ABSTRACT
The Sahara Desert, which stretches across northern Africa from the Atlantic in the west to the Red Sea in the east, roughly between 15° and 20° North of the Equator, has a very low density of population. It separates the northern tier of African countries bordering the Mediterranean from the rest of the continent. Six countries in northern Africa-Western Sahara, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt-have been grouped in this book with the countries of Southwest Asia (see Chapter 13), with which they have many features in common. The boundary between these countries and their neighbours to the south is taken as the northern limit of the major world region of ‘Africa south of the Sahara’, a description I prefer to ‘sub-Saharan Africa’. Figure 12.1 shows the countries of the region. Excluding those of North Africa, there are over fifty distinct states in the continent, including two groups of small islands in the Atlantic, as well as Madagascar and three other smaller island groups in the Indian Ocean. The number could grow. Eritrea became independent from Ethiopia in 1993 and Soma liland (formerly British Somaliland) is seeking independence from Somalia.
