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An Africa Beyond the ‘North’ and ‘Sub-Saharan’ Divide

AfricaDecember 24/January 25
Africa

Collage by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref: SMITHSONIAN LAB, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS

An Africa Beyond the ‘North’ and ‘Sub-Saharan’ Divide

Geography is political. Over the centuries, the borders of ‘sub-Saharan’ and ‘North’ Africa have shifted to serve expansionist agendas. Despite decolonization, these labels continue to be used today and have limited our conception of Africanness. Is it not time to change this?
Africa

Collage by Dami Mojid / THE REPUBLIC. Ref: SMITHSONIAN LAB, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

THE MINISTRY OF WORLD AFFAIRS

An Africa Beyond the ‘North’ and ‘Sub-Saharan’ Divide

Geography is political. Over the centuries, the borders of ‘sub-Saharan’ and ‘North’ Africa have shifted to serve expansionist agendas. Despite decolonization, these labels continue to be used today and have limited our conception of Africanness. Is it not time to change this?

Exactly three months before his assassination, the Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean revolutionary, Amílcar Cabral—whose centenary of birth fell on 14 September 2024—met with 120 representatives of Black organizations in the United States during a visit to New York on 20 October 1972. During his interaction with the public, a participant asked him: ‘Looking at Africa geographically, where does the PAIGC [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde] get most of its support: North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa?’ Cabral, whose movement was strongly backed by countries like Algeria and Ghana, pushed back against this suggestive framing: ‘We don’t like this division of Africa.’ 

With his answer, Cabral did not only acknowledge the reality that support for the liberation movement he belonged to was not determined by the location of countries vis-à-vis the Sahara as a dividing line; he also articulated his rejection of the separation as an expression of his ideological anti-colonialist position. Cabral was not the only one who adopted this posture among anti-colonial activists. In 1961, political philosopher, Franz Fanon, wrote: ‘African unity, that vague formula … whose operative value served to bring immense pressure to bear on colonialism.’ Later in 1963, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah posited that: 

(T)here is a tendency to divide Africa into fictitious zones north and south of the Sahara which emphasizes racial, religious, and cultural differences. The basic fallacy of these persuasions, dangerous to the independence of Africa in their shrewd exploitation of our pride and vanities, is the deliberate distortion of our vision of the African Union.

More than half a century later, the terms ‘North Africa’ and ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ are far from being relegated to history. Today, the debate over whether such constructs should be retained or abolished continues to be animated by geopolitical rivalries among African countries; domestic political ideologies; geopolitically debased interpretations of the root causes of the contemporary tragedies of migratory movements to the northern coast; influences from various socio-political movements, especially in the US; evolving identities; and even by the great game of football.  

As expressed by one of Africa’s greatest thinkers, Mahmood Mamdani: ‘Geography has a history, and we will do well to historicize the geographies of Africa.’ Indeed, understanding the contemporary debates and critiquing them must start by contextualizing the use of the terms historically. When was Africa first divided along those lines, and what motivated the distinction between the two sub-regions of a single continent? What shaped the evolution of the concept until today, and in what form does it continue to exist?  

A RACIALIZED GEOGRAPHY

The concept of ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ is relatively recent. The Economist first used it in 1938, and the term became a popular catchphrase for Africa south of the Sahara in the 1980s. But the notion of two (or more) Africas is older than a century. It simply evolved under different names including ‘black Africa’.  

Imperial cartography played an important role towards the end of the nineteenth century in shaping the concept. Cartographers used the term ‘North Africa’ as early as the 1830s; it divided the continent along the so-called ‘Soudan’ dividing line, stretching from the Gulf of Guinea until modern-day Ethiopia. Through cartography, Africa was cut and sliced using different categorizations, largely to serve colonialist ambitions as illustrated by John George Bartholomew’s map entitled the ‘Colonizability of Africa.’  

But cartography merely reflected the political ambitions of the different empires, as well as the dominant, racialized politico-philosophical thinking of the time, as theorized by the likes of German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. In 1837, Hegel ‘shifted’ the border of North Africa further north and argued that: 

Africa must be divided into three parts: one is that which lies south of the desert of Sahara—Africa proper—the Upland almost entirely unknown to us, with narrow coast-tracts along the sea; the second is that to the north of the desert—European Africa (if we may so call it)—a coastland; the third is the river region of the Nile, the only valley-land of Africa, and which is in connection with Asia. 

