Flag: Guinea Emoji
U+1F1EC U+1F1F3:guinea:About Flag: Guinea 🇬🇳
Flag: Guinea () is part of the Flags group in Unicode. Added in Unicode E2.0. Type on GitHub and Slack to use it. On Discord it's . Click copy above to grab it, paste it anywhere.
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Meaning varies across cultures, see cultural notes below.
Scroll down for the full story: meaning, trends, combos, and more.
How it looks
What does it mean?
The flag of Guinea. A vertical tricolor of red, yellow, and green (hoist to fly). Ratio 2:3. Adopted on November 10, 1958, less than six weeks after Guinea became independent from France.
Guinea is the country that said no to de Gaulle. On September 28, 1958, de Gaulle offered the French African colonies a referendum: vote YES and stay inside a loosely federated French Community, vote NO and become immediately independent with all French aid, administration, and investment cut off overnight. Fourteen colonies voted yes. Only Guinea, led by the 36-year-old trade-union leader and first-ever elected African deputy Ahmed Sékou Touré, voted no, with 95% against on a 85.5% turnout. France retaliated with Operation Persil: civil servants pulled out within weeks, counterfeit banknotes were dropped into the economy, ports blockaded. Independence was proclaimed on October 2, 1958. The flag followed five weeks later.
Touré's most-quoted line from that autumn, engraved on everything from textbooks to banknotes: 'Nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l'esclavage' ('There is no dignity without freedom: we prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery').
The flag's layout is a deliberate visual inversion of France's blue-white-red tricolor, and the palette is the pan-African red-yellow-green of Ghana, whose president Kwame Nkrumah was Touré's closest ally. French template, African colors, one of West Africa's loudest breaks with the metropole.
Emoji 2.0 (2015), regional indicator pair + (G + N). Platforms without flag support fall back to .
The 1958 'Non' still does heavy lifting. 🇬🇳 shows up most often on pan-African, leftist, and African-diaspora feeds in the context of Sékou Touré's September 28, 1958 referendum and Touré's famous quote on poverty vs. slavery. Every October 2 (Independence Day) and September 28 (the referendum anniversary), the quote cycles through Black Twitter, Francophone Afro-Twitter, and pan-Africanist TikTok. In the same year that 🇧🇫 and 🇲🇱 left ECOWAS to form the Alliance of Sahel States, Guinea stood as the ancestor: the first Francophone country to tell Paris no.
Music, led by Mory Kanté. The single biggest ongoing driver of 🇬🇳 on global social is Mory Kanté's 1987 kora-and-synths anthem 'Yé ké yé ké,' which was European number one in 1988 and the first African single ever to sell over a million copies. It still plays across wedding and afro-night DJ sets from Paris to Lagos. Bembeya Jazz National, crowned 'National Orchestra' in 1966 under Touré's cultural-policy scheme, anchors the West African-jazz reissue scene on Bandcamp, NTS, Boiler Room, and Afropop Worldwide.
Doumbouya news cycles. Since Colonel Mamady Doumbouya's September 5, 2021 coup (a former French Foreign Legionnaire overthrowing his former boss, President Alpha Condé), 🇬🇳 has carried recurring weight in Africa-policy feeds. Doumbouya consolidated power through the December 2025 presidential election (won with 86.72%) and the March 2026 dissolution of the main opposition parties, moves that have kept 🇬🇳 trending on democracy-tracking and West Africa desks.
Bauxite, Simandou, commodity feeds. Guinea is the world's top exporter of bauxite, raw material for aluminum; roughly 60% of production ships to China. The Simandou iron ore mega-project in the southeast, holding ~3.3 billion tonnes of high-grade (65% Fe) ore, launched its first exports in 2025 after a decade of legal fights. 🇬🇳 appears regularly in S&P, Bloomberg, and Reuters commodity threads, and in Chinese business-press coverage.
Guinean diaspora. Guinea's diaspora is mostly Francophone Europe and the Americas. Paris, Brussels, Montréal, and New York hold the largest communities. Music-scene nightlife in the 18th and 19th arrondissements of Paris is heavily Guinean and Malian; Bembeya Jazz alumni tour Europe every year. Younger Guinea-Conakry diasporans on TikTok often identify as Guinéen(ne) or Guinée 224 (after the country calling code) to disambiguate from Guinea-Bissau (🇬🇼) and Equatorial Guinea (🇬🇶).
The Guinea confusion. Four countries on earth are called some version of Guinea: 🇬🇳 Guinea-Conakry, 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau (Lusophone, next door), 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea (Hispanophone, on the opposite side of the continent), and 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea (on the other side of the Pacific). Most search traffic to 'Guinea' on Google lumps them together; 🇬🇳 has to share oxygen with three namesakes.
The flag of Guinea (officially the Republic of Guinea, also called Guinea-Conakry to distinguish it from the other three Guineas): a vertical red-yellow-green tricolor, ratio 2:3. Adopted November 10, 1958, five weeks after Ahmed Sékou Touré proclaimed independence following Guinea's unique 'No' vote in the September 28, 1958 French constitutional referendum.
President Sékou Touré tied each band to a term in the national motto Travail, Justice, Solidarité ('Work, Justice, Solidarity'). Red stands for the blood of anti-colonial martyrs and the labor of the working classes. Yellow stands for the sun and mineral wealth (Guinea is the world's top bauxite exporter). Green stands for vegetation and the rural peasantry. The palette echoes Ghana's flag; the layout echoes France's vertical tricolor as a deliberate visual inversion.
🇬🇳 in West Africa
The Guinea emoji palette
Guinea at a glance
- 🏙️Capital: Conakry (9.64°N, 13.58°W), a peninsular city of 2M+ on the Atlantic coast
- 👥Population: ~14.5 million (2025)
- 🗺️Area: 245,857 km² (about the size of the United Kingdom)
- 💵Currency: Guinean franc (GNF, FG); not the CFA franc (Guinea left the franc zone in 1960)
- 🗣️Official language: French. [Susu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susu_language) on the coast, [Pular](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fula_language) in the Fouta Djallon, [Maninka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maninka_language) in Upper Guinea, Kpelle and Kissi in the Forest Region.
- 🕌Religions: ~85% Muslim, ~13% Christian (mostly Catholic in the Forest Region), ~2% traditional beliefs
- 🧭Four geographic regions: Maritime Guinea (Conakry), Fouta Djallon highlands, Upper Guinea savanna, Forest Region (southeast)
- 🧭Borders: Mali, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau. Six neighbours, one Atlantic coast.
- 📞Calling code: +224 (used as diaspora shorthand, 'Guinée 224')
- ⏰Time zone: GMT (UTC+0), no DST
- 🌐Internet TLD: .gn
Emoji combos
Signature foods and iconic landmarks
Foods that show up next to 🇬🇳
Landmarks and cultural sites
Right now in Conakry
Origin story
The French colony of Guinée française (1891-1958). France formalized Guinea as a colony in 1891 inside French West Africa, administered from Dakar. The coastal Susu, the highland Pular (Fula), the savanna Mandinka, and the forest-region Kpelle and Kissi were welded into one administrative unit around the port of Conakry on the Îles de Los. Rubber, palm oil, and later bauxite dominated the economy.
Sékou Touré and the RDA. Ahmed Sékou Touré, born 1922 in Faranah, claimed descent from the 19th-century Mandinka resistance leader Samory Touré. He started as a postal-service trade-union organizer, built a base through the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG, local section of the pan-African Rassemblement Démocratique Africain), and became the first African elected deputy to the French National Assembly in 1956.
The September 28, 1958 referendum. Charles de Gaulle, returning to power in the Fifth Republic, put a new constitution to referendum across metropolitan France and its colonies. The deal: vote YES and stay inside a reorganized French Community with internal autonomy, vote NO and get full immediate independence with all French aid, administration, and investment cut off at once. All fourteen other African colonies voted yes. Guinea voted NO by 95% on 85.5% turnout. Touré, speaking to de Gaulle in Conakry a month earlier, had delivered the line: 'We prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery.'
