Originating from the Eastern Horn of Africa (EHOA) region, Ethiopians comprise the second largest group of migrants in Kenya and South Africa - whose majority double up as refugees and economic migrants. This paper presents a multi-sited ethnographical discussion of Ethiopian cross-border experiences of belonging and everyday practices of multiple citizenship(s) beyond their nation of origin. It explores Ethiopian enclaves of Jeppestown and Yeoville in Johannesburg, South Africa, and the cosmopolitan transit localities of Eastleigh and Kilimani in Nairobi, Kenya - spaces and communities which provide insights into how transnational socialities, belonging and ideological social citizenships are experienced, negotiated and practised by Ethiopian migrants. In this paper, I argue that multi-national networks, socialities and communities that Ethiopians strategically build or become part of, provide physical and socio-economic anchorage, produce inclusion and emplacements, and legitimise their social and political membership in multiple transnational places they are part of. Further, I discuss the experiences and practices of belonging of Ethiopians as construed through their deliberate migration into specific and familiar social and spatial enclaves; participation in strategic and cyclical contestation of socio-political emplacements as witnessed through the process of documentation and struggle for recognition as trans-citizens. These modes of belonging experienced individually, communally or through social institutions legitimise their presence; produce fluid and often stratified social ordering; hierarchical claim to a common global citizenry, and pragmatically pave the way for the making of liveable lives.