I spent about nine days in Guinea, mostly in Conakry and being driven around the countryside. My notes here have a heavier bend toward personal experiences than usual, though I do go into the basics of Guinean history.

As always, Martin Meredith’s Fate of Africa is a major source for me, but I also got a lot out of Tom Burgis’s The Looting Machine: Warlords, Oligarchs, Corporations, Smugglers, and the Theft of Africa’s Wealth. Other assorted sources are linked within.

Overview

Population (2021) – 13.53 million

Population growth rate (2021) – 2.4%

Size – 94,926 square miles (a little smaller than Michigan, a little larger than the United Kingdom)

GDP (nominal, 2021) – $16.1 billion (slightly more than Moldova)

GDP growth rate (2021) – 3.9%

GDP per capita (2021) – $1,189

GDP per capita PPP (2022) – $2,993

Inflation rate range (2019-2023) – 6%-13%

Biggest export – Gold and Bauxite (Guinea may have half of the world’s bauxite reserves)

Median age – 18

Life expectancy (2020) – 59

Founded – 1958

Religion (2020) – 87% Muslim, 9% African Pagan, 4% Christian

Corruption Perceptions Index rank – #147

Heritage Index of Economic Freedom ranking – #129

What the Hell is a “Guinea”?

There’s Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, guinea pigs, guinea fowl, guinea as a slur for Italians, and guinea coins. What’s this “guinea” business? From a bunch of Googling:

“Guinea” (or “guine”) was a generic Portuguese term for dark foreigners. Eventually, this somehow morphed into an anti-Italian slur in America because Italians are kind of dark compared to most other Europeans and tended to be lower class prior to World War II.

When the Portuguese explored the West African coast in the 15th century, they found a bunch of Africans they couldn’t tell apart, so they named the whole region “Guinea” along with the “Gulf of Guinea.” There was also a lot of gold mining in the region, hence the British naming one of their gold coins the “guinea.” And the “guinea fowl” also originates from this region (I saw wild ones) but has been exported around the world.

As Europeans began colonizing the area, a bunch of Guinea colonies emerged –French Guinea, Portuguese Guinea, and Spanish Guinea. These would eventually become Guinea, Guinea-Bissau (as in, the nation of Guinea based at the capital city of Bissau), and Equatorial Guinea.

One thing I can’t find a definitive answer for is why the names turned out this way… like, why isn’t Guinea-Bissau called “Guinea,” and Guinea called “Guinea-Conakry” (as people sometimes informally do in the region). My best guess is that Guinea nabbed the generic name because it was the first of the three states to get independence.

Papua New Guinea is a different story. For one, it’s in South Asia, north of Australia, and obviously nowhere near the original Guinea region. Supposedly, the Spanish explorer who discovered the Papua New Guinea region thought the natives looked like the natives he had previously seen in the Guinea region, so he called the place “New Guinea,” which was later attached to a local regional term to become Papua New Guinea.

Finally, the guinea pig is more of a mystery and no one seems to know for sure where the name came from. There are no guinea pigs in the Guinea region; they’re native to South America. But it’s possible that merchants brought guinea pigs to Europe by-way-of Africa, so some Europeans called them “guinea pigs.” It’s also possible that they were once called “guiana pigs” in reference to the Guiana region of northeast South America, and that somehow got bastardized into “guinea pigs.” Wikipedia also doesn’t know why “guinea pigs” are called “pigs,” so they are clearly just a mysterious animal in general.

On the Ground

In West Africa, generally the coastal countries (Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, etc.) are safer, more stable, and more developed than the inland countries (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, etc.). Guinea is the exception. Here are some highlights from the Wikitravel entry on Guinea:

• “…lawlessness and criminality are widespread…”
• “Anthrax is very common in the herds in some areas, according to a local veterinarian, so don’t eat meat from a non controlled source.”
• “The best insider’s tip for eating fresh vegetables is to soak them in a big bowl of water that has bleach in it.”
• “Business trips to Guinea are strongly discouraged. Business frauds and scams are rampant, and if you are going for a business trip in Guinea, it is strongly recommended that you do not go.”

Generally, even dirt-poor African countries will have at least a few paved major highways. They’ll be nothing special – barely the width of two cars, lots of potholes, maybe some dirt or mud stretches, but they’ll be functional. You can always see these main roads on Google Maps.

This is not the case in Guinea. Those big yellow Google Maps lines are all dirt, or at best, they haven’t been paved for 20 years. Travelling anywhere by car or bus in Africa is a major gamble where travel time can easily 2X or 3X from expectations. But in Guinea, it’s more like 5-10X. At one point, I went from Ganta to Kouremale – from the Guinean border with Liberia to the Guinean border with Mali – a 420 mile trip. In the US, that might take you 6.5 hours, in another part of West Africa it might take you 12+ hours, and Google Maps puts it at 14.5 hours. The trip through Guinea, with multiple stops, took me about 35 hours.

Normally I could sleep through such a long ride, but not in Guinea. I think it might actually have been easier to just drive through the jungle than on those roads. Our van was hurled up-and-down and side-to-side despite the skilled driver slowing to a crawl every 50 yards to get around a massive pothole or through a ditch. I’m used to squeezing into vehicles in Africa, but this was the only ride that literally left me bruised. We drove through one entire night in absolute pitch black – not a single light the entire time aside from a rest stop in the middle-of-nowhere we found at 10 PM.

(Fun fact – Guinea might still be the only country on earth without any telephone lines.)

The cities are scarcely better. Or rather, the city since Guinea really only has one. Conakry, the capital, has over 1.6 million people, making it the largest metropolitan area in a nation of 13.6 million people. The second largest city is Nzerekore, with a population of less than 200,000.

Now that I’ve traveled throughout West Africa, I must strip Lagos of its “Worst Traffic in the World” title. Conakry wins, hands down. I could not think of a worse way to design a city for traffic; it’s a narrow peninsula that stretches about 11 miles into the ocean, and of course, the central downtown region with all the government buildings and banks is at the bottom end. Imagine if Manhattan had only two major roads running south-to-north, no train lines, and every day hundreds of thousands of poor commuters entered and exited the city through its roads on the north end. That is roughly the Conakry experience.

To be fair, this is another instance of infrastructure being built before population growth. Conakry was meant to be a governing outpost for French colonials to rule over a sparsely populated jungle region, not the capital of a country with 2.5% population growth for 40 years. In 1958, Guinea had under 3 million inhabitants.

There’s not a lot else to say about Conakry. It looks like a standard chaotic African metropolis, but a bit less crowded (outside of rush hour). It’s noticeably dark due to a lack of streetlights. Wi-fi is almost impossible to get outside the big French expat bar. There’s a giant mosque in the middle of the city entirely financed by the Saudi Arabian government. There are no Western stores or restaurant chains. There are a decent number of high-rise apartments downtown for the wealthy, but they all look like crumbling concrete husks that could fall down any day. I stayed in an Airbnb in one for $30, and when I told the host that my Wi-Fi wasn’t working, he replied, “you don’t need it.”

Outside of Conakry, Guinea is far nicer. I’d go as far as to say that Guinea might have the best natural beauty of West Africa due to its combination of deep jungles and rolling hills. More so than anywhere else in the region, I felt like I was truly in the middle-of-fucking-nowhere between towns, with horribly maintained dirt roads cutting through jungle valleys. Often, the only civilization to be seen for tens of miles are occasional giant signs with Chinese writing in front of huge walls guarding industrial complexes.