Operation Persil and the October 2, 1958 proclamation. France pulled every civil servant within weeks, counterfeited Guinean banknotes, blockaded ports, and launched covert destabilization (the 'Operation Persil' campaign). The new Republic of Guinea was proclaimed on October 2, 1958, with Touré as president. The flag was adopted November 10. Ghana's Nkrumah immediately loaned $28 million and allied Accra and Conakry under what they called the Ghana-Guinea Union. The palette tribute is explicit.
The 26-year Touré era (1958-1984). Touré ruled for 26 years, increasingly harshly, with one-party socialism and periodic waves of real and imagined purges (the 1970 'Portuguese plot,' the 1976 Peul plot). Hundreds of thousands fled into exile in Senegal, Ivory Coast, and France. Camp Boiro, his regime's detention camp inside Conakry, is one of post-colonial Africa's most notorious. Touré died of heart surgery complications on March 26, 1984, in a Cleveland hospital.
Conté, Condé, and the 2021 Doumbouya coup. Colonel Lansana Conté took power in a week-after-Touré coup on April 3, 1984 and ruled for 24 more years. Alpha Condé won the first competitive election in 2010, became increasingly authoritarian, and was overthrown by Colonel Mamady Doumbouya on September 5, 2021. Doumbouya, a former French Foreign Legionnaire who Condé had promoted to head the special forces, went on to consolidate power through a December 2025 presidential election (86.72%) and the March 2026 dissolution of the main opposition parties. The flag has not changed since 1958.
Red, yellow, green: 'Travail, Justice, Solidarité'
Ratio 2:3 · Adopted 1958
Around the world
Inside Guinea
🇬🇳 flies on October 2 (Independence Day), September 28 (the referendum anniversary), May 1 (Labour Day, historically weighty because Touré started as a union leader), and April 3 (Second Republic Day, the 1984 Conté coup). Touré's portrait still hangs in many public buildings and schools, though his human-rights record is increasingly openly discussed. Under Doumbouya, pro-government posts often pair 🇬🇳 with 🇷🇺 and 🇨🇳 where the bauxite and Simandou money flows; opposition posts lean on pre-2021 democratic imagery.
Paris-Conakry diaspora
Around 100,000 Guinea-Conakry nationals live in France, clustered in Paris (18th, 19th, and 20th arrondissements), Marseille, and Lyon. Second-generation Guinéens in the Paris music scene (Soul Bang's, Banlieues Bleues) often label themselves Guinée 224 on TikTok and Instagram to disambiguate from Guinea-Bissau. On October 2, Conakry-radio streams and balafon concerts take over Paris Guinean cafés.
Pan-African and leftist feeds
For pan-African and anticolonial Twitter, 🇬🇳 carries outsized weight relative to population thanks to the 1958 referendum. Touré's 'Non' to de Gaulle is reposted every September 28 and shows up in any thread about Sankara, Ibrahim Traoré, or Patrice Lumumba. Less-cited is Touré's long human-rights record after 1960, including Camp Boiro; that conversation mostly happens on Guinean diaspora accounts.
Commodity and industry feeds
For metals and mining analysts (Bloomberg, S&P, Reuters, Caixin), 🇬🇳 is a bauxite-and-iron-ore flag. The country holds ~25% of global bauxite reserves and the Simandou iron ore project is the biggest new high-grade iron supply coming online in a generation. Coverage spikes around first-ore shipments (2025), Chinese investment announcements, and every price shock in aluminum or iron futures.
In the September 28, 1958 referendum, de Gaulle offered the African colonies a choice: remain inside a reorganized French Community with internal autonomy, or vote no and receive immediate independence. The other 14 colonies voted yes for the guarantees of French aid, training, and investment. Guinea, under Sékou Touré, voted NO because Touré publicly argued that 'there is no dignity without freedom, we prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery.' France retaliated within weeks by pulling out civil servants, cutting aid, counterfeiting the new Guinean franc, and blockading ports (the 'Operation Persil' campaign).
