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Middle Africa
The rainforest heart of the continent, drained by the Congo
Middle Africa is the UN's name for what almost everyone else calls Central Africa: Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. Nine countries, about 217 million people, and a single dominant fact — the Congo Basin, the second-largest tract of tropical rainforest on the planet, a carbon sink and biodiversity reservoir whose fate matters to everyone. The DR Congo, mineral-rich and desperately governed, is by itself larger than Western Europe and holds more than half the region's people.
The Congo River gives the region its shape, looping across the equator twice as it drains a basin of some 3.7 million square kilometers, and carrying more water to the sea than any river but the Amazon. Around the basin the land rises: to the Adamawa plateau in Cameroon, to the highlands of Angola, and in the far east to the glaciated Rwenzori range, where Margherita Peak reaches 5,109 meters on the Ugandan border. Chad, at the northern edge, is not rainforest at all but Sahara and Sahel, and the shrinking of Lake Chad has become a slow disaster for the fishers and herders who depend on it. Equatorial rain falls year-round through the middle.
Timber, oil, cobalt, copper, coltan, and diamonds have made the region a byword for the resource curse. The Congo Free State, run as King Leopold II's private estate, was among the most brutal colonial regimes ever assembled, and the DR Congo's eastern provinces have not known a settled peace since the 1990s. Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, thinly populated and sitting on offshore oil, have some of the highest per-capita incomes in Africa alongside some of the widest inequality. Where Middle Africa ends is a genuinely open question: Chad is often filed under the Sahel, Angola under Southern Africa, and the African Union's own Central Africa region does not match the UN's.