English was hard to come by, but the few people who spoke a little of it were eager to talk. I spoke with a handful of Guineans, but more Sierra Leones, Liberians, and a Nigerian, all of whom were temporarily in Guinea for business except for a Liberian motorcycle taxi driver. The views on Guinea expressed by these foreigners were universal – Guinea has a bad reputation even by the standards of West Africa. Bad infrastructure, untrustworthy government, terrible borders, and an extremely corrupt military. At least the people were nice enough (besides my Airbnb host in Conakry); I want to give a big shout-out to the Conakry taxi driver who spent an hour helping me get a sim card.

Leaving Guinea 1

In defiance of advice from two locals and two foreigners, I decided to leave Guinea for Sierra Leone by road rather than plane. Here is what happened on my trip from Conakry to Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital:

I took a motorcycle taxi from my Airbnb to Conakry’s largest “garage,” which is a big parking lot for long-distance transit. I wandered around, squeezing between the thousands of people and hundreds of vehicles, while repeatedly saying “Sierra Leone” until I found a guy driving there. I paid about $10 and he took me to his car, which as expected, was at least 20 years old and had most of the interior ripped out. I sat down next to a guy in the backseat and an overweight woman sat in the front. There were brother and sister from Sierra Leone and had come to Conakry to sell shoes, and now were making their way home.

In the garage system, vehicles don’t leave at a set time; they leave whenever they get enough customers to fill up. I sat down at 3 PM and then spent four hours waiting, which tied my previous waiting record set in Senegal. The Sierra Leonean guy was talkative and introduced himself as Jonathan. We chatted for at least two hours with him mostly asking me about America. I asked him about his life and he told me that his parents and one brother had died of Ebola, leaving just him and his sister who were running this ad hoc shoe business. They both hated Guinea and French Africa in general, but the economy was so horrible in Sierra Leone that they could make more money here.

By 7 PM, we finally had a full car – me, Jonathan, and two other unrelated Sierra Leoneans in the back; Jonathan’s sister, a Guinean woman, and the driver sat in the front. That’s seven people in a standard car built for five. I was in the far left back behind the driver. All the Sierra Leoneans spoke English and French, but the driver and the other Guinean only spoke French.

After leaving the garage, it took us five hours to drive roughly seven miles to leave Conakry. Most of that time was spent in bumper-to-bumper stand-still traffic on one of the city’s major roads lit only by car headlights. Everyone in the car liberally made use of the vendors who swarmed the road selling soda, dried plantain chips, and knick knacks.

I was not as used to being squeezed into the back of a car for nine hours as the others, so I got a bit antsy and moved around too much. Given my position in the car, I accidentally kneed the driver’s seat in front of me twice. I swear it really wasn’t that hard, but he made a comment after the first time, and he yelled at me in French after the second time.

By that point in my travels, I was beginning to understand a little French, and I heard the driver say something about me being American which made the two Sierra Leoneans next to me laugh but annoyed Jonathan. He translated for me that the driver, in addition to being irritated by me kneeing his seat, was blaming being stuck in traffic on me. I asked how the traffic was possibly my fault. Jonathan explained that I am American, and therefore rich, and thus the driver believed that I should have purchased most of the vehicle’s seats from the start so that we could have left earlier, so we wouldn’t have hit this traffic. I tried to laugh it off but the driver really did look pissed off.

Many long, boring hours passed in traffic, with me mostly silent but the Sierra Leoneans talking. At some point, the conversation between Jonathan and the two other Sierra Leonean guys drifted to Ukraine. All three were in unanimous agreement that Ukraine and the European Union had provoked Russia into the war, and they wished Putin a speedy victory.

We exited Conakry around midnight and began down an awful semi-paved road through the jungle. For thirty minutes we were making good progress, but then we pulled into the first town we encountered. The driver said something in French, and everyone groaned and got out of the car, including me. We stood around for 15 minutes until I asked Jonathan what was happening. He said that the Guinean woman in the front seat had used the vehicle to get here rather than go to Sierra Leone, so our driver wanted to pick up another passenger before moving on.

As another 15 minutes passed, Jonathan, his sister, and the two Sierra Leonean guys got increasingly annoyed as the driver wandered around soliciting potential passengers. Every few minutes, someone would make a comment at the driver, and he would make an angry comment back. Jonathan told me that the driver was very rude “like all French people.”

After another 15 minutes had passed, an English-language revolt was beginning to brew. Jonathan and the other Sierra Leoneans were plotting to confront the driver, demand most of their money back, and go search for another vehicle. Jonathan explained this to me and then recruited me into the scheme. A few minutes later, we had his sister on board too, and we agreed to give the driver another five minutes before the insurrection was launched.

The driver saved himself in the nick of time by picking up a new passenger, a Guinean guy who squeezed into the front with Jonathan’s sister. And so we started into the jungle again at about 1 AM.

Two smooth hours later, we reached what could best be described as an African rest stop about a mile away from the Sierra Leonean border. This was our final destination with the driver, and he let us out to mill around with about 30 Guineans and Sierra Leoneans who either lived or squatted there to sell currency or transport people across the border. One of the Sierra Leoneans in the car helped me trade some Guinean francs for Sierra Leone leones.; he promised me that I got a “good price.”

Then the driver walked up to me and in broken English asked where his “thank you” was. I was certain that I had said “thank you” as I was getting out of the car even though the mood was quite chilly given the near revolt. I pointlessly explained this to the driver in English but he only repeated himself and looked angry. Jonathan came up beside me and began talking in French.

It was hard to follow what happened next. Over the course of fifteen minutes, the driver and Jonathan escalated to ANGRILY SHOUTING at each other as more than a dozen bystanders crowded around us.

As best as I could grasp between my very weak French and one of the Sierra Leoneans translating, the fight started with Jonathan defending my honor against the driver’s rudeness, but evolved into a dispute over whether I could cross the border tonight; the driver said I couldn’t (he would sometimes turn to me and shout in French), but Jonathan believed that I could cross but the driver was purposefully trying to mislead me in some sort of logistical sabotage revenge plot. At one point, Jonathan turned to me in frustration and yelled, “this man is prejudiced against you! He has no idea what he is talking about! Don’t listen to him!” A few Sierra Leoneans jumped in on Jonathan’s side and joined in the shouting at the driver.

(Reminder that all of this was happening after 3 AM in pitch-darkness aside from a handful of extremely bright white lights around the rest stop.)

Eventually the driver yelled that he was getting the police and he stormed away from the mob. At that point I was a little concerned; I didn’t think I had done anything wrong, but if I was in a dispute with a local in one of the most corrupt countries in the world and the police got involved, I had no idea what might happen. Another Sierra Leonean tried to reassure me that everything would be fine, and Jonathan, who I was beginning to view as my heroic defender, kept repeating stuff like, “you’re getting across the border tonight. You’re coming with me. No one is going to stop you.” Etc.

