Western Africa

Western Africa, region of the western African continent comprising the countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Western Africa is a term used in the Encyclopædia Britannica to designate a geographic region within the continent of Africa. The term West Africa is also often used to refer to this part of the continent. As conventionally understood, however, West Africa is primarily a political and economic designation and comprises all the areas considered here except Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Saharan parts of Mali, Mauritania, and Niger.

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  The countries of western Africa.

  Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The region may be divided into several broad physiographic regions. The northern portion of western Africa is composed of a broad band of semiarid terrain, called the western Sudan, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the area of Lake Chad on the east, a distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km). It is largely a plateau of modest elevation and borders the Sahara (desert) on the north and the Guinea Coast forests on the south. Rainfall in this region ranges from less than 10 inches (250 mm) in its arid northern reaches to about 50 inches (1,250 mm) in the south. The flora of the western Sudan consists of the scrub vegetation of the transitional zone known as the Sahel in the north and a mix of tall trees and high savanna grasslands in the south. Lying south of the western Sudan are the Guinea Coast equatorial forests, which flourish along the Atlantic coast and extend inland for about 100 to 150 miles (160 to 240 km).

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  Elevation of western Africa.

  Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Most of the Sahara and the transitional vegetational zones to its south (the Sahel and the western Sudan) are drained, where there is enough rainfall to support surface streams, either southward via the Niger River system or inland to the Lake Chad basin in the east. Along the better-watered Atlantic coastal areas, the chief features are (west to east) the Mauritanian-Senegal Basin, drained by the Sénégal River; the Fouta Djallon and Guinea Highlands; the Volta River and Niger River coastal plains; and the uplands of Nigeria’s Jos Plateau and the Cameroon Highlands.

Culturally, the people of the region belong for the most part to one of three major language families. In the northern and least-populous Saharan regions, Arabs and Imazighen (Berbers; singular Amazigh) of the Afro-Asiatic language family predominate. South of a line connecting the course of the Sénégal River, the Niger River, and the southern two-thirds of Nigeria, Niger-Congo languages are spoken. Along the middle course of the Niger River and around Lake Chad, Nilo-Saharan languages related to those of peoples farther east predominate. These peoples are divided into a very complex ethnic mosaic but may often be conveniently classified by their individual languages.

This article covers the history of the region primarily from the 11th century through the 20th century. Coverage of the region’s physical and human geography can be found in the article Africa. For discussion of the physical and human geography of individual countries in the region and of their postcolonial history, see Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Area 3,059,702 square miles (7,924,592 square km). Pop. (2014 est.) 375,477,000.

Muslims in western Africa

A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available about 1000 ce. Three centuries earlier the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to growing amounts of information about what they called the bilād al-sūdān, the territory of the black peoples south of the Sahara.

This information has its limitations. The Muslim writers, contemptuous of non-Islamic societies, passed on little of what they must have known about the organization of pagan black societies and tended to concentrate on and condemn what struck them as their more monstrous aberrations. Conversely, they doubtless exaggerated the importance of the Islamization that entered western Africa with the Muslim traders crossing the Sahara. The earliest firsthand account of western Africa is probably that of the world traveler Ibn Baṭṭūṭah, who visited the western Sudan in 1352–53. Finally, the North African merchants did not penetrate into western Africa beyond the urban centres of trade and government that existed or came to develop on the northern fringes of the cultivable savannas fronting the Sahara. Their bilād al-sūdān was in fact only the northern marches.

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Nevertheless, the picture of western Africa given in the early Muslim writings is of major interest. It is apparent that, right from the beginnings of Arab contact, the organization of the more northerly western African peoples was not solely tribal. They had considerable towns and cities that were supported by a developed agriculture. They had organized networks of markets and trade and a developed system of monarchical government. Kings, whose claim to power was based on descent from the mythical divine founding ancestors of their ethnic groups, taxed trade and levied tribute on the agricultural villages through their possession of bodies of retainers who provided them both with military force and with a hierarchy of officials.

It seems likely that there was an increase in the volume of trans-Saharan trade following the organization of North Africa under Muslim dynasties and that this growth of international trade with western Africa stimulated the growth there of internal trade, urbanization, and monarchical government. Certainly the control of trade, towns, and government in western Africa became increasingly Islamic in form. But it is quite clear that the foundations for the economic and political development of the western Sudan were in existence before the time of contact with Muslim traders or authors. Early Muslim interest was concentrated on two major western African kingdoms: Kanem, in the east, north of Lake Chad; and Ghana, in the extreme west, on the borders of modern Mauritania and Mali. The Muslim sources, which are broadly confirmed by local tradition, indicate that the kingdom of Kanem was being formed during the 9th and 10th centuries through an interaction between Saharan nomads and agricultural village communities. But ancient Ghana (not to be confused with its modern namesake, considerably farther to the south and east) had already reached levels of organization that presuppose several centuries of continuing development.

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  Distribution of the peoples of the western Sudan and locations of major historic states.

  Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.