Much of Hegel’s theorization of ‘Africa proper’ and ‘European Africa’ is motivated by a racialized reconfiguration of the continent. In his writing, Hegel argued that North Africans are ‘not strictly Africans, that is, negroes, but are skin to Europeans.’ This marked a shift from the predominant conception of North Africans as ‘people of the Barbary’; the term used since the Roman Empire to refer to the areas inhabited by the indigenous population of the Maghreb—in particular, the Amazigh, whom the Romans judged to be ‘barbaric’. Hegel’s conceptual shift was arguably not accidental but rather an attempt to pave the way for the colonial integration of North Africa into European territories. As he argued: ‘The northern part of Africa … must be attached to Europe.’ The French colonization of Algeria would later try to translate this into reality through the creation of l’Algerie Francaise (French Algeria).  

The division of Africa also served the colonial project in West Africa. The administrator of the French colonial mission in Senegal, Général Louis Faidherbe, wrote in 1889: ‘To the north of the Sahara, the white man … to the south of the Sahara, the black man.’ Like Hegel, he also sought to break away from the past Roman conception, but by Europeanizing North Africans to justify the colonization of West Africa. He wrote: ‘There is nothing, for example, most dissimilar in the world than Berbérie and the Sudan.’ He also argued that there are ‘two parts of the world,’ divided by a ‘Sahara’ whose, ‘barrier is more serious than a (Mediterranean) sea,’ separating Europe from North Africa. Marking the racial reclassification of the North African, Faidherbe depicted them as, ‘the White man, active, industrious, resilient, struggling against nature and often modifying its laws,’ and arguing that ‘south of the Sahara, the Black man who, in his apathy, submits to nature as a slave … whose intelligence is comparable to that of many white races but who, lacking character, will always be subjected to other races.’ 

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UNRESOLVED COLONIAL LEGACIES

The French had thus skilfully applied the divide and rule approach, making West Africans fear the ‘extension of the white man’: the North African. As colonization took root in the twentieth century, the tactic was then reversed. Imposed racial divisions between North Africans and particularly West Africans were instrumentalized, and the colonization of the latter was used to entrench colonization in the former. 

North African memory, although now fading away with the passing of the generation that lived through colonialism, vividly recalls the role played by the Tirailleurs from West African colonies, as the French deployed their ‘pacification’ campaigns in their North African colonies and protectorates. Much of the memory of North African elders of West Africans centred on the latter’s perceived role as powerful instruments of the colonial power, not realizing that these confrontations were part and parcel of colonial ideology themselves.  

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon summed up the practice well when he wrote: ‘We said earlier that some incidents (the North Africans despised black men) had surprised us. Every time there was a rebellion, the military authorities sent only the coloured soldiers to the front line. It is the “people of colour” who annihilated the attempts at liberation by other “peoples of colour.”’  

Thus, for the West African, the North African was the ‘extension of the White man’, and for the North African, the West African came to be perceived as the agent of the colonial power. This colonial manipulation has left an enduring legacy of misperception and misrepresentation that has permeated throughout post-independence Africa. As Africans, we are yet to confront this legacy and its influence on our collective memory. 

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THE DE-AFRICANIZATION OF NORTH AFRICA

Based on colonial conceptions of race, North Africa was instrumentally de-Africanized in order to justify to Europeans that it was acceptable to integrate the region into their geography. To borrow the concept proposed by academic Mohamed Amer Meziane in his 2022 paper, this constituted the ‘invention of North Africa’ as a racially, culturally, religiously and historically unique region of the continent deserving of a separate status. The geography of North Africa was further shaped by orientalism, which adjoined it to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf through the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) moniker. The direct impact, which has endured until today, has been the erasure, in particular, of the Maghreb culture and identity.  

This framing of North Africa continues to shape narratives around Africanness and further entrenches a representation of Africa as two distinct regions along the lines of Hegelian theory. In his famous speech delivered in Cairo in 1967 entitled ‘The Foundations of “Africanité” or “Négritude” and “Arabité”’, Senegalese leader and key thinker of the Negritude movement, Léopold Sédar Senghor, sought to find ‘cultural’ bridges between North Africa and ‘the rest’. But in attempting to do so, he further entrenched an orientalist conception of North Africa by ‘urging’ North Africans to ‘become rooted in Arabité.’ Senghor’s view might have been influenced by the fashion of the time in some North African countries. After all, he was speaking in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt—the father of pan-Arabism, which would later also become fashionable under Houari Boumediene’s Algeria.  

The de-Africanization of North Africa should indeed also be contextualized within the domestic political motivations of consecutive ideologies among post-independence North African leaders. As some North African countries turned to pan-Arabism as a national ideology and sought to fit their diverse populations into a constructed definition of Arabness, much of the Amazigh character of the Maghreb in particular (stretching from Morocco to Libya) faced temporary erasure. As populations (both Amazigh and Arabic-speaking) have come to assert their identity as belonging to the Amazigh heritage, the discussion on geographic belonging is being shaped internally from within these countries and such debates continue to unfold today. 

