I’m just starting work on a course about “Modern Empires” to be offered this summer. In poking around this vast topic, it struck me that there is some significance behind the etymology of a term that arises in multiple locations and contexts: Guinea. As a place name it appears to show up in six different countries on three continents (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea (all in Africa), Guyana and French Guiana (South America), and New Guinea (Oceania)), and a currency. And therein lies a tale.
“Guinea” first entered European awareness as a Portuguese adaptation of the term “guineus;” their way of referring to the “black” Africans (as distinguished from the lighter-skinned Africans of the Berbers and Arabs of North Africa. The Berbers themselves used the term “Ghinawen” meaning “the burnt people.” Or it might be tied back to the important trading town of Djenné (now in Mali). In any event, the term became applied to the entire region as well as to the nearby portion of the Atlantic.
“Guinea” first entered European awareness as a Portuguese adaptation of the term “guineus;” their way of referring to the “black” Africans (as distinguished from the lighter-skinned Africans of the Berbers and Arabs of North Africa. The Berbers themselves used the term “Ghinawen” meaning “the burnt people.” Or it might be tied back to the important trading town of Djenné (now in Mali). In any event, the term became applied to the entire region as well as to the nearby portion of the Atlantic.
As they hop-scotched down the coast, swapping territories and seeing which ones would be economically viable and militarily defensible, Europeans ended up with a hodge-podge of territories, paying no attention to existing ethnic groupings, chiefdoms, and empires either in terms of organization or naming. What is now Guinea was French, what is now Guinea-Bissau was Portuguese, and what is now Equatorial Guinea was, sequentially, Portuguese, Spanish, British, and finally Spanish. Each attained independence as part of the mid-20C wave of decolonization.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans (all the usual suspects) were equally active. While the Spanish and Portuguese took over most of South America, the French, British, and Dutch grabbed relatively small chunks of the coast just to the north of Brazil in the 16C and 17C. They each referred to their territories as Guiana, a name NOT derived from their African activities , but from an indigenous word meaning “land of many waters, a reference to the many streams which flow into the Atlantic there. Suriname took a new name upon independence and French Guiana is still a part of France.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, Europeans (all the usual suspects) were equally active. While the Spanish and Portuguese took over most of South America, the French, British, and Dutch grabbed relatively small chunks of the coast just to the north of Brazil in the 16C and 17C. They each referred to their territories as Guiana, a name NOT derived from their African activities , but from an indigenous word meaning “land of many waters, a reference to the many streams which flow into the Atlantic there. Suriname took a new name upon independence and French Guiana is still a part of France.
New Guinea was the name applied by Spanish explorers in 1545, to the island which the locals called “Papua”. Ynigo Ortiz de Retez used “Guinea” since he saw a resemblance between the locals and west Africans. Later, control over the island became shared by the British, German, and Dutch empires. Today, the western half is part of Indonesia (the imperial successors to the Dutch), while the British and Germans did a deal in the 1880s to split the eastern half. The Brits passed their piece on to the Australians during WWI. They added the German northeast quarter in the aftermath of WWI, and granted Papua-New Guinea independence in 1975.
The British have many names for their money. The “Guinea” was an actual coin minted from the middle of the 17C to early in the 19C, and was originally worth one pound. It got its name from the source of much of the gold that was used in the minting: the “Guinea” region of West Africa. It was used as an informal synonym for a pound throughout the 20C, long after its direct connection was superseded. Indeed, long after British attention to the lesser portions of their African empire had waned, this linguistic remnant continued in everyday culture.
(Btw, “guinea pigs” come from western South America and are thus not “Guinean” (or “guyanan”) (or, for that matter, pigs). Nonetheless, the term may well have emerged into European consciousness via their transshipment from the Guyana region on the Atlantic Coast, thus acquiring that (distorted) nomenclature.)
What can we take away from these linguistic connections and coincidences? First, they show the interconnectedness of the various European imperial projects. In both Africa and South America, the first empire in place inspired the follow-ons, both in terms of seeking commercial and proselytizing opportunities and in nomenclature. They also show the modern impacts of decisions made centuries ago by captains and explorers.
Place names (and other words) affect how we see the world. Referring to the United States of America as “America” leaves out the other 34 countries on the two continents (and, of course, just referring to us as “The” United States omits other countries with similar names, including the United States of Mexico, Brazil, and half-a-dozen defunct polities). Calling the islands in the Caribbean the (West) “Indies” is good evidence that Columbus and other European explorers of the late 15C were headed for East and South Asia when they stumbled across the various land masses of the Western Hemisphere.
In our case here, the Spanish explorer who brought a conception of darker-skinned people from Africa across two oceans to an island near Australia was expressing the importance Europeans placed on the difference in the color of peoples’ skin as a defining attribute even where, genetically and culturally, African “Guineas” were likely more closely related to Europeans than to the “Guinean” people of the Pacific. This definition by difference highlights that what we call “race” was an embedded part of European world-views long before “scientific” racism blossomed in the 19C.
So, too, was the lust for gold that spurred many explorers and exploiters. Deriving the name of a significant aspect of your domestic coinage after a region named for the color of the locals’ skin says much about British imperial culture.
The plethora of “Guineas” today owes much to the power of European imperial practices. We can never know what names would have emerged if local powers had developed on their own terms instead of being run over by the white Christians from the northwest corner of Afro-EurAsia. Nor can we, even as we recognize the awfulness of the behavior often visited upon them, take a stab at the broader questions of alternate history: What would the rest of the world have looked like if Europeans didn’t or couldn’t exercise the power they did across the planet from the 15C through the 20C? Who would have been “better off” and who worse? (Especially since our very sense of “better” and “worse” is derived from that same dominant European culture.)
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