UN West Africa counts sixteen states from Sahara to Atlantic
Western Africa, in United Nations usage, groups sixteen countries from Benin and Burkina Faso through Nigeria and Senegal to Cape Verde. Historic empires such as Mali and Gao controlled gold, ivory, and other trade at the crossroads between North Africa and the southern Sahel.
The dry Sahara to the north and east sends the Harmattan winds, while the Atlantic to the south and west brings seasonal monsoons. Between them lie belts of tropical forest, savanna and drylands, with the Sahel crossing several countries, supporting pangolins, rhinos and elephants. Deforestation, overfishing, mining pollution, plastics and climate change now threaten that biodiversity.
Archaic humans using Acheulean tools may have lived across the region from at least 780,000 years ago. Middle Stone Age peoples, such as those at Iwo Eleru, were gradually replaced by Late Stone Age newcomers as wetter conditions spread the forest; hunter-gatherers reached coastal West Africa by 12,000 years ago and moved north into Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania over the next four millennia. Niger-Congo speakers at Ounjougou in Mali made Africa’s earliest known pottery by at least 9400 BCE, and the Thiaroye figurine from Senegambia, around 2000 BCE, may be the region’s oldest statuette.
Centralised societies followed, beginning with Dhar Tichitt around 1600 BC and Djenné-Djenno from 300 BC, then the Ghana Empire, which flourished roughly from the second to the twelfth century and gave way to Mali. By the ninth century, Arab writers counted three great kingdoms in the lands south of the Sahara: Ghana, Gao and Kanem. Historians often divide the whole story into five eras: prehistory, Iron Age empires, flourishing polities in contact with outsiders, colonial rule, and independence.
European contact drew local economies into the Atlantic slave trade, and after it ended in the early nineteenth century, France and Britain extracted cocoa, coffee, timber and minerals as colonial rulers of nearly the entire region. Today Nigeria, with more than 242 million people, is Africa’s most populous country, while Niger and Mali rank among the lowest in human development.
Source: West Africa
