GLAM/Newsletter/January 2025/Contents/Africa report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XV, Issue I, January 2025

Africa report

Guinea-Bissau Heritage from Commons to the World

1973: a young Dutch physician involved in a revolution in Africa

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 were made in 1973 and 1974. "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 Portugese powers in Guinea-Bissau in the early 1970s. Coutinho was a young doctor from the Netherlands, in his twenties. He had sympathy for the struggle against Portugal, he liked the adventure and he decided to travel from the Netherlands to Guinea-Bissau.

He was head of a small hospital in the Senegalese border town Ziguinchor (Senegal), lived between the rebels, learned the local language and in March/April 1974 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 in 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 later first president and prime-minister of the country.

750 images to Wiki Commons

We decided to digitise all 750 photos and make them available via Wikimedia Commons, with descriptions in English, Dutch and Portuguese. In that way we would be 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 digitised by a professional company and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by our Leiden Wikipedian in Residence. A Portuguese speaking student assistant added descriptions, in cooperation with Roel Coutinho. 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.

Usage inside and outside Wikipedia

The photographs were soon used on diverse platforms. As expected the (rare) photos of the later first prime-minister of Guinea-Bissau, Chico Mendes and the later president of G-B, Luís Cabral (indeed, brother of the even more famous Amilcar Cabral who was murdered in January 1973), were instantaneously used. 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 e-mailed for permission to use the photo of a breast-feeding mother in a book about breast-feeding. Sure!

Luís Cabral
Coutinho vaccinating
Carrying a wounded person
Francisco Mendes

Publication of the diary in Portuguese

When Coutinho mentioned that he had kept a diary during these years (1973-1974) we looked 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 freely available. Two years later the book was translated in Portuguese by Arie Pos and subsequently published in December 2024. It may come as no surprise that this publication is also openly online. Several paper copies have been sent to Bissau, so as to make this part of the revolutionary heritage of Guinea-Bissau available to the people of the country.