The need for [revival] regional integration has never seemed so pressing on the African continent, yet the numerous programmes and institutions have achieved very little since índependence. Regionalisation reveals itself in Sub-Saharan Africa through complex and often conflicting trends of interaction. Commitments to regional integration in Africa have been constrained by a highly ambivalent critique of the colonial heritage. At independence, the leaders of the new independent states readily acknowledged the disastrous effects of the partition of the continent, but were reluctant, if not totally unwilling, to support policies likely to restrain state sovereignty and, consecutively, their power.