For over three decades, African regional integration has been interpreted through a linear Balassian framework assuming staged progression toward supranational authority. This paper argues that this lens misreads African regionalism by obscuring the distributed functional mechanisms through which integration actually unfolds. Integration advances primarily through sector-specific coordination initiatives. Transport corridors, energy pools, digital payment infrastructures, joint border management arrangements, and selective regulatory mechanisms are generating measurable integration effects on the ground, often emerging independently of formal treaty processes. African regionalism is better understood as a spatial-functional configuration that cannot be captured by linear, stage-based models of integration. The paper advances the concept of modular convergence, in which integration is driven by interlocking functional domains shaped by operational necessity and emergent opportunities for cooperation across space.

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