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Flags of Guinea-Bissau

From the western reach of the Mandinka Kingdom of Kaabu — a successor and one-time vassal of the Mali Empire that dominated this coast for over six centuries — through nearly five hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule built on one of the earliest and most exploitative Atlantic slave-trade footholds in Africa, into Amílcar Cabral's guerrilla war for independence, and finally a sovereign republic flying Pan-African colors: five flags across roughly eight centuries.

This is a small country with an outsized role in African decolonization — the PAIGC's armed struggle from 1963 is one of the era's defining liberation wars, and Guinea-Bissau's 1973 declaration of independence, forced through before Portugal itself had thrown off dictatorship, helped trigger the 1974 Carnation Revolution that ended Portuguese colonialism everywhere at once.

Scope of this page: the lands of present-day Guinea-Bissau, c. 1230–present, five political entities. Kaabu's inland Mandinka rule and Portugal's coastal trading-post presence genuinely overlapped for centuries — Portuguese ships were trading (and taking captives) along this coast from the 1440s while Kaabu still governed the interior. This page follows the convention used elsewhere in the atlas: each entry covers the entity whose flag and rule are the clearest continuous thread for the territory during that span, with Kaabu's fall to Fula forces in 1867 marked as the hinge point where Portugal's presence hardens from coastal trading posts into an inland colonial claim. Part of a larger atlas — see the linked pages at the bottom.

Towns and liberated zones, 1963–1974

Guinea-Bissau's own real border, split into the two pieces the independence war actually produced: the coastal towns Portugal kept holding, and the rural interior the PAIGC governed outright as its own "liberated zones." Press play, or drag the slider.

The PAIGC ran schools, clinics, and courts before it ran a country. By the mid-1960s it controlled large stretches of the interior in fact, not just in name, even while Portugal still held Bissau and the other towns. The line below is a schematic stand-in for a guerrilla war's genuinely patchy front lines — it solidifies only for the years the two sides truly governed separate populations, and dissolves for good after the 1974 Carnation Revolution.

1963

PAIGC turns to armed struggle

Schematic internal partition on a real traced border — the towns/interior dividing line stands in for a guerrilla war's genuinely irregular front, not a surveyed frontier. The Bijagós Islands are omitted from this simplified coastline.

red hoist with black star, yellow over green — unchanged since independence

1973 – present

Republic of Guinea-Bissau

Republic, independentLuís CabralNo official state religion (secular)

Migration & conquest:Emigration: to Portugal & Senegal (1990s–)

Who & why: the PAIGC unilaterally declares independence on 24 September 1973, months after Amílcar Cabral's January 1973 assassination robs him of the moment he had spent a decade building toward. Portugal does not recognize it at first, but the April 1974 Carnation Revolution topples the Estado Novo dictatorship in Lisbon, and the new Portuguese government formally recognizes Guinea-Bissau's independence on 10 September 1974. Luís Cabral, Amílcar's half-brother, becomes the first president.

What it represents: the flag adopted at independence is the PAIGC's own party banner, unchanged, made into a national flag — Pan-African red, yellow, black, and green, closely related to Ghana's flag and to those of other PAIGC-aligned movements, and a visible echo of the party's founding vision of a single Guinea-Bissau–Cape Verde federation, a merger the two countries in the end never actually completed.

Paint guide

Proportions1:2, officially adopted 24 September 1973.

LayoutRed vertical band (2/5) at the hoist with a black five-pointed star centered; yellow over green horizontal bands filling the fly.

Red#CE1126

Yellow#FCD116

Green#009739

Star, black#0D0D0D

the PAIGC's own war-era banner, flown over the liberated interior

1963 – 1973

PAIGC armed struggle (liberated zones)

Liberation movementAmílcar CabralNo official religion (secular liberation movement)

Who & why: the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), founded in 1956 by Amílcar Cabral, turns to armed struggle in January 1963 after peaceful organizing is met with colonial violence, most notoriously the August 1959 Pidjiguiti dockworkers' massacre. Fighting a genuinely effective guerrilla campaign, the PAIGC controls large stretches of the rural interior by the mid-1960s, running schools, clinics, and courts in what it calls the liberated zones even as Portugal still holds the towns. Cabral, the movement's strategist and voice abroad, is assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973, almost certainly on the orders of a rival within the party working with Portuguese intelligence.

What it represents: the PAIGC's party flag — a black hoist band with a red star, yellow over green in the fly — flies over the territory the movement actually governs. It is the direct template for the national flag adopted a few months after Cabral's death, with the hoist recolored red and the star black.

Paint guide

ProportionsNo fixed ratio during the war years; shown at 3:2.

LayoutBlack vertical band (2/5) at the hoist with a red five-pointed star centered; yellow over green horizontal bands filling the fly.

