Publisher's Synopsis
During colonization, the development of French-speaking Africa was conceived in the form of large groups: the AOF and the AEF. With independence, each territory, in order to fully express its sovereignty, broke away from these groups, further fragmenting the continent. But very quickly, certain African leaders such as L. S. Senghor of Senegal and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had demonstrated the necessity of regrouping. The latter, in his posthumous book Africa must unite (Nkrumah 2001), advocated African unity. But integration is not the result of colonization. This notion, which existed long before colonization through trade, had been completely distorted by the erection of colonial borders (Goeh-Akué 2009: 16). It had taken on a new form insofar as one could observe the same people on both sides of the borders and peoples who previously could not get along were forced to live together.
