Following the assassinations on 1 March of Guinea-Bissau’s President João ‘Nino’ Vieira and military chief General Batista Tagmé Na Wai, the Goree Institute’s Waly Ndiaye analyses some of the underlying causes of the country’s troubled history since its independence in 1974, and asks whether the deaths of these two men – whose personal rivalry helped tear apart political life – have created an opportunity to build Guinea-Bissau into a modern state.