The driver came back ten minutes later with two Guinean cops. Lots of French was thrown around while they were brought up to speed. I just stood there quietly. The cops eyed me suspiciously; I couldn’t imagine they saw a lot of white people here, let alone in the middle of the night. Jonathan began arguing with them just as loudly as with the driver. In the middle of French tirades, he would suddenly switch to English to extol my virtues with phrases like “he’s a good man!” or “this man has done nothing wrong!” like some sort of ad hoc street lawyer. The driver would always argue back.

The cops listened for a while stoically and then asked for my passport. I gave it to them while Jonathan and the driver continued arguing over the nature of my character. Through a Sierra Leonean translator, I answered a few basic questions from the cops (“what are you doing here?” “why do you want to go to Sierra Leone?” “do you have a visa?” Etc.). Jonathan kept interjecting to plead my innocence on all matters and deny whatever the driver was saying.

The cops, the driver, Jonathan, and some other Sierra Leoneans talked for another 15 minutes, and the tone slowly calmed. I hung back with another friendly Sierra Leonean who asked me about America and what I was doing here and the same 50 questions I was asked 100 times per day in West Africa. It was annoying, but this guy was really nice and would end up helping me out a lot. Also, he wore a beanie and looked exactly like Will-I-Am from the Black Eyed Peas.

Finally, the police called me back over, handed me my passport, said some more French stuff, and then… walked away. The mood had anticlimactically died down. The crowd dispersed to the nearby buildings, leaving me with just Jonathan, the driver, and Will-I-Am. Jonathan awkwardly explained to me that they had all had a big misunderstanding. The driver was a huge asshole, and he was prejudiced against me, but he was right that I couldn’t cross into Sierra Leone tonight. The explanation was hard to follow, but I think that the specific border guard they would need to handle tourist visas (which are very rare for this border) wouldn’t be at the border until later in the morning. Apparently the driver had told Jonathan this in a rude way, which caused Jonathan to react badly, which led to the shouting and arguing, and now here we were thirty minutes later.

I thanked the driver for the info, and to his credit, he mostly laughed off the arguing, shook my hand, and finally went back to his car for a long ride back to Conakry.

I reconvened with Jonathan and a few Sierra Leoneans to figure out what to do. Jonathan had been intending to cross right away with his sister on motorcycle taxis, but since I couldn’t cross until later, he vowed to wait with me until 8 AM, and then shepherd me all the way to Freetown.

This was one of those moments I’ll never forget. There are plenty of negative things one can say about Africa, but I really did meet some of the nicest people on earth there. I barely knew Jonathan, and I don’t think I did anything to impress upon him some sort of unbreakable bond between us. Yet he defended me like I was his oldest friend, and he was willing to burn hours more of his life on this already grueling night to see to my final destination.

It was too much. Over his protests, I told him to go on ahead without me; I couldn’t possibly inconvenience him (and his sister) any longer. Will-I-Am interjected and offered to take me the rest of the way. With that assurance, Jonathan gave me a giant handshake and we finally parted ways.

It was almost 4 AM. I had at least four hours to kill. I sat down on a bench in front of the roadside shacks and leaned against a wooden pole to try to sleep. Will-I-Am did the same thing a few benches away more successfully by lying down. The whole roadside rest stop continued buzzing as people swirled around us talking, eating, and smoking. Not a single car stopped by for the rest of the night as far as I could tell. Sleep didn’t come easily to me, but I watched Equalizer 2 playing on a small tv in one of the shacks and eventually drifted off for a few hours.

My alarm woke me at 8 AM. While utterly exhausted, I stumbled over to Will-I-Am in the morning light, and he told me we had to wait a bit longer. At 9 AM we finally began negotiating with one of the local motorcycle taxis to take us to the border. While in that process, one motorcycle guy backed into another and knocked over his bike. A mini argument ensued but ended fairly quickly.

Thirty minutes later I reached the border and left Guinea.

Guinean Politics

In 1958, the fledgling French Empire launched a last-ditch effort to keep its colonies against overwhelming international pressure and internal tumult. The new French colonial system, called the “French Community,” was sort of like a tighter British Commonwealth, where the colonies gained autonomy over most internal affairs while staying under French sovereignty. To gain legitimacy for the French Community, 20 French colonies held elections to decide whether to stay within the French empire or opt for independence. 19 colonies voted to stay with France, only Guinea voted to leave.

This really pissed France off. For centuries, France had taken care of Guinea, given it administrators, built up Conakry, and introduced French culture, all as part of its “civilizing mission” colonial policy to uplift its subject. And then the Guineans ungratefully voted them away!

In response:

“…as a warning to other French-speaking territories, the French pulled out of Guinea over a two-month period, taking everything they could with them. They unscrewed lightbulbs, removed plans for sewage pipelines in Conakry, the capital, and even burned medicines rather than leave them for the Guineans.”

In an instant, nearly all of Guinea’s human capital evaporated. It wasn’t just the colonial administrators either, French businessmen, engineers, and academics fled out of fear for their safety without French protection. An already poor colony was stripped of what little potential it had.

The man left behind to pick up the pieces was Ahmed Sekou Toure, the leader of the Guinean independence campaign and the nation’s first president. Toure was more of a bruiser and less of an intellectual than his fellow neighbor revolutionaries, like the Ivory Coast’s Felix Houphouët-Boigny or Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, but Toure closely echoed the latter’s sentiment with quotes like, “We prefer poverty in liberty to riches in slavery.”

And poverty they would have, as Guinea remains one of the poorest countries on earth to this day. The French deserve their share of the blame but so does Toure. He immediately established a one-party state with himself as de facto dictator. Despite being a Muslim aristocrat, he started reading Marx as a high school student and then threw himself into labor union agitation. For a decade, he was a headache for the French colonial authorities as he led numerous successful strikes and stemmed the flow of sweet African natural resources to the global market.

Once in power, Toure based his economic blueprint on Maoist China. First, he nationalized all major firms, then he seized the holdings of the largest landlords, who were all French, leading to a near complete break of diplomatic relations and the withdrawal of any remnant of French support. Next was more small-scale economic collectivization efforts culminating in a complete ban on private economic activity. Due to the loss of property rights, deteriorating economic conditions, and the repression needed to keep Toure in power, resistance sprang up. Over a million Guineans fled the country during his reign, while thousands were arrested and tortured. Toure even set up a concentration camp in Conakry which held and executed at least 5,000 individuals. The total death toll under his regime is estimated at 50,000.

The closest Toure came to losing power was in 1970 when about 400 Portuguese soldiers and anti-Toure exiles launched an amphibious attack on Conakry intending to overthrow the regime in response to Toure’s continued support for a left wing rebel group fighting to overthrow Portuguese colonial authorities in neighboring Portuguese Guinea (future Guinea-Bissau). The Portuguese forces destroyed a rebel base, freed 26 Portuguese POWs, took out some infrastructure, and were apparently curbstomping any Guinean military forces they came across, but they couldn’t find Toure, so they left after a single night. Toure obviously couldn’t respond militarily, but he launched an internal purge that executed 29 and sentenced dozens of other government and military officials to hard labor.

In 1978, after transforming Guinea into a horrible militant socialist state for 20 years, Toure suddenly announced that he was no longer a Marxist. Likely motivated by the abysmal state of the economy, Toure called up all his old French contacts and began selling resource concessions again. He even loosened a lot of the collectivization efforts and tried to restore some liberalism back to the Guinean economy. It helped a bit, but Guinea remained dirt poor.

