In December 1970, Birgitta Dahl – a 33-year-old Swedish Social Democrat and recently-elected Member of the Swedish Parliament – was trekking through the dense forests of Guinea-Bissau, wearing the uniform of the liberation movement led by Amílcar Cabral, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). By her side was the photographer Knut Andreassen, a political scientist called Lars Rudebeck, a Social Democratic Youth Party activist called Gunnar Hofring, and soldiers of the PAIGC. The recently liberated terrain was hotly contested by the Portuguese army, and the Swedish visitors felt the presence of war. In the book they published on their return to Sweden, Dahl and Andreassen vividly depict the Portuguese reconnaissance planes that were regularly spotted above the canopy during daytime, the Alouette helicopters that fluttered across rice paddy fields, and the Fiat bombers that roared past on their trek. The idea of Dahl, a Swedish social democrat, trekking with and donning the uniform of an armed revolutionary movement in Africa might seem almost fantastical today. Such stories and images can have a tendency to prompt imaginations of an era of solidarity and anticolonial struggle that no longer exists. But what does Dahl’s trip reveal about the politics of solidarity that connected her to the anticolonial national liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau? How might dissecting the conditions and motivations of the various agents involved allow us to see beyond romanticised or nostalgic visions of such past encounters?