🇬🇳 bauxite share of global supply
When 🇬🇳 spikes: the Guinean calendar
- 🪖April 3: Second Republic Day: Marks the [1984 Conté coup](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lansana_Cont%C3%A9) a week after Sékou Touré's death.
- ✊🏿May 1: Labour Day: Public holiday. Guinea's trade-union roots run through Sékou Touré's origin story as a postal-service organizer.
- 🗳️September 28: Referendum Day: Anniversary of the 1958 vote that rejected de Gaulle's French Community and made Guinea independent. Not a federal public holiday but heavily observed on social media and in schools.
- 🎉October 2: Independence Day: The biggest civic day. Commemorates the [proclamation of the Republic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_S%C3%A9kou_Tour%C3%A9) in Conakry, 1958. Presidential parade at the Palais du Peuple.
- 🌙Korité and Tabaski: The year's biggest personal celebrations. Ram sacrifices, new clothes, and mosque gatherings across Maritime Guinea and the Fouta Djallon.
Say it in Susu, Pular, and Maninka
Often confused with
🇲🇱 (Mali) is the same pan-African green-yellow-red palette but with the colors in the opposite horizontal order: green at hoist, red at fly. Guinea runs red-yellow-green hoist to fly. No star on either. Neighbouring Mandinka-speaking sister countries, mirrored tricolors.
🇲🇱 (Mali) is the same pan-African green-yellow-red palette but with the colors in the opposite horizontal order: green at hoist, red at fly. Guinea runs red-yellow-green hoist to fly. No star on either. Neighbouring Mandinka-speaking sister countries, mirrored tricolors.
🇸🇳 (Senegal) uses the exact same green-yellow-red palette as Mali (so the same three colors as Guinea), arranged vertically with a green five-pointed star in the yellow band. Guinea has no star. All three flags are cousins in the pan-African vocabulary Sékou Touré and his contemporaries adopted in 1958-1960.
🇸🇳 (Senegal) uses the exact same green-yellow-red palette as Mali (so the same three colors as Guinea), arranged vertically with a green five-pointed star in the yellow band. Guinea has no star. All three flags are cousins in the pan-African vocabulary Sékou Touré and his contemporaries adopted in 1958-1960.
🇨🇲 (Cameroon) has a vertical red-yellow-green tricolor with a gold star on the red band. Same palette and same order as Guinea, just shifted: Cameroon runs green-red-yellow left to right (the star over the central red). Guinea runs red-yellow-green left to right.
🇨🇲 (Cameroon) has a vertical red-yellow-green tricolor with a gold star on the red band. Same palette and same order as Guinea, just shifted: Cameroon runs green-red-yellow left to right (the star over the central red). Guinea runs red-yellow-green left to right.
🇬🇼 (Guinea-Bissau), the Lusophone neighbour to the northwest, uses a red-and-yellow-and-green palette in a completely different layout: a vertical red band on the hoist with a black star, then two horizontal yellow and green bands. Guinea-Conakry is three equal vertical stripes with no star. Independent countries, often confused at a glance.
🇬🇼 (Guinea-Bissau), the Lusophone neighbour to the northwest, uses a red-and-yellow-and-green palette in a completely different layout: a vertical red band on the hoist with a black star, then two horizontal yellow and green bands. Guinea-Conakry is three equal vertical stripes with no star. Independent countries, often confused at a glance.
🇬🇶 (Equatorial Guinea) sits on the other side of the continent and speaks Spanish. It uses a green-white-red horizontal tricolor with a blue triangle on the hoist and a coat of arms in the center. Nothing design-wise connects it to 🇬🇳 except the name. English speakers mix up the three Guineas constantly.
🇬🇶 (Equatorial Guinea) sits on the other side of the continent and speaks Spanish. It uses a green-white-red horizontal tricolor with a blue triangle on the hoist and a coat of arms in the center. Nothing design-wise connects it to 🇬🇳 except the name. English speakers mix up the three Guineas constantly.
