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

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:

There 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?