CONAKRY - Guinea, where junta strongman Mamady Doumbouya is almost certain to win Sunday's presidential vote, is one of the world's most impoverished countries.
Despite this, the west African nation possesses immense natural resources. It also has a long history of coups and violence.
Here are five things to know about Guinea:
- Autocratic regimes -
Guinea has been under junta rule for the last four years following a September 2021 coup that swept Doumbouya into power.
Although he initially promised not to stand for office and to return the country to civilian leadership, Doumbouya is running in this year's election.
Guinea has had only one freely elected civilian president, longtime opposition mainstay Alpha Conde, who was voted into office in November 2010 and led the country for 11 years until his ousting by Doumbouya.
Since taking power, Doumbouya has cracked down on civil liberties. The junta has banned protests since 2022 and has arrested, put on trial or driven to exile many opponents. Reports of enforced disappearances have multiplied in recent years.
Since its independence in 1958, Guinea has had a complex history of military and authoritarian rule, including multiple military interventions.
- Independence pioneer -
The former French colony became the second country in sub-Saharan Africa after Ghana to gain independence in 1958, before the decolonisation wave began in the 1960s.
It is the only Francophone state on the continent to have rejected in 1958 the Franco-African community proposed by then French president Charles de Gaulle.
Instead, the country plumped for independence and installed a socialist regime which Ahmed Sekou Toure would go on to rule with an iron fist for a quarter of a century.
- Natural resources -
Agriculture is the main employment source in the country of 14.5 million inhabitants as of 2024, according to the World Bank.
Its major mineral resources most notably include bauxite, the chief mineral used in aluminium production, along with iron, gold and diamonds.
But the wealth from mining them is unevenly shared and benefits little of the population.
The country has one of the world's largest iron ore deposits in the southeastern Simandou mountain range.
Three decades after the discovery of the deposit, mining operations began there in November, which authorities hope will propel the country into the ranks of the world's largest iron exporters.
Guinea has benefited from strong GDP growth over the past few years, according to a recent report from the World Bank (5.1 percent on average between 2019 and 2023, and 5.7 percent in 2024).
Poverty remains nevertheless high, with 52 percent of the population living on less than $3.65 per day.
- FGM, Ebola -
Guinea has among the world's highest incidences of female genital mutilation (FGM). According to the United Nations children's agency UNICEF, around 95 percent of Guinean girls and women ages 15-49 were circumcised in 2024.
The country was also hit by the worst outbreak to date of Ebola, starting in December 2013 and lasting three years. The outbreak left 11,000 west Africans dead -- 2,500 of them in Guinea.
- Mandingo music -
Guinea is, with Mali, the cradle of Mandingo music played with traditional instruments including the harp-like kora and the balafon, a kind of xylophone.
One of its most famous exponents, Mory Kante, who died in May 2020, scored a global hit in 1987 with "Yeke Yeke".