Having highlighted the role of colonial states in either facilitating or inhibiting mobility, I now consider the implications for framings of identity in the two regions concerned. As I have indicated in Chapter 2, the demography of frontier zones in the nineteenth century was often highly fluid, and this was accentuated by the political turbulence around the time when the borders were being demarcated. In that sense, the cherished notion that fixed communities were destabilized by the imposition of colonial borders is somewhat problematic. Whereas flight and displacement had been a feature of the frontier regions in the later nineteenth century, colonial regimes had an interest in fixing populations in productive spaces whilst regulating the flow of migrants. Whether people were at liberty to cross a border and to access land on the other side, or not, had a very practical bearing on the issue of what it meant to claim membership of a community. In the trans-Volta, as we will see, the casting of settlers as strangers entailed a perpetual disability, whereas a more open regime in the Senegambia tended to erode the distinction between indigenes and more recent arrivals. In the first case strangers tended to be sectioned off in distinct residential quarters, whereas in the second the settlement patterns were more interspersed. This, in turn, had a bearing on the practical salience that was attached to ethnicity when projected onto a larger canvas.