Travel Guide Youkounkoun

Youkounkoun is in the heart of the Coniagui country, a minority ethnic group in Guinea but also in Senegal. It is a small village with wide alleys of cheese trees, 23 km east of Koundara. Further east, in the direction of Termesse, there are other similar villages perched on high ground and inhabited by an ethnic group very close to the Coniagui: the Bassari. The huts are very close to each other, which is different from traditional Fulani villages, and the foundations of the houses are made of stone rather than earth. The Coniagui and the Bassari, who have lived in the region since the thirteenth century, are two ethnic cousins of Diallonke origin and, according to some historians, are related to the Bantu of Central Africa. They have resisted slave raids, waves of Fulani migration, and Islamization in the seventeenth century by entrenching themselves in arid and steep areas of the region. They are farmers, hunters and gatherers. Their society is organized in age groups, whose roles are defined according to the circumstances. Influenced by Christianity in the twentieth century, they perpetuate their ceremonies of initiation rites, wearing their huge feather masks. Their customs and their traditional clothes still testify to their relative distance from the modern era. The festivities in the villages traditionally take place in April and May, but the dates vary from one year to the next