Black#0D0D0D

Yellow#FCD116

Green#009739

Star, red#CE1126

Portugal's Republic-era flag, flown over the colony after 1911

1911 – 1963

Portuguese Guinea (colony, Republic era)

ColonyManuel de ArriagaNo official state religion (Portugal's Catholic Church disestablished in 1911)

Migration & conquest:Emigration: forced contract labor to São Tomé

Who & why: Portugal's 1910 revolution replaces the monarchy with a republic and, in 1911, a new national flag that flies over every Portuguese possession including Guinea, formally organized as a separate colony (Guiné Portuguesa) since 1879. Portuguese control on the ground stays thin and heavily contested for decades — so-called “pacification” campaigns against Bijagós, Balanta, and other resisting peoples continue into the 1930s under the later Salazar dictatorship, which treats Guinea as a source of forced labor and cash-crop exports while investing almost nothing in schools or infrastructure, conditions that feed directly into the independence movement that follows.

What it represents: Portugal's green-and-red national flag, adopted in 1911 and still in use today, carries the armillary sphere and shield from the old royal arms into the new republican era; it is flown, not a distinct colonial design, across the whole Portuguese empire during this span.

Paint guide

Proportions2:3, per Portugal's 1911 national flag law.

LayoutGreen (2/5, hoist) and red (3/5, fly) vertical bands, armillary sphere and shield centered on the boundary (simplified here as a ringed circle).

Green#046A38

Red#C0272D

Armillary sphere, gold#C9A13C

the Kingdom of Portugal's blue-and-white flag, flown 1867–1911

1867 – 1911

Portuguese Guinea (colony, Kingdom era)

ColonyLuís I of PortugalRoman Catholicism (Portugal's state religion)

Ruling house:House of Braganza

Who & why: Portuguese traders have worked this coast since Nuno Tristão's 1446 voyage, running one of the earliest and most exploitative Atlantic slave-trade operations in Africa from coastal posts like Cacheu and Bissau, but for centuries their real reach stops at the shoreline. That changes as Kaabu, the Mandinka kingdom that had governed the interior for over six centuries, is destroyed at the 1867 Battle of Kansala by an alliance of Fula forces from Fouta Djallon; the loss of Kaabu's counterweight opens the interior to a Portuguese colonial claim that hardens over the following decades, formalized as the separate colony of Guiné Portuguesa in 1879 and contested at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85.

What it represents: the blue-and-white flag of the Kingdom of Portugal, carrying the old royal coat of arms, flies over this claim until Portugal's own 1910 revolution replaces both the monarchy and its flag.

Paint guide

ProportionsNo fixed civil ratio recorded for this period; shown at 3:2.

LayoutBlue (1/3, hoist) and white (2/3, fly) vertical bands, royal arms centered on the boundary (simplified here as a ringed circle).

Blue#1E2F96

White#F4EFE1

Arms, gold#C9A13C

placeholder field — no surviving territorial banner attributed to Kaabu

c. 1230 – 1867

Kingdom of Kaabu (western reach)

KingdomTiramakhan TraoréTraditional Mandinka animist beliefs

Migration & conquest:Emigration: Atlantic slave trade via Kaabu & the coast

Ruling house:Kaabu Empire (Nyancho Dynasty)House of Braganza

Who & why: Kaabu emerges around 1235 as a Mandinka province carved out by generals of Sundiata Keita, founder of the Mali Empire, and governs the western savanna and coastal hinterland that today straddles Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Senegal. It rules for a time as a tributary of Mali, then, as Mali's own power fades through the 15th and 16th centuries, emerges as a fully independent kingdom by around 1537 under its own Mansa at the capital, Kansala. Kaabu remains the dominant power of this region for centuries, ruling a mixed Mandinka, Balanta, Papel, and Bijagós population, until an alliance of Fula forces from neighboring Fouta Djallon — driven partly by Kaabu's continued raiding for the slave trade that Fula Muslim reformers opposed — storms and destroys the capital at the November 1867 Battle of Kansala, ending Kaabu as a state.

What it represents: no securely documented territorial flag survives for Kaabu; like much of pre-colonial West Africa, political authority here was expressed through royal regalia, drums, and oral praise-titles rather than a fixed banner. Shown here honestly blank rather than invented.

Paint guide

ProportionsN/A — no attested flag.

Reading the tags

Kingdom — sovereign or tributary rule under its own crown

Colony — administered as a possession of a foreign power

Liberation movement — armed movement governing contested territory

Republic, independent — sovereign under its own elected government

Leader — the named ruler most associated with the era's start

State religion — the official/established faith, not the population's

Find the records

Family history research for Guinea-Bissau lives in a different project, Record Atlas, which maps which archive actually holds the paper for a given place and era.

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