In 1984, Toure died of a heart attack. The planned successor within the party was overthrown within months by the military, but this was actually good for Guinea. The junta denounced Toure, further reversed his socialism, released most of the political prisoners, and declared amnesties to coax exiles back, leading to a return of 200,000 Guineans.

But that was the extent of the military regime’s good policies. The new dictator, Lansana Conté, was not exactly an energetic statesman. Guinea settled into a stodgy military state with even more corruption and repression on top of a dead economy. Conté wasn’t quite as systematically brutal as Toure, but he had no qualms about ordering his troops to fire into crowds of bread rioters. Conté focused his efforts on remaining in power, including rigging a bunch of elections and forcing the rubber-stamping legislature to keep extending term limits, leading to a glorious 24 year reign. Of course, Conté and his military lieutenants got rich selling concessions to foreigners; in 2007, Transparency International declared Guinea to be tied for the second most corrupt country on earth.

Like Toure, Conté ruled until his natural death, this time in 2008 and likely of some sort of terminal illness he had hid from the public. Just like last time, his chosen successor was almost immediately overthrown by the military, and Guinea found itself under Moussa Dadis Camara, a largely unknown Islamic military officer who spoke five languages and was supposedly nocturnal. But after two successive multi-decade spanning dictatorships, the Guinean people were finally sick of it. Enormous protests erupted throughout the country, especially in Conakry, calling for real elections.

Camara decided to send his most loyal soldiers to deal with the crowds, the largest of which was congregating in Conakry’s main soccer stadium. Some excerpts from a New York Times article:

“Soldiers, many from the Presidential Guard, burst into the stadium and fired at close range on the thousands of people who had gathered there in a carnival-like atmosphere, dancing and praying. Once the troops ran out of ammunition, they attacked the unarmed civilians with daggers, bayonets, bludgeons and even catapults, the report said. People scattered in every direction, and those who paused to help the wounded were gunned down.

The panic caused some people to suffocate in the crowds streaming for the exits, with the lack of oxygen exacerbated by tear gas. Some victims were trampled to death or electrocuted when they tried to climb over the fences; soldiers had attached electrical lines that they had downed to the metal fences, according to the report.

Women were a particular target. Soldiers shoved a gun inside one victim of a gang rape and pulled the trigger, killing her, the report said. Another had her throat slit when she lifted her blindfold. At least four women were abducted and held for days as sex slaves, the report said; they were drugged and photographed while being assaulted.”

“The attacks left at least 156 people dead or missing and about 109 women raped or sexually abused… Because some of the victims were found in mass graves, it is likely that the death toll was far higher, the report stated.”

Probably as a result of the ensuing turmoil and international backlash, one of Camara’s top lieutenants tried to assassinate him a few months later (there’s also speculation that the lieutenant believed Camara was going to frame him for the stadium massacre). Camara’s driver and bodyguard were killed, but Camara survived a gunshot to the head and was flown to Morocco for medical care. With his back to the wall, Camara parlayed with other high-ranking regime officials and foreign agents, and agreed to relinquish power to a transitional government for six months before elections would be held. Camara then chilled out in Burkina Faso in exile for over a decade, and converted to Catholicism. In 2022, Camara was arrested and extradited back to Guinea where he currently faces charges for the 2009 stadium massacre.

In 2010, Alpha Conde (cool name) became the first democratically elected leader of Guinea. He was 72 years old and had never held political office, but Conde had plenty of street cred. He had been a longtime opposition leader who was arrested in 1992 for challenging the previous long-standing dictator Lansana Conté (don’t confuse “Conde” with “Conté”) in one of his bullshit elections. Conde was held all the way until 2001 when he was pardoned on the terms that he no longer participate in politics. He held the promise until the death of Conté, at which point Conde awkwardly aligned himself with Camara and tried to encourage a purge of Conté supporters in the government. Despite the tarnishing of Camara’s reputation after the stadium massacre, Conde emerged victorious in the elections by sheer reputation and organizational ability.

As the first democratically-elected leader of Guinea, Conde declared himself the “Mandela and Obama of Guinea,” and set out a platform of anti-corruption and economic development. With ample international support, he took on George Soros and Tony Blair as advisors, the former of whom would engage his nonprofit apparatus to both establish a regulatory framework for Guinea’s mining and agricultural revival, and connect Guinea with businessmen eager to extract Guinea’s ample resources. However, not all within Guinea were so sanguine about the new president, and in 2011 Conde survived an RPG assassination attempt on his home.

Tom Burgis (author of The Looting Machine) personally interviewed Conde, and framed him as an earnest reformer who fought an impossibly uphill battle. Initially, Conde did a decent job drumming up early economic activity based on Guinea’s ample untapped resources, but eventually nearly all the new wealth was frittered away via corruption. Or at least that’s the common consensus; there isn’t a ton of information about Guinea’s economic performance out there, but the vast majority of Guineans remain extremely impoverished despite a significant uptick in general economic output over the previous decade. Nevertheless, Conde won reelection in 2014 despite some pretty blatant indicators of fraud. Later on, documentation revealed that Conde may have won his first election with covert help from shadowy international mining interests.

After the luster wore off Conde and the international community began to see him as just another generic African dictator, Western companies became reluctant to deal with him, if not for moral reasons, then at least for the practical reason that he couldn’t be trusted and might steal all their equipment at any time. Increasingly, Conde turned in a new direction to fulfill Guinea’s economic potential (and fill his pockets)… the Chinese:

“By 2011, Condé was engaged in negotiations with China over the development of a bauxite mine, the construction of an alumina refinery, a deep-water port, and a coal-fired power plant. By 2014, the Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto mining company and Chinalco, the Chinese state-owned mining company, had signed a $20 billion deal to mine Guinea’s iron ore. By 2016, Chinalco had bought out Rio Tinto, leaving it in control of the project. In 2017, China agreed to loan Guinea $20 billion over almost 20 years in exchange for concessions on bauxite. By 2020, China had huge mining interests in Guinea’s iron ore and bauxite, of which China is the world’s top producer.”

In return for all this investment being granted without questions about labor regulations or human rights records or election fraud, China got diplomatic support in the region and resources, including 50% of China’s annual bauxite requirements, a huge figure for the largest industrial power on earth.

Guinea was stable-ish throughout Conde’s 11 years in power, but the opposition steadily grew, with periodic outbursts of strikes and protests turning into riots. The largest bout was in late 2019 and early 2020, with tens of thousands of Guineans across the country demanding an end to Conde’s regime as Guinea’s ineffectual legislature debated a bunch of reforms pushed by Conde that, shockingly, suggested weakening term limits on his presidency just in time for him to run again in 2020. Conde deployed all the police and military forces he could rely on, and around 800 protesters were killed. After the elections, in which Conde obviously won again, another 27 protesters were killed.

In 2020 and 2021, Conde’s regime limped on but the country wasn’t doing so hot. Despite price controls, the prices of basic goods were skyrocketing, and the state was approaching bankruptcy. As a last-ditch effort, Conde’s regime removed some price controls, slashed salaries for government employees, and raised taxes. All these measures were needed in the long run, but in the short run, they crashed an already dire economy. Protests became chronic, and Conde only intensified his repression.

