Guinea-Bissau Gallery

Senegal - Griot playing a Kora

Senegal - seated Griot playing a Kora, a 21-stringed harp lute that originated in the Gambia River valley with the Mandinko but is one of the most popular instruments in Senegal. Griots from most Mande groups in Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Guinea, and Guinea Bissau play the kora, which has featured on a number of western recordings in recent years. A Griot is a West African historian, storyteller, praise singer, poet and/or musician. The griot is a repository of oral tradition, and is also often seen as something of a societal leader due to his traditional position as an adviser to royal personages. Date: circa 1910s

© Mary Evans / Grenville Collins Postcard Collection

Elly Beinhorn with her plane, 1932. Creator: Unknown

Elly Beinhorn with her plane, 1932. Beinhorn (1907-2007) was one of Germany's most distinguished female aviators. In 1931 she crash-landed in the Sahara on the way to Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau). She joined a Tuareg camel caravan to Timbuktu and later returned to the crash site to recover parts of the plane. Flying a Klemm monoplane, she flew to Mount Everest, Bali and eventually Australia. She was the second woman to fly solo from Europe to Australia, after Amy Johnson. From "Die Eroberung Der Luft", (The Conquest of the Air), cigarette card album produced by the Garbáty cigarette factory, 1932. Eugene and Moritz Garbáty, who were Jewish, were driven out of business by the Nazis in the late 1930s, and forced to sell their factory which lay empty for over 70 years. [Garbaty Cigarettenfabrik, Berlin-Pankow, 1932]

© The Print Collector / Heritage-Images