GUINEA, the general name applied to part of the western coast region of equatorial Africa, and also to the gulf formed by the great bend of the coast line eastward and then south ward. In the widest acceptation of the term, the Guinea coast may be said to extend from 13° N. to 16° S., from the neighbour hood of the Gambia to Cape Negro. Southern or Lower Guinea comprises the coasts of Gabun and Loango, the Congo and Angola, and Northern or Upper Guinea stretches from the river Casamance to and inclusive of the Niger delta, the Cameroons occupying a middle position. In a narrower use, Guinea is the coast only from Cape Palmas to the Gabun estuary. Originally, however, Guinea was supposed to begin as far north as Cape Nun, opposite the Canary Islands, and Gomes Azurara, a Portuguese historian of the 15th century, is said to be the first authority who brings Guinea south to the Senegal.
The derivation of the name is uncertain, but is probably taken from Guinea, Ginnie, Genni or Jenne, a town and kingdom in the basin of the Niger, famed for the enterprise of its merchants and dating from the 8th century A.D. The name Guinea is found on maps of the middle of the 14th century, but it did not come into general use in Europe till towards the close of the 15th century. Guinea may, however, be derived from Ghana (or Ghanata) the name of the oldest known state in the western Sudan. Its capital, also called Ghana, was west of the Niger, and is generally placed some Zoo m. west of Jenne. (See L. Des plagnes in La Geographie, xvi. 329.) By the early traders the coast of Upper Guinea was given names founded on the productions characteristic of the different parts. The Grain coast, that part of the Guinea coast extending for 500 m. from Sierra Leone eastward to Cape Palmas received its name from the export of the seeds of several plants of a peppery character, called variously grains of paradise, Guinea pepper and melegueta. The name Grain coast was first applied to this region in Towards the end of the 18th century Guinea pepper was sup planted in Europe by peppers from the East Indies. The name is seldom used, the Grain coast being divided between the British colony of Sierra Leone and the republic of Liberia. The Ivory coast extends from Cape Palmas to 3° W. and obtained its name from the ivory it exported. Eastwards of the Ivory coast are the Gold and Slave coasts. The Niger delta was for long known as the Oil rivers.
Few questions in historical geography have been more keenly discussed than that of the first discovery of Guinea by the navigators of modern Europe. Lancelot Malocello, a Genoese, in 1270 reached at least as far as the Canaries. The first direct attempt to find a sea route to India was, it is said, also made by Genoese, Ugolino and Guido de Vivaldo, Tedisio Doria and others who equipped two galleys and sailed south along the African coast in 1291. Beyond the fact that they passed Cape Nun there is no trustworthy record of their voyage.
In 1346 a Catalan expedition started for "the river of gold" on the Guinea coast ; its fate is unknown. The French claim that between 1364 and 1410 the people of Dieppe sent out several expeditions to Guinea ; and Jean de Bethencourt, who settled in the Canaries about 1402, made explorations towards the south. At length the consecutive efforts of the navigators employed by Prince Henry of Portugal—Gil Eannes, Diniz Diaz, Nuno Tristam, Alvaro Fernandez, Cadamosto, Usodimare and Diego Gomez—made known the coast as far as the Gambia, and by the end of the 15th century the whole coast was familiar to Europeans.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-For the history of European discoveries, consult Bibliography.-For the history of European discoveries, consult G. E. de Azurara, Chronica de descobrimento e conquista de Guine (Paris, 1841), English translation, The Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, by C. R. Beazley and E. Prestage (Hakluyt Society publica tions, 2 vols., London, 1896-99 ; vol. ii. has an introduction on the early history of African exploration, etc., with full bibliographical notes) . Desmarquets, Mem. chron. pour servir a l'hist. de Dieppe (1875) ; Santarem, Priorite de la decouverte des pays situes sur la cote occidentale d'Afrique (1842) ; R. H. Major, Life of Prince Henry the Navigator (1868) ; and the elaborate review of Major's work by M. Codine in the Bulletin de la Soc. de Geog. (1873) ; A. E. Norden skiold, Periplus (Stockholm, 1897),i Charles de la Ronciere, La Decouverte de l'Afrique au Moyen Age (Cairo vols. i. and ii., 1925, vol. iii., 1927) .