Current Regime

In September 2021, Alpha Conde was overthrown in a coup by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya. And oh boy does he want you to know it; here are some of pictures from Conakry:

I’ve spent a lot of time reading about African dictators this year and Doumbouya is a particularly interesting one. He’s got a mysterious vibe… little is known about him, but he seems to have done a (some would say suspiciously) good job of taking over Guinea and holding on to power. As of writing this, Doumbouya is only 43, making him the second youngest head-of-state in Africa behind fellow military coup leader, Mali’s Colonel Assimi Goita (age 42).

What is supposedly known about Doumbouya is that he was born in Guinea in the same region and as part of the same ethnic group as Conde. He has a Master’s degree in “defense and industrial dynamics” from the Universite Paris-Pantheon-Assas. Even more interestingly, Doumbouya received military training in France, Israel, Senegal, and Gabon, and spent 15 years in the French Foreign Legion, the famed elite military unit comprised entirely of foreigners, where he supposedly served in Afghanistan, the Ivory Coast, Djibouti, the Central African Republic, Israel, Cyprus, the United Kingdom, and Guinea. Via the French Foreign Legion, Doumbouya is a French citizen.

As almost certainly the most well-trained and experienced military individual in all of Guinea, Conde invited Doumbouya back to Guinea in 2018 after his long military absence to form the Special Forces Group (SFG), a sort of praetorian guard for the presidency. In retrospect, this was not a great decision for obvious reasons.

In September 2021, Doumbouya and about 100 of his SFG were undergoing a training program run by a dozen American Green Berets. Details are understandably sparse, but Doumbouya and the SFG soldiers “slipped away” on a “down day” and drove four hours to the presidential palace to launch their coup. In the words of the New York Times:

“…although numerous U.S.-trained officers have seized power in their countries — most notably, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt — this is believed to be the first time one has done so in the middle of an American military course.”

The coup was mostly peaceful, though there are reports of three presidential guards being killed in the SFG’s assault on the presidential palace. Conde surrendered, was arrested, and has been in custody ever since. To show the world that Conde wasn’t murdered, Doumbouya’s new government published this picture:

Shortly after taking power, Doumbouya gave a speech (in French) while absolutely nailing the African dictator aesthetic:

Here and elsewhere, Doumbouya claimed he had to take power from Conde to save Guinea from corruption, mismanagement, and a slide into authoritarianism, and all the other generic coup bullshit. He cited Ghana’s Jerry Rawlings (of whom I’m a fan) as an influence with the Rawlings quote:

“If the people are crushed by their own elites, it is up to the army to give the people their freedom.”

Though generally a man of few words, Doumbouya has some memorable quotes of his own, like:

“We don’t need to rape Guinea any more, we just need to make love to her.” 

Others have claimed another cause of the coup (or maybe the real cause) was that Doumbouya’s SFG had been marginalized by Conde due to his understandable fears of getting couped by them. Supposedly, the SFG had been deprived of equipment and had been kicked out of the capital for a new base far outside the city.

The coup was wildly celebrated within Guinea as evidenced by mobs of supporters in the streets of Conakry, but it was internationally condemned. ECOWAS (the rough equivalent of a West African European Union) and the African Union immediately suspended Guinea from their memberships, demanded the release of Conde, and proposed setting up a meeting to settle the leadership matter Constitutionally. Doumbouya refused, but in May 2022, he declared that he would hold elections in 39 months, and ECOWAS officially approved of the plan. The coup was also condemned by the United Nations, the United States, France, and much of the rest of the world, but one notably adamant condemner was China; the long-standing proponent of “do whatever you want within your own borders” diplomacy was conspicuously upset by the removal of one of its geopolitical assets.

It turned out that China didn’t have anything to worry about. As far as I can tell, Doumbouya hasn’t done much since taking power on a policy level, and has left Chinese infrastructure and mining operations alone. Doumbouya even exempted mining facilities from his post-coup curfews. Mostly he talks about “re-founding of the state,” and vague anti-corruption policies. At one point, he met with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, who is generally considered one of the best post-independence African leaders, and Doumbouya pledged to forge a similar path for Guinea, but not much has come of it.

Doumbouya has two other notable concrete policies.

First, say what you will about him, but he’s not a hypocrite. Doumbouya has spoken in support of his fellow coup leaders in the increasingly coup-ful West Africa: Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon have all had coups since 2021. ECOWAS, the ostensible regional power block, has condemned one-after-another and keeps kicking couped countries out of its membership and demanding all members levy sanctions against the coup states (to varying degrees). Guinea has been suspended from ECOWAS since Doumbouya’s coup and Doumbouya refused to go along with ECOWAS’s attempts at political and economic marginalization of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger (Gabon was never a member of ECOWAS). He could probably pick up some easy political points by siding with ECOWAS, but instead Doumbouya has actually established some flimsy military treaties with his new coup buddies. More recently, Doumbouya made a somewhat common African argument in the UN that Western-style democratic governance is inherently unsuited to Africa.

Second, Doumbouya is attempting the seemingly impossible dream of mining iron in Guinea. Since the mid-2000s, it has been known that the designated Simandou mine region in eastern Guinea probably contains the largest iron ore reserves on earth. The problem is that the mining site is in the middle of some of the most remote jungles in Africa and isn’t particularly close to the coast, so early estimates say that laying down just the basic mining infrastructure will cost at least $20 billion.

As described in The Looting Machine, companies from Brazil, Australia, and China have duked it out for mining rights in Simandou for almost 20 years with various forms of legal and illegal bribery (like giving tens of millions of dollars to one of the dictator’s fourth wives). In the best of circumstances, securing such a massive concession would be extraordinarily complicated, but Guinea has never been a stable country to begin with, and since the mid-2000s, it has seen the death of a long-standing dictator, the exile of another brief dictator, the overthrow of a long-standing democratically-elected quasi-dictator, and now the reign of another dictator who could be sticking around for a while.

Various deals have been made between various companies and dictators, but they always fell through. For instance, in 2009, Chinalco offered an extremely generous $7 billion (around the equivalent of Guinea’s GDP at the time) to take a dominant share of Simandou, with a $100 million up-front bonus. President Moussa Dadis Camara was thrilled with the deal and the prospects it offered his fledgling regime, and he practically broke his hand signing it. 12 days later, Camara’s militia marched into a stadium in Conakry and slaughtered over 150 people, and within a few months, Camara was overthrown, and the deal fell apart.

In other words, Simadou has not produced an ounce of iron for Guinea or anyone. But President Doumbouya wants to finally change that; in March 2023, the Guinean government hammered out a deal with… almost everyone. An Australian company, two Chinese companies, and a Guinean company optimistically named the “Winning Consortium Simandou” signed a deal to proceed with building the gargantuan jungle-spanning mining infrastructure. If this thing ever actually gets going, Guinea could become the largest per capita iron producing country on earth.

But maybe that’s giving Doumbouya too much credit. He doesn’t strike me as a particularly dynamic leader outside of military operations, and certainly doesn’t come off as benevolent. When I was in Guinea, there was an air of unease and repression. It wasn’t just the omnipresent giant photos of a scowling dictator all over Conakry; multiple people told me to be careful in certain parts of the city and especially when dealing with the military and police. On a short boat ride off the coast of Conakry, the entire boat (a dozen people) freaked out when I took a picture near the shore because there was a naval base nearby. My guide told me it wouldn’t have been a problem a few years ago, but the military would even punish a tourist for taking photos now.

