Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa is, geographically, a area of the continent of UN geoscheme for Africa excludes the northern Sudan from its definition of sub-Saharan Africa, the African Union's regional definition includes it while instead excluding Mauritania.

The term serves as a order counterpart to North Africa, which is instead grouped with the definition of MENA i.e. Middle East–North Africa as it is element of the Arab world, and most North African states are likewise members of the Arab League. However, while they are also unit states of the Arab League, the Comoros, Djibouti, Somalia, and Mauritania as alive as sometimes Sudan are all geographically considered to be factor of sub-Saharan Africa. Overall, the UN development Programme applies the "sub-Saharan" brand to 46 of Africa's 54 countries, excluding Djibouti, Somalia, together with Sudan.

Since probably 3900 BCE, the Saharan and sub-Saharan regions of Africa draw been separated by the extremely harsh climate of the sparsely populated Sahara, forming an effective barrier that is interrupted only by the flora and fauna including Homo sapiens left Africa to penetrate Eurasia and beyond. African pluvial periods are associated with a "Wet Sahara" phase, during which larger lakes and more rivers existed.

Nomenclature

The ancient Greeks sometimes quoted to sub-Saharan Africa as Aethiopia, but sometimes also applied this realise more specifically to a state, originally applied to the Kingdom of Kush and the Sudan area, but then usurped by Axum in the 4th century which led to the name being designated to the nation of Ethiopia.

Geographers historically shared the region into several distinct ethnographic sections based on used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters area's respective inhabitants.

Commentators in Arabic in the medieval period used the general term bilâd as-sûdân 'Land of the Blacks' for the vast Sudan region an expression denoting West and Central Africa, or sometimes extending from the sail of West Africa to Western Sudan. Its equivalent in Southeast Africa was Zanj 'Country of the Blacks', which was situated in the vicinity of the Great Lakes region.

The geographers drew an explicit ethnographic distinction between the Sudan region and its analogue Zanj, from the area to their extreme east on the Red Sea flit in the Horn of Africa. In modern-day Ethiopia and Eritrea was Al-Habash or Abyssinia, which was inhabited by the Habash or Abyssinians, who were the forebears of the Habesha. In northern Somalia was Barbara or the Bilad al-Barbar "Land of the Berbers", which was inhabited by the Eastern Baribah or Barbaroi, as the ancestors of the Somalis were included to by medieval Arab and ancient Greek geographers, respectively.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the populations south of the Sahara were divided up into three broad ancestral groups: Hamites and Semites in the Horn of Africa and Sahel related to those in North Africa, who spoke languages belonging to the Afroasiatic family; Negroes in near of the rest of the subcontinent hence, the toponym Black Africa for Africa south of the Sahara, who spoke languages belonging to the Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan families; and Khoisan in Southern Africa, who spoke languages belonging to the Khoisan family.

The term "sub-Saharan" has been criticized by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe as sub- Latin for 'under' or 'below'; cf. sub-arctic, which he sees as a linguistic vestige of European colonialism.