Religion has historically also played a role in the de-Africanization of North Africa. Islam came to be associated with the predominantly Muslim population of the North as a perceivably unique characteristic that justified a different status for the region. Colonialists distinguished between Islam in North Africa and ‘Black Islam’, arguing that the latter was marginally practised and less ‘aggressive’. ‘North African’ Islam, however, was associated with the unifying ideology that enabled the conquests of North Africans (the ‘Moors’—a designation used by Christian Europeans for the Muslim populations of the Maghreb) of the Iberian Peninsula as well as anti-colonialism. This led colonial powers such as France to introduce policies to control it (for example through public ownership of the mosques in North Africa and Madrasas in West Africa).  

Today, 260 million of the 440 million Africans who identify as Muslim reside in countries other than those on the continent’s northern shores. This is not surprising. While much attention has been drawn to North Africa’s ties with the Arabo-Muslim world, thus justifying its ‘otherness’, regions such as the East African coast, which have experienced a similar level of linguistic, cultural and ethnic influence, have not faced similar dilemmas. Religion has also led North Africa to be associated with the Arab slave trade. Admittedly, historical religious conquests, whether Muslim or Christian, have all been brutal. Muslim conquests invaded various African ethnic groups: those in North Africa and other parts of Africa alike. While the result of this was the Arabization of North Africa’s indigenous population, East Africans also maintained the Bantu language character while blending elements of Arabic into what we know today as Swahili. 

The historical role played by imperialism and its links to slavery also need to be recognized. As argued by W.E.B Du Bois, one of the fathers of pan-Africanism, ‘in this whole story of the so-called “Arab slave trade,” the truth has been strangely twisted,’ he wrote, ‘Arab slave trading was at the beginning, and largely towards the end, a secondary result of British and American slavery and the slave trade, and specifically was based on American demand for ivory.’ On its part, the so-called Barbary slave trade largely associated with North Africa, which was practised well into the Ottoman rule of North Africa and led by pirates (the corsairs), focused on slavery from Europe, stretching as far as countries like Ireland and Iceland.  

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PAN-AFRICANIST THOUGHT

Consecutive reflections of pan-Africanist thinkers have, perhaps unwillingly, also entrenched a division of the continent separating ‘Africa proper’ from a de-Africanized North Africa. The internalized ‘whiteness’ of North Africa came to be juxtaposed with the Negritude movement. While the latter was conceived by some, like the Martinican Aimé Cesaire, as ‘a way of living history within history … That is to say, that Negritude in its initial stage can be defined as a sudden awareness of difference, as a collective memory, as loyalty, and last, as a form of solidarity’; it also came to be seen as what Fanon referred to as ‘racial essentialism’.  

Much of this debate is still alive today. The failure to bring the divided parts of the continent in dialogue with one another and to not only acknowledge colonial racialization but also accept that two realities can exist simultaneously, without denying the Africanness of other Africans, has arguably contributed to keeping the constructs of ‘North’ and ‘sub-Saharan’ Africa alive.  

OUR TURN TO DEFINE

For much of our modern history, Africa’s internal borders, both physical and metaphorical, have been drawn for us. Even our current regional organizational structures, it could be argued, have been defined in several cases along neo-colonial lines that render such regional constructs more geopolitically instrumental for non-African actors in contemporary times. Whether intentional or as a result of inertia, these lines have been moved to serve the purposes of external actors and feed their imaginations of who is an ‘African’. Until recent times, our diversity has been instrumentalized to argue for our differences and, one might contend, our tribalization. The tragedy is that many of us Africans have internalized such division and decontextualized it from history and political motivations.  But is it not finally time for us to move beyond the racialized divisions of our continent and assert a vision we own? Without wishing to dictate an answer on how the geography of the ‘Africa we own’ would look, I rather would provide elements of a framework to help us think about this centuries-old question.  

I would argue that we need to reflect on the question along the following five lines: space, people, culture, religion and geopolitics. Space: for our physical geography, recognized as a single continent. People: from the Amazigh (including those Arabized) of North Africa to the Xhosa of South Africa, while recognizing that each, with no exception, has been influenced by its individual history, without erasing their belonging to the continent. Culture: which is rich in its diversity and historical influences yet with many similarities that we would see if only we take time to decolonize our study of African cultures and free it from the Western gaze. Religion: for that North Africans share the same religion as West and East Africans. And finally, Geopolitics: just as it shaped the colonial division of Africa in the nineteenth century, geography is geopolitical. Thinking of Africa and its diversity in terms such as these can, perhaps, allow us to transcend conceptualizations of Africa that have not served us before and will never serve us in future⎈

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