Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is the name given to everything on the continent lying below the Sahara, which means the region is defined less by what it contains than by what stands to the north of it. That is the first thing worth saying about it, and the most contested: a line drawn by a desert has been asked to carry the weight of culture, race, religion, and economics, and it buckles under the load. Critics note that the term lumps 49 countries and well over a thousand languages into a single residual category, and that the Sahara has always worked as a corridor of trade rather than a wall. No other shorthand for this immense, young, fast-growing part of the world has stuck.

The region sprawls across roughly 24.3 million square kilometers, from the scrub of the desert's southern rim to the Cape of Good Hope, and takes in nearly every landscape the planet offers: the Congo rainforest, the Serengeti grasslands, the Kalahari, the Ethiopian Highlands, the Rift Valley lakes, and the snows of Kilimanjaro at 5,895 meters. The Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi drain it, and the equator runs through its middle. Where exactly it starts is argued case by case. Sudan and Mauritania straddle the divide and get sorted differently by the UN, the World Bank, and most atlases, because the desert thins gradually into the Sahel rather than ending at any line a cartographer could honestly draw.

Home to about 1.29 billion people and the youngest population on earth, Sub-Saharan Africa is where the demographic center of humanity is shifting. Its median age is under twenty, and Lagos, Kinshasa, and Nairobi are growing faster than almost any cities anywhere. The region holds the deepest human ancestry, the oldest surviving lineages of our species, and a linguistic inheritance of some 1,500 to 2,000 tongues, among them the Bantu languages that spread across half a continent in a few thousand years. Colonial borders, carved up in Berlin in the 1880s, still shape its politics. Its economies run from South African industry and Nigerian oil to smallholder farming, and its cobalt, platinum, and copper underwrite much of the global energy transition.