How Africa divides into regions

Where the catalogue draws the northern edge

Africa is bounded by the Atlantic to the west, the Mediterranean to the north, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to the east, and by the meeting of the Atlantic and Indian oceans to the south. Only the northern edge needs a decision, and the decision is made on political grounds rather than physical ones: a country is filed once, under the continent that holds its government, and the same rule sends Türkiye and Russia to Europe. Each of those pages records the reasoning rather than repeating the argument here.

The regions inside the continent are drawn no more finely than the material supports. North Africa holds Egypt and Sudan. The Maghreb holds Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia together with Western Sahara. The Horn is kept apart from East Africa, Central Africa from West Africa, and Southern Africa from both, which gives eight groups where a reader looking for one country would otherwise face fifty-eight.

What sits here that is not a state

The roster records three dependencies on this continent and the state each answers to: Mayotte and Réunion under France, and Saint Helena under the United Kingdom. Saint Helena has a region to itself, the South Atlantic, because the nearest mainland is a very long way off. Western Sahara is recorded as disputed, which is a status rather than a verdict, and the record says so without taking a side.

Two of the four appear on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, which has run since 1946 and still carries seventeen entries worldwide. Saint Helena and Western Sahara are on it. Mayotte and Réunion are not, and the difference between being on that list and being governed from another capital is exactly the sort of thing a catalogue should record and not resolve.

Why the grouping carries no argument

The UN Statistics Division publishes the M49 standard, which assigns every country and territory to a region and states plainly that the assignment is a statistical convenience implying nothing about political affiliation. This catalogue takes the same position. A continent here is a way of finding a page rather than a claim about what its members have in common, and the regions below it exist because thirty-five groups can be browsed where five cannot.