ABSTRACT
While organized crime activity persists in one form or another in most regions of the African continent, this chapter focuses on regions where patterns of criminality are most recognizable and have had the most continuity over time. West Africa is a region of sixteen nations with more than 300 million people, all scoring poorly on most human development indexes. West African drug traffickers have benefited from a number of factors that have forced Latin American drug trafficking organizations to reconfigure their smuggling routes. A number of international syndicates have become involved in the smuggling of diamonds, including Russian, Chinese, Italian, and African organizations. The illegal export of oil, more commonly known as bunkering, has become a major problem in Nigeria, which for many years was the region's only producer of oil. In the 1980s, indigenous crime networks emerged in most South African countries. East Africa has been home to heroin traffickers for over thirty years.
