What makes North Africa a region

Where the edges are drawn

The UN Statistics Division files Egypt and Sudan under Northern Africa in its M49 standard, together with Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Western Sahara, and states plainly that the assignment is a statistical convenience implying nothing about political affiliation. This catalogue divides that grouping in half. The Maghreb is a region of its own, and what remains under this heading is the pair of countries the Nile runs through.

The African Union sorts the same countries differently again. Its Northern region holds Egypt alongside Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and Tunisia. Sudan is not in it: the AU lