Ziguinchor (also called Zinguinchor) is the capital of the Ziguinchor Region, and the chief town of the Casamance area of Senegal, lying at the mouth of the Casamance River. It has a population of over 230,000 (2007 estimate). It is the second city of Senegal, but largely separated from the north of the country by The Gambia.

The first European settlement in the area was founded by the Portuguese in 1645. According to tradition, Ziguinchor's name and meaning comes from the time when Portuguese traders and explorers came to the region to form a trading post, and derives from Portuguese Cheguei e choram, "I came and they cry". The local people, seeing the Europeans, began crying, thinking they were to be enslaved. Ziguinchor was in fact a Slave port during much of the Portuguese occupation.

The spot was not chosen at random. While a Jola village predated the town, it was situated to trade with the Jola kingdom of Kasso, which dates back to the Mali Empire, when Mandinke people moved into the area from the south and east.

Aline Sitoe Diatta (1920–1944) (alter: Aline Sitow Diatta and Alyn Sytoe Jata): a Senegalese heroine of the resistance to French colonialism, often called the Joan of Arc or the Marianne of Senegal.

Diola royalty living in the village of Kabrousse, Basse Casamance, Aline Sitoe Diatta was one of the leaders of a tax resistance movement during the Second World War. While Diola resistance had never really ended since the region was annexed to French West Africa in 1914, in 1942 the French government began seizing as much as half the area's rice harvest for their war effort.

When a boycott begun by market women proved successful, the French authorities imprisoned the boycott's leadership. Aline Sitoe Diatta, esteemed as a Diola queen and believed to have religious powers, was marked out by authorities as a leader. She remained in prison, and was deported to a jail in Timbuctu in 1943. There she died of disease in 1944.

Since her death, Aline Sitoe Diatta has become one of the best known symbols of resistance in West Africa, and a national symbol in Senegal, especially in Casamance. An area of Dakar, near Cheikh Anta Diop University is named cité Aline Sitoé Diatta, a stadium bears her name, and numerous schools, businesses, and organizations are named after her.