This dissertation explores the local dynamics of colonial administration in Guinea-Bissau between 1961 and 1974, focusing on the particular case of the district of Cacheu. Its scope includes the low-ranking state officials, their African intermediaries, as well as the rural populations they administered.It argues that the late colonial state in Guinea-Bissau kept administering colonial population and territories in a way very similar to the one of the early times of colonial presence. Despite the abolition of the Native Statute in 1961, a significant part of the African population remained under customary law, meaning the administration’s arbitrary authority. It also demonstrates how the Portuguese late colonial state fostered the maintenance of intermediary African structures, namely chieftaincies, which confirms the permanent fragility (and capacity of adaptation) of the late colonial state on the local level, subject to a permanent tension between regulations and administration decisions and shortcomings and unwanted reactions.