the official language of Guinea-Bissau, only about 3% of the population speaks it as their first language, the majority of Bissau-Guineans prefer to speak Guinea-Bissau Creole.
Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest countries in the world. The country also languishes towards the bottom of the Human Development Index and many Bissau-Guineans still struggle with food security. This is largely down to decades of poor governance and high levels of corruption. The political turmoil has been so unrelenting that analysts do not even agree on exactly how many coups there have been throughout Guinea-Bissau’s 47 years of independence.
More recently Guinea-Bissau has fallen into the role of Africa’s “narco-state”. Drugs are smuggled from South America to Guinea-Bissau and then re-routed to Europe.
Last year, for one day Guinea-Bissau had two presidents because of a stand-off before one of the presidents eventually stepped down.
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