In the Chapter 4, I pointed out that the colonial authorities needed to be mindful of the policies that were effected on the opposite side of a given border. Populations proved themselves highly adept at exploiting the points of divergence. In a seminal article on migration as revolt, A.I. Asiwaju drew attention to the multiple ways in which West Africans turned mobility to their advantage by escaping across colonial borders.1 In this chapter and the next, I confirm the applicability of this insight to the Senegambia and the trans-Volta. But I also want to go beyond documenting forms of resistance. Practical governance arose out of the quotidian interplay between state actors and those who populated, moved through and traded within the borderlands.