ABSTRACT
Introductory West Africa is the territory which bounds the Gulf of Guinea on the north. From east to west it extends roughly 2, 700 kilometres, from Cap Vert to the Cameroons Mountains. Its north-south width is less, at a maximum r,350 kilometres, because it is rightly considered to cease at the River Niger and the edge of the Sahara. The Sahara itself is not properly a part of West Africa, although colonial frontiers by chance included large blocks of it in the West African territories, Mauritania and Niger which are almost wholly Saharan, and a big wedge north of the Niger bend which was attached to the French Sudan. But the ecology and human geography of the desert is entirely different from that of the cultivated savannah and forest; and there is evidence that in pluvial times, when the Sahara was more densely populated by animals and plants as well as by man, it enjoyed on the whole a winter rainfall and so formed a projection of the Mediterranean Maghreb rather than of the West African tropics.