So what should we make of Mamady Doumbouya?

One angle I heard a few times in Guinea was conspiratorial; the theories write themselves:

• A mysterious officer who used to be in the French Foreign Legion and is a French citizen just took over a former French colony and seems to be holding power with ease. He’s obviously a French stooge deployed to bring a long-errant colony back into the French sphere.
• A mysterious officer launched his coup in the middle of an American special forces training program against a Chinese-aligned third world dictator. He’s obviously an American stooge undermining a key economic base for China.
• A mysterious officer trained in the West takes over an African country by coup, gets a bunch of international condemnations, but then makes a vague gesture at holding elections in three years, and the international community forgets about him. Meanwhile, similar coup regimes in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso are facing enormous pressure from abroad and have been diplomatically isolated by everyone but Russia and China. The only difference between Guinea and the others: Guinea isn’t anti-Western. Doumbouya is some sort of pro-Western stooge put in power to keep a part of West Africa in imperialist hands.
• And many more.

After reading about this guy for a few weeks, I have another possible angle: he’s mostly bullshit.

Everything I’m writing here is based on various articles across the web, but it’s funny how so little is known about Doumbouya, or African dictators in general. Like, the claim that Doumbouya was motivated to launch his coup due to a lack of resources for his SFG comes from either unnamed sources or a single speech where he bitched about French military trainers getting ammunition that his squad couldn’t get.

Even the reports about Doumbouya’s military record come from “a biography circulated by Guinea intelligence officials” after he took power. It also says stuff like, Doumbouya is “able to identify and defuse risky situations by remaining calm in the face of a hostile environment and extreme pressure.” That sure sounds like something a megalomaniac African dictator would write about himself.

In other words, take this entire section with a big grain of salt. Doumbouya could just be another random African military officer who was a little smarter and more ambitious than the others, and struck at the right time, and now finds himself running a country. Those medals on his chest could be meaningless and he could just be another generic thug.

Nevertheless, Doumbouya is an interesting figure. But the one Guinean who might be more interesting that Mamady Doumbouya is his wife:

There’s not much known about Mamady Doumbouya, but there’s even less known about Lauriane Doumbouya except that she’s from southern France, she’s a cop, she’s a former member of the Republican Guard (an elite policing unit sort of like the American Secret Service), and she’s apparently 5’9 based on her photos with the president. She probably met Mamady while he was in the French Foreign Legion, which gives 45 vacation days per year (typically French bullshit). It’s not clear whether she lives in Guinea, France, or both. She was at her husband’s presidential inauguration, but hasn’t made many other public appearances yet, though here she is at the “Residence of the Contestants of Miss GUINEE 2023.” Also, according to The Times, professional Russian trolls are spreading rumors that she used to sleep with French President Emmanuel Macron.

I have a feeling there is going to be an awesome movie about her life someday.

Leaving Guinea 2

I loved Guinea so much that I returned a second time during my trip. Or rather, flights from Liberia to Mali are extremely expensive, so I made the ill-fated decision to over-land transit from Yekepa to Bamako across Guinea without stopping.

I’ll recount a very truncated summary of the trip until things got interesting at the Malian border:

• Motorcycle taxi from Yekepa to the Liberian-Guinean border went fine. No issues exiting Liberia.
• Hired a different motorcycle taxi to get me from the Liberian border checkpoint to the Guinean border checkpoint. Motorcycle broke down after a mile, so we had to walk the last half mile.
• Getting into Guinea was a little challenging because of my tourist visa. Usually, visas are stamps or pieces of paper glued into a passport, but Guinea gave me a separate piece of paper that I just shoved into my small backpack. Over the course of 2 months, it had gotten steadily more beaten up and eventually nearly tore in half. All of the info was still visible, but it did feel a bit ridiculous handing the border guards a nearly torn-in-half piece of paper. The one sort of English-speaking border guard asked what happened to it and I politely explained that I was backpacking across West Africa and it just got beat up and I was sorry. He gave me a look but let me through.
• After the Guinean guard post, I took a new motorcycle taxi to the town of Lola.
• At Lola, I went to a garage and found a car going to Nzerekore. Having traveled in West Africa for almost three months, I was tired enough to buy two front seats so I didn’t have to squeeze in. The driver was grateful.
• Rough road to Nzerekore but beautiful jungle scenery.
• At Nzerekore, I went to another garage to try to get a car to Kankan, but ended up getting a double-car package to take me to Siguiri, which is closer to the Malian border.
• I waited for 2.5 hours for the Kankan car to fill up. While sitting in the garage, a mentally ill man kept asking me for money with his hand outstretched. I’d tell him to go away or ignore him, but he would repeatedly hang around for 10+ minutes at a time with his hand out, then walk away, then return 15 minutes later. Some onlookers found this quite funny.
• Road to Kankan was the worst I have ever seen in West Africa. Night fell and we went by headlight on pitch-black jungle roads where we typically hovered around 10 MPH. Almost impossible to sleep with the shaking and rocking and general horrible discomfort of the drive.
• After some conversation, Liberian guy in the car vowed to get me to Mali. Something like this happened in about 25% of my West African car rides.
• Stopped at a rest stop around 10 PM in the middle-of-nowhere. I hadn’t eaten in 10 hours so I bought a surprisingly good baguette. Got mobbed by children who wanted to see a white man.
• Arrived in Kankan at 1 AM. I wasn’t sure whether to find a hotel or just sleep on another bench. I was leaning toward the latter since garages tend to open early, but the garage was completely deserted and sleeping in the open didn’t seem safe. Two passengers left my van, but the other four and the driver made an impromptu plan to sleep overnight in the car. I asked if I could too and they let me.
• One of the guys who left was the Liberian who vowed to get me to Mali (I have no idea why he made the vow if he was leaving before the border). He handed off his escort duties to one of the people staying in the car, a Guinean woman who didn’t speak English, but the Liberian guy said she would get me there.
• I got the front seat all to myself for sleeping, but the lady behind me put her feet right next to my head all night.
• Woke up after an hour with my arms completely covered in bug bites. So I rolled down my sleeves despite the heat to protect myself. Later learned that I got a spider bite that night; deep mark remained on my arm for three months, I still have a faint scar five months later.
• Woke up at 6 AM, got maybe three hours of sleep.
• Followed Guinean guardian lady around garage. Ended up getting into an argument with a local driver over whether my ticket should get me to Siguiri. My Guinean guardian won the argument and my seat was secured.
• Waited in the Kankan garage for three hours. At one point, I wandered off and bought some cashews (so damn cheap in West Africa), water, and a local energy drink (couldn’t believe I found sugar-free out here). My Guinean guardian got mad at me for not telling her that I was getting stuff. I offered her some cashews, she declined.
• 5 hour ride from Kankan to Siguiri. My arm was fucking roasting in the sun because I had to stick it outside the front-seat window the whole time to fit next to another passenger.
• Arrived in Siguiri at 12:30 PM. My Guinean guardian lady helped me find a car to Bamako (my final destination), but she wasn’t going there, so she dumped me off with a new guardian, a large Liberian woman, who told me in English that she would get me to Mali. She seemed grumpy despite munching on chocolate chip cookies.
• Me, new guardian, and a Guinean guy sat in a roasting car for two hours waiting for more people to come so the car would leave. Eventually, we get bored enough to pool our money to buy extra seats between us. After getting one more passenger, the drive began. The guardian was the only one besides me who spoke English.