Four. 🇬🇳 Guinea (Guinea-Conakry, Francophone, West Africa). 🇬🇼 Guinea-Bissau (Lusophone, next door). 🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea (Hispanophone, Central Africa). 🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea (English/Tok Pisin, Pacific Ocean). The name 'Guinea' comes from an old Berber term meaning 'land of the blacks,' first used by Portuguese navigators and later applied inconsistently by several European powers.
🇲🇱 Mali is a vertical green-yellow-red tricolor, hoist to fly. 🇬🇳 Guinea is a vertical red-yellow-green tricolor, hoist to fly. Same three colors, reverse order. Both are pan-African palette flags adopted in 1958-1960; the two countries share a long border and a substantial Mandinka-speaking population.
No. They are two separate countries sharing a land border on the West African coast. Guinea (🇬🇳) is the Francophone Republic of Guinea with ~14.5M people, independent since October 2, 1958. Guinea-Bissau (🇬🇼) is the Lusophone Republic of Guinea-Bissau with ~2M people, independent from Portugal since September 24, 1973 (de facto) / September 10, 1974 (de jure). Different languages, different colonial histories, different flags.
The four Guineas: population scale
Fun facts
- •Guinea was the ONLY French sub-Saharan colony to vote NO in de Gaulle's September 28, 1958 referendum, choosing immediate independence over membership in the reorganized French Community. 95% voted against on an 85.5% turnout.
- •Sékou Touré's famous line from that campaign, engraved on Guinean textbooks and banknotes: 'We prefer freedom in poverty to riches in slavery' ('Nous préférons la liberté dans la pauvreté à la richesse dans l'esclavage').
- •Mory Kanté's 1987 single 'Yé ké yé ké' was the first African single to sell over a million copies and hit #1 in six European countries in 1988.
- •Guinea is the world's top bauxite exporter, with roughly 60% of production shipping raw to China. It holds approximately 25% of global bauxite reserves.
- •The Simandou iron ore project, launched for first exports in 2025 after a decade of legal disputes, holds ~3.3 billion tonnes of ~65% Fe high-grade ore. At full capacity, Guinea is projected to be the world's fifth-largest iron ore exporter.
- •The Fouta Djallon highlands, rising to 1,538 m at Mount Loura, give rise to the Niger, Senegal, and Gambia rivers; they are known as 'West Africa's water tower.'
- •The Imamate of Futa Jallon (1727-1896) in the highlands was one of the first theocratic Islamic states in sub-Saharan Africa and remains a major center of Islamic scholarship in the Pular diaspora today.
- •The djembe drum, now played worldwide, originated with the Mandinka of what is now Guinea and Mali in the 13th century. Famidjan Konaté and his son Mamady Keïta were the two global ambassadors of the instrument from the 1950s onward.
Trivia
For developers
- •🇬🇳 is a regional indicator sequence: (G) + (N). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: .
- •Unsupported platforms render it as the letters . Common in older Windows chat clients.
- •The top-level domain is administered by CENTRENIC and is restricted to local registrants.
- •Shortcode: or on most messaging platforms. Note: is ambiguous on some platforms; use if clarity matters.
🇬🇳 was added in Emoji 2.0 (2015) as part of the initial regional-indicator flag rollout. Its pair is + (G + N). Platforms without flag support fall back to .
See the full Emoji Developer Tools guide for regex patterns, encoding helpers, and more.
What do you most associate with 🇬🇳?
Select all that apply
- Flag of Guinea - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Guinea - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Ahmed Sékou Touré - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- 1958 Guinean constitutional referendum - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Operation Persil - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Mamady Doumbouya - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Lansana Conté - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Mory Kanté - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Bembeya Jazz National - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Futa Jallon - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Imamate of Futa Jallon - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Simandou mine - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Djembe - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
- Mount Nimba Strict Nature Reserve - UNESCO (unesco.org)
- Simandou iron ore project - S&P Global (spglobal.com)
- Guinea dissolves main opposition parties - Al Jazeera (aljazeera.com)
- Sékou Touré | Britannica (britannica.com)
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