The logic of division has worked in Europe. Who really considers Belgium for example, to be too small? (If anything, that country's political problems come from being too big, and it is many ways already divided in two.) Or Finland, which is home to far fewer Finnish speakers than there are Igbo speakers living in an area of Nigeria my wife sometimes calls "Igboland." And, besides, why should size be any objection in a world that cheered the birth of Slovenia and Slovakia? Did not the independence of tiny Kosovo receive the full measure of support from the very Western nations who worry that Africa might someday fracture into a hundred nations or more?

In a world where this is a Finland, cannot Sudan's region of Darfur, which is as large France, be a nation? Or the perilous region of Sudan that sits above the South and is home to the much-aggrieved Nubian people? Or could not northern Nigerian, with its 60 million Muslims and its vast farm lands, not be in its own nation? Or Casamance, a part of Senegal split from its mother ship by the Gambia? And might even the continual crisis in Somalia become somehow more understandable, more tolerable, if the international community would recognize as nation-states the two breakaway Somali states (Somaliland and Puntland), which, unlike the region dominated by Mogadishu, are performing relatively well economically and socially?

These are not musings of the foolish or irresponsible. Africans are hungry for new political arrangements -- in the Congo, Nigeria, in Somalia, and what remains of Sudan. But there's a major barrier preventing Africans from creating political arrangements that might better serve them socially, economically, and culturally: Western nations. What Jeffrey Herbst, the president of Colgate and an important scholar on African politics, wrote ten years ago, in a paper on "rethinking African sovereignty," is even truer today. "It is likely that if the United States and other powers were to finally cast aside the old practices [of treating a sovereign African nation-state as sovereign forever] they would find many African countries eager to explore political arrangements that were not so directly tied to the boundaries established by the colonialists."

Secession might not always be the best form for these new arrangements. Perhaps some kind of association between areas bordering one another would do. Consider Eastern Congo, which is today one of the poorest, worst-run places in the world. How could independence make things better in a country dominated by war-lords, pillaging soldiers, awful governance, and relentless poverty? Well, to find the silver lining just look at a map. Eastern Congo, which is terribly distant from the Congolese capital of Kinshasa, covers a vast area with a favorable climate, rich natural resources, and motivated trading partners (albeit located to the east). The chief partner could well be Rwanda -- a relatively rapidly growing, resource-poor country -- which the people of Eastern Congo can easily reach through the border city of Goma. Rwanda, under President Paul Kagame, has turned Anglophone and forged extensive trade networks with Tanzania and Kenya, both with seaports, and with Uganda, which has a large domestic market. Rwanda also has joined the East African trade community (EAC), which generally means no duties or restrictions on movements of goods or people between these countries. By integrating economically with neighboring Rwanda, the vast resources and human initiative of Eastern Congo would be linked physically, socially, economically, and legally with East Africa, perhaps the most thriving, rapidly-growing economic block in sub-Saharan Africa.