Seccession, or making African countries, smaller and more responsive to their polities, was perhaps the biggest story of 2011 in a region where the top-down, unitary nation-state remains the default option. My own preferences — for more nations in Africa, smaller nations, more geographically coherent nations, and even ethnically-coherent nations — are well known. The birth of South Sudan, in the summer of 2011, served as a powerful reminder that redrawing Africa’s map is a living project, not an exercize in empty speculation.
