This article was first published in the January 2025 This Month in GLAM – Africa Licensed CC-BY SA 4.0.

In 2015, Roel Coutinho, a well-known Dutch virologist, entered my office in a Leiden library. He was carrying a box with photographic slides, contact prints and negatives. He asked if I was interested in the photographs, and he explained that they had been taken in 1973 and 1974, adding, "The only time I ever took photos in my entire life". He then told me about the last anti-colonial revolution in Africa, namely the uprising of the people against the colonial Portuguese powers in Guinea-Bissau in the early 1970s. Coutinho was a young doctor from the Netherlands, at the time in his twenties. He had sympathy for the struggle against Portugal, he liked the adventure, and so he decided to travel from the Netherlands to Guinea-Bissau.

He was head of a small hospital in the Senegalese border town of Ziguinchor, lived among the rebels, learned the local language and, in March/April 1974, he walked for a month through the liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. During this trip, he also took photographs of the bush hospitals, met Cuban doctors working there, and photographed the life of the population who were under constant danger of being bombed by the Portuguese. These photos are special for two reasons: they give a unique insight into daily life during a revolution, and furthermore, there are some people to be seen in the photos who later played an important part in the government of independent Guinea-Bissau: the future first president and future Prime Minister of the country.

We decided to digitize all 750 photos and make them available via Wikimedia Commons, with descriptions in English, Dutch and Portuguese. By doing this, we would make sure the heritage of the revolution in Guinea-Bissau would not be buried in a Dutch library, but also be available for people in Portugal and Guinea-Bissau. All photographs were digitized by a professional company and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by our Wikipedian in Residence in Leiden. A Portuguese-speaking student assistant added descriptions, in cooperation with Roel Coutinho himself. Further assistance from librarians at the African Studies Centre in Leiden was instrumental. The images were published in Commons under a Creative Commons license, so every photograph could be used easily by others. The Coutinho collection was now out in the open.

The photographs were soon used on various platforms. As expected, the rare photos of the later first prime-minister of Guinea-Bissau, Chico Mendes, and the future first president of G-B, Luís Cabral (indeed, brother of the even more famous Amílcar Cabral, who was murdered in January 1973), instantaneously drew attention. To our surprise, one of the other photos was used in the German-language Wikipedia as an illustration of the article about the jet injector (Impfpistole). Other photos were used in research publications about daily life in times of war. A Belgian professor even e-mailed for permission to use the photo of a breast-feeding mother in a book about breast-feeding itself. Sure!

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  Luís Cabral
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  Coutinho vaccinating
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  Armed escort carrying a wounded person
• 
  Francisco Mendes

When Coutinho mentioned that he had kept a diary during these years (1973–1974), we looked at how we could make this rare document available. In 2022, the African Studies Centre in Leiden published the Dutch edition of Coutinho's diary from the '70s, together with an introduction (looking back in retrospective) and 40 photographs. The booklet is now freely available.

Two years later, the book was translated into Portuguese by Arie Pos and subsequently published in December 2024. It may come as no surprise that this publication is also openly available online. Several paper copies have also been sent to Bissau, in order to make this part of the revolutionary heritage of Guinea-Bissau accessible to the people of the country.

• Portuguese edition online: Roel Coutinho: A luta pela libertação da Guiné-Bissau, vista pelos olhos de um jovem médico neerlandês. Voorschoten, Editora Couto, 2024
• Dutch edition online: Roel Coutinho: De vrijheidsstrijd van Guinee-Bissau door de ogen van een jonge dokter. Leiden, African Studies Centre, 2022. ISBN 9789054481959.