The drive to the Guinea-Mali border was smooth but I was nervous. I had only gotten my Mali tourist visa a few days ago and I was repeatedly told by my contact in Mali that given the paranoid nature of the new military government and the whiteness of my skin, my rejection at the border was a distinct possibility. I just had to go to the border and take my shot. But first, I had to leave Guinea.

Like the vast majority of checkpoints on land borders in West Africa, the Guinean outpost had a ramshackle appearance. There were just a few wooden huts patrolled by maybe half a dozen guys in military uniforms carrying assault rifles. They looked bored and many smoked.

I approached a guard standing outside one of the huts and did my best to indicate that I was a tourist. He didn’t speak English. I took out my tourist visa, the one that was nearly ripped in half. He gave it a strange look, grabbed it, walked inside, and motioned for me to follow.

I waited in the main room of the hut for ten minutes while guards talked in French in other rooms. The rest of the people in my car, all Africans, quickly went through the border check and returned to the car to wait for me, except my guardian who stood with me in the hut in case I needed a translator. I felt bad, but this was standard for West African travel; I was always at least a bit of a hassle for drivers.

Eventually my guardian and I were brought into another room, the office of the head guard. He sat behind a desk in a military uniform that was a bit more elaborate than the others, which clashed with the almost entirely blank concrete walls and dusty floor. Another guard walked into the room and leaned against the desk.

The head guard spoke to me sternly. My guardian translated. He asked who I was, where I was from, what I had been doing in Guinea, why I was going to Mali, etc. I answered politely, my guardian translated. The head guard never followed up on anything I said or reacted at all. He sat there with a stony face and kept throwing out more questions.

This went on for five minutes. Then the head guard picked up my nearly torn-in-half visa. He began to speak. His eyes squinted and he looked angry. For minutes I sat there listening to uninterrupted French, not getting a word.

My guardian began to translate parts in whispers while the head guard continued to talk. The gist of the comments was that I had insulted the nation of Guinea. It was offensive and disgraceful that my visa (a single sheet of paper given to me by the Guinea embassy in Dakar) was torn and beat up. He explained that I was from America, a nation well known for its laws and order, and therefore I should know better than to tear up a visa.

During a pause in the verbal assault, I asked my guardian to translate for me as I said something like, “I have been backpacking through West Africa for two months. All of my belongings are in two well-worn bags. I’ve stayed in numerous cheap guesthouses and even camped a few nights. The Guinea visa was in my backpack and got bent and torn along the way. It was an accident.”

My guardian translated this to the head guard. He listened and then immediately went back to stern French. I waited another minute until he stopped. My guardian translated some of it to me and it was the same stuff about me being disrespectful and how I should know better, with some new insults about how I was a rich American and had no excuses.

I tried a slightly different tact, something like: “I have greatly enjoyed traveling around West Africa and seeing Guinea. It is a beautiful country and I loved staying in Conakry for a week (*blatant lie*). I swear I meant no disrespect. The torn visa was an honest accident.”

More translating back-and-forth. More condemnations of my character and failed Americaness. This went on for maybe ten minutes. At one point, the head guard growled at me: “What would happen to someone who did this in America? What if a tourist brought a torn visa to the American border?”

I didn’t bother arguing the finer points of the prompt, and instead offered to go get a new version of the visa paper printed.

The head guard fired back, “where will you get it printed?” and held his hands up in disbelief.

Granted, we were in rural Guinea, but we had just passed a mini-town that seemed to service border traffic. There’s usually at least one telecom store in places like that which might have a printer. Two nights ago, I had been in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Liberia and there was a guy who made money renting out his printer.

Again, I told this to the head guard through translation in a nice way. Again, he was flabbergasted and offended at my suggestion and went back to expressing outrage for my disrespect toward Guinea.

A few minutes later, the highly irate driver of my car came in to ask what the fuck was going on. He and the rest of the passengers had been waiting for me and my guardian for at least 20 minutes. I didn’t need a translator for what happened next. The driver’s anger was quickly muted as he saw me being interrogated by two scary military guys. The driver said something, and then the head guard held up my torn visa and said something like, “look what this American did.” The driver’s face tightened up and anger came to his eyes as if he had just witnessed me defecating on a Guinean flag. He responded to the head guard with a few comments expressing shame at how I had eternally insulted the Guinean people because this little fucking piece of paper got torn over the course of two months of backpacking.

I was starting to get worried. Guinea has never been a land of laws, and at this moment it was under the control of a military dictator who had taken power in a coup less than two years ago. Would these border guards detain me on trumped up charges? I’m sure they could. But would they? Was it in their interest? Would their commanding officer get pissed off for potentially starting an international incident? Or would it be some sort of powerplay for the new government to flex its muscles by arresting an American? I had no clue.

The driver then began talking to my guardian, with the gist being that the driver was super angry about being stuck here and he was going to leave without us in a few minutes. My guardian tried to convince him to stay, but he refused. The two escalated to near shouting. The two guards watched disapprovingly. The driver kept threatening to leave, and strongly suggested that she leave me behind, and my guardian resorted to offering him money to stay and wait for me. The driver left after a final outburst and the situation was unresolved; I had no idea whether the car would be waiting for me if I managed to get out of here.

I was still keeping my cool. I expressed no anger, but I also tried not to show weakness. Through my words and expressions, I maintained that I was moderately sorry but I hadn’t done anything wrong, let alone illegal. Then an illegal thought occurred to me.

They’re looking for a bribe. I was annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but it was hard to think with the guards staring me down. I was about to ask my guardian how much to offer (in English they wouldn’t understand), but then I thought that offering a bribe might be the worst thing I could do. What if they took that as a sign of weakness and asked for an exorbitant bribe? What if they capitalized on my bribe attempt and arrested me for real? What if, god forbid, these were rare, honest, uncorrupt, weirdly patriotic African soldiers who really would arrest me for a crime? How long would they hold me? Would it make the international news? Would I be exchanged for a Russian spy?

So rather than outright offer a bribe, I asked through my translator something like, “ok, so what should I do now?”

A minute later, my translator told me that they were asking for money. They didn’t call it a bribe, but nor did they even attempt to give a pretense for how my payment would abrogate whatever horrible crime I had committed. I asked my guardian how much money they wanted. She talked to them for another few minutes; the head guard continued speaking sternly, but my guardian began raising her voice and arguing back. Eventually, she stopped, turned to me, and said that they originally wanted $1,000, but she got them down to $150.

I was relieved. There was a way out of this situation, and it wouldn’t be too expensive. The problem now was that, of course, they only wanted American money, not that I had 1.3 million Guinean francs on me. But I wasn’t sure if I had enough USD either.

