Guinala
Biafada kingdom in pre-colonial Guinea
Guinala or Quinara was an important Biafada kingdom in pre-colonial Guinea situated between the Geba and Rio Grande de Buba rivers. The main port town, also called Guinala, was located on a tributary of the Buba, with the capital Bruco (or Buduco) a short distance inland.
History
The kingdom was a regional power and important center of trade well before the arrival of Europeans. In the middle of the 15th century the kingdom defeated a large Fula armed migration from Futa Toro led by Dulo Demmba that had cut its way through several Wolof and Mandinka states.
The port of Guinala was the primary center of Euro-African trade in the region throughout the 16th century, exporting on average 3000 slaves a year to the Americas. The kingdom also boasted the region's largest weekly market at Bijorei. In the 1580s the lançados built a fort nearby, called Porto da Cruz, in order to defend against French pirates as well as potential conflict with their Biafada hosts. With this rejection of the pre-existing host-guest relationship, the Afro-Portuguese faced higher prices and rude, sometimes violent, treatment.
Guinala's economic importance waned in the early decades of the 17th century. In 1610 raiders from the Bijagos islands attacked Porto da Cruz and disrupted trade there.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Guinala” as biafada kingdom in pre-colonial Guinea. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as biafada kingdom in pre-colonial Guinea. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q122663042. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1610.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Guinala” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.