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Western Africa
Sixteen states on the great bulge, from desert to rainforest
Western Africa fills the continent's great Atlantic bulge, and the UN counts sixteen states there: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d'Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo, with the remote island of Saint Helena tacked on. It is the most populous subregion in Africa, roughly 450 million people, and one country holds more than half of them — Nigeria alone accounts for some 237 million. The region reads in horizontal bands, from Saharan sand in the north through the semi-arid Sahel to a humid, forested coast where nearly every capital city sits.
The Niger River is the organizing feature, rising in the Guinea highlands, curving improbably northeast into the desert at Timbuktu, then bending south through Niger and Nigeria to a vast delta on the Atlantic. Rainfall increases sharply from north to south, so a traveler crossing Mali or Nigeria passes from dune to thorn scrub to savanna to rainforest within a few hundred kilometers. Highlands are modest — Chappal Waddi on the Nigeria-Cameroon frontier, at roughly 2,419 meters, is the tallest thing here — and much of the land is low plateau. The coast is a warm, wet, hurricane-free shore of lagoons, mangrove, and one of the most crowded urban corridors on earth.
The historic empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai grew rich on trans-Saharan gold and salt, and their trading cities left libraries at Timbuktu that scholars still work through. European slavers and later colonial powers carved the coast into strips, which is why the modern map is a set of narrow rectangles reaching inland from the sea, and why the linguistic border between anglophone and francophone Africa runs in vertical stripes. Today ECOWAS binds most of the region economically, oil dominates Nigeria, cocoa dominates Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, and the Sahelian north faces drought, jihadist insurgency, and a run of coups. The line between Western Africa and the Sahel is a matter of rainfall, not politics, and it moves.