I checked my small backpack and found I still had some USD. I had come from Liberia which uses both their local Liberian dollars and USD as official currencies, with the local money mostly used for petty cash and USD for big transactions. I had heard that ATMs were especially rare in Mali, so I went to an ATM in a fancy hotel in Monrovia (Liberia’s capital) to take a few hundred USD.

But then I remembered that I had unexpectedly spent most of the cash over the week, and I only had $60 left in the form of three $20 bills left. I checked my wallet to see if I had any other USD, and to my relief, there was a $100 bill I had brought with me from America. I had $160, so I could pay the bribe, but I figured I was not getting the $10 in change that I was entitled to.

I placed the money on the desk and I probably would have found what happened next to be funny if I wasn’t scared of being thrown in Guinean jail. The head guard had been excoriating me for thirty minutes because my Guinea visa was torn in half and beat up, and now I handed him $160, and the three $20 bills were the rattiest, filthiest dollar bills you have ever seen in your entire life. One even had a tear in it.

The head guard immediately threw up his hands and began shouting. He picked up the bills, looked at them closely, and ranted in French. Even my guardian turned to me and said, “what is wrong with you!? Why are you so messy!? Why do you tear everything!?”

I swear to god, this time it really wasn’t my fault at all. This is just what USD in Liberia looks like. They literally came out of the Liberian ATM looking like that.

I tried to explain all this to the head guard through the translator. He was annoyed, but he had money in his hands so he let it go. I waited through another ten minutes of admonishments which went largely untranslated. By this point I was more worried that the driver had not only left me behind, but also my poor guardian who had heroically stayed to defend me.

Finally, my guardian and I were let go. The head guard watched as we got up and left the room with a stony expression. We walked outside the guard post hut, and I saw that our vehicle was still there. I felt more relief, less so for my own convenience, and more so for not ruining the guardian’s whole day.

We walked 20 paces, and then we heard another guard shout at us from the hut. We stopped and turned around. My guardian listened as the guy shouted again. Then she told me that I needed to be searched for drugs.

As we trudged back toward the hut, to a table under a little wooden thatched roof outside, my mind once again ran through the worst-case scenarios. I had no drugs on me, nor had I ingested anything illegal while in Africa, not even the weed that every single tour guide on this continent seems to have. But, yet again, I had no idea what these military guys in this military regime might do to a random white tourist. Maybe they would plant something on me. Maybe they would extort more bribes from me. Maybe they would use me as an example of how the new government was valiantly clamping down on the West African drug trade.

A new guard was tasked with searching me for drugs. Through translation, I was told to put my two backpacks on the table, to open them, and to take everything out. He leafed through my clothes, some books, etc. He picked up a little wooden elephant I had bought it in Guinea-Bissau, and knocked it against the table, presumably checking to see if it was hollow. Eventually, he zeroed in on my zip lock bag that contained my toothbrush, sunscreen, and a few medications. He suspiciously took out every item and examined it. He asked me about every single one. What is it? Where did I get it? What does it do? Where is your prescription? In one of the many experiences I never thought I’d have in my life, I had to explain to a military guy at a Guinean checkpoint that cetirizine was a harmless antihistamine sold over-the-counter across the world, so no, I do not have a prescription for it.

The drug guard gave up and told me I was free to go. I guessed that they had done the drug search either out of revenge for my alleged transgressions against the honor of Guinea, or just to take a shot at a massive payday for finding some drugs on me. I put every article of clothing and miscellaneous item in my possession back into the two bags and walked with my guardian back to the car. The driver was utterly enraged. He spouted off angry somethings in French which my guardian didn’t bother translating. The other passengers looked annoyed and despondent, but they didn’t say anything. The driver put my big bag on top of the car and tied it into place, and then we all piled in, ready to finally set off for the Malian border.

We heard a shout in French. It was one of the guards back at the hut. My guardian told me that they wanted me to come back, again. The driver looked like he was ready to murder us.

My guardian and I walked back to the hut, through the main room, and once more to the office where the head guard sat behind the desk and another guard leaned on the table. The head guard held the $100 bill I had given him. He twirled it in his hand while he spoke for a minute in his usual stern tone to my guardian.

My guardian translated to me: “he thinks the $100 bill is fake.”

I figured it was remotely plausible that an American dollar bill I got in Africa was counterfeit. But this bill wasn’t from Africa; I had brought it from home. Unlike the Liberian bills, it was relatively fresh and crisp. I had no idea what made him think it was fake. Was it another ploy? More fake outrage? Another bribe attempt?

The head guard fiddled with the $100 bill some more. He held it up to the light and looked through it. He closely examined parts of it. He handed it to the other guard who did all the same exact things. My guardian’s attitude up until this point was calm even though she fully knew I was being unjustly extorted. But now she got annoyed. She began shouting in French that the counterfeit accusation was absurd and that I had done nothing wrong. The two guards just kept looking over the bill.

The head guard began to question me again, but this time more intensely, as if he was trying to fish out my secret criminal background. He asked me, for the third time, why I was in Guinea. I told him I was travelling around West Africa. Looking extremely suspicious, he asked why. I told him I wanted to see another part of the world. Looking extremely, extremely suspicious, he asked why this part of the world. I tried my best to explain that West Africa is largely unknown to Americans and I wanted to go somewhere unique. He seemed to have trouble processing this white, Western, upper middle-class, privileged bullshit. My guardian jumped in to argue my innocence.

After five more minutes of back-and-forth while I sat silently, the guards came up with a solution: I would travel with them down the road toward the Malian border where there were a bunch of money changers. If the money changers said the $100 bill was real, I was free to go. If they said it wasn’t real, I was not.

We left the hut yet again, went back to the car yet again, and avoided the gaze of the driver who looked like he was about to murder everyone at the checkpoint. I was placed on the back of a motorbike with the guard who had been leaning against the desk. My guardian took a motorbike with another guard while the head guard waited back at the hut. Our car with the furious driver drove alongside us.

The trip to the money changers was uneventful. They confirmed the $100 was real and the two guards instantly lost interest in us. My guardian and I got back in the car and continued to the Malian border. In the calm, I took the opportunity to pledge my eternal gratitude to this woman who had truly stuck her neck out for me and was absolutely amazing and I love her. She politely accepted my thanks, said she was pissed off at the Guinean guards for hassling me, and ranted about how much she hated Guinea in general (in English so the Guineans in the car couldn’t understand).

We talked over the situation, and she told me that I handled it well. Indeed, you should strike a balance between being too hostile and too apologetic; either can backfire. I told her that I was considering offering a bribe before they brought it up, and she said that would have been a massive mistake. They would have responded with all the indignation and outrage they could possibly muster, and then would have demanded a 10X bribe that even she couldn’t have bargained down.

After all that, I still dreaded crossing the Malian border, which I had been warned about for weeks. Yet nothing went wrong, I crossed without a hitch.

Miscellaneous

• I saw more American flags in Guinea than any other West African country, often flying on motorized rickshaws or motorcycle taxis.
• I had a guide to explore this island off the coast of Conakry, and like so many other guides I had in West Africa, he left me alone for an hour to smoke pot. To his credit, he offered me some.
• Guinea may not be a developed country, but it has among the world’s most developed chimpanzees: “For the first time, chimpanzees have been seen using tools to chop up and reduce food into smaller bite-sized portions.”
• Conakry has a cool statue of an elephant kicking a soccer ball: