For centuries, Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast region has been the site of regional and global interactions, with societies from different parts of the African continent and beyond engaging in economic trade, cultural exchange and various forms of conflict. This book provides a wide-ranging look at how such encounters have continued into the present day, identifying the disruptions and continuities in religion, language, economics and various other social phenomena. These accounts show a region that, while still grappling with the legacies of colonialism and the slave trade, is both shaped by and an important actor within ever-denser global networks, exhibiting consistent transformation and creative adaptation.

List of Maps and Figures

Introduction: The Upper Guinea Coast in Global Perspective
Jacqueline Knörr and Christoph Kohl

PART I: CREOLE CONNECTIONS

Chapter 1. Towards a Definition of Transnational as a Family Construct: An Historical and Micro Perspective
Bruce L. Mouser

Chapter 2. Lusocreole Culture and Identity Compared: The Cases of Guinea-Bissau and Sri Lanka
Christoph Kohl

Chapter 3. Freetown’s Yoruba-modelled Secret Societies as Transnational and Trans-ethnic Mechanisms for Social Integration
Nathaniel King

PART II: DIASPORIC ENTANGLEMENTS

Chapter 4. Contested Transnational Spaces: Debating Emigrants‘ Citizenship and Role in Guinean Politics
Anita Schroven

Chapter 5. Identity beyond ID – Diaspora within the Nation
Markus Rudolf

Chapter 6. The African ‘Other’ in the Cape Verde Islands: Interaction, Integration and the Forging of an Immigration Policy
Pedro F. José-Marcelino

Chapter 7. Celebrating Asymmetries – Creole Stratification and the Regrounding of Home in Cape Verdean Migrant Return Visits
Heike Drotbohm

PART III: TRAVELLING MODELS

Chapter 8. Travelling Terms: Analysis of Semantic Fluctuations in the Atlantic World
Wilson Trajano Filho

Chapter 9. Rice and Revolution: Agrarian Life and Global Food Policy on the Upper Guinea Coast
Joanna Davidson

Chapter 10. Transnational and Local Models of Non-Refoulement: Youth and Women in the Moral Economy of Patronage in Post-War Liberia and Sierra Leone
William P. Murphy

Chapter 11. Expanding the Space for Freedom of Expression in Post-war Sierra Leone
Sylvanus Spencer

Chapter 12. Sierra Leone, Child Soldiers, and Global Flows of Child Protection Expertise
Susan Shepler

PART IV: INTERREGIONAL INTEGRATION

Chapter 13. The ‘Mandingo Question’: Transnational Ethnic Identity and Violent Conflict in an Upper Guinea Border Area*
Christian K. Højbjerg†

Chapter 14. Solo Darboe, Former Diamond Dealer: Transnational Connections and Home Politics in the Twentieth-Century Gambia
Alice Bellagamba

Chapter 15. Market Networks and Warfare: A Comparison of the Seventeenth Century Blade Weapons Trade and the Nineteenth Century Firearms Trade in the Casamance
Peter Mark and José da Silva Horta

Notes on Contributors
Index

*This chapter is not available in the open access edition due to rights restrictions. It is accessible in the print edition, spanning pages 255-279.