Cross-Border Lives and the Complications of Citizenship

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that in the 1960s and 1970s, the postcolonial state in Guinea and the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau came to define national belonging through ideas of “sacrificial citizenship,” ideas that did not correspond with how many borderland residents saw their own geographies. Borderland residents used the border to, for the most part, ignore or complicate territorial concepts of national belonging, while informally putting forward their own geographic conceptions and networks. The history of cross-border migration and mobility during this period illustrates the unfinished nature of postcolonial ideas of citizenship and belonging, and the alternative communities and imaginaries that borderland residents developed after independence in parallel to the modern nation-state. These cross-border networks and spaces offer an example of the contestation of sovereignty and the nation-state in the decades immediately following the independence of West African states.