WESTERN AFRICA

also called West Africa region of the western African continent comprising, in the Encyclopdia Britannica, the countries of Benin, Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta), Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Cte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Excluded here is the Western (former Spanish) Sahara, which is often placed within the region although its cultural orientation is toward North Africa. The 19 countries of western Africa occupy an area of about 3,068,400 square miles (7,947,000 square km). 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 of 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). 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 Sngal 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 Berbers of the Semito-Hamitic language family predominate. South of a line connecting the course of the Sngal 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 and tribal mosaic but may often be conveniently classified by their individual languages. Evidence of the earliest human habitation of the region has been best preserved in the Sahara, where stone tools and rock paintings attest to Paleolithic hunters and gatherers between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago. They were succeeded by Neolithic pastoralists (the Sahara then had a far more hospitable climate) during the last 10,000 years. Because most of these peoples were nonliterate, they left few records of the period up to about AD 1000, when Arab historians and scholars began describing a western African region that already possessed centralized states, agriculture, and long-distance trading routes. From the 11th to 16th century these kingdoms of the savanna, Sudan, and southern Saharachief of which were those of Mali, Songhai, and the Hausa Bakwai statesgrew, coalesced, divided, and waned. Toward the end of this period, trading contacts with European powers began to grow around the coastal periphery of the Guinea coast and elsewhere, gradually supplanting the trans-Saharan caravan routes with the waning Arab states of North Africa. During the 15th and 16th centuries, gold was the principal attraction for the European powers, but this gave way in the 17th century to the slave trade, which predominated by the 18th century. European colonialism became aggressive during the second half of the 19th century, and by World War I most of the native states had become colonial possessions of the French, British, Germans, Portuguese, and other European powers. Liberia was the only independent state during this period. Great economic advances occurred during the interwar period, but these were exploitive in nature and tended to result in structural imbalances in the local national economies. After World War II the climate of world opinion, the interwar growth of indigenous nationalist movements in many of the countries of the region, and the emergence of local bureaucracies led to the divestiture by the European powers of their western African colonies. Ghana became the first British colony in western Africa to reach independence (in 1957), and it was followed by Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), and The Gambia (1965). Most of France's colonial possessions in the region reached independence in 1960, and thus the nations of Dahomey (now Benin), Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso), Cameroon, Chad, Ivory Coast (Cte d'Ivoire), Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, and Togo came into being. The Portuguese did not relinquish their possessions until guerrilla warfare forced them out. Guinea-Bissau achieved independence in 1974, and Cape Verde in 1975. Spanish-held Equatorial Guinea attained independence in 1968. In the first 25 years of independence there were few successes in the struggle for economic development, and most efforts toward local development were negated by political instability, bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption, tribalism, natural disasters, and the economic dependency of many countries on a single agricultural or mineral export. There were some successes, however, particularly among the former French colonies; Cte d'Ivoire and Cameroon were notable for their stable governments and for their pragmatic development strategies, which concentrated on export-oriented tropical agriculture as the basis of foreign-exchange earnings. The Sahel states of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, and Niger were perhaps the most unfortunate, since these semiarid countries had limited food-producing resources to begin with and were extremely vulnerable to drought and to desertification. Pop. (1994 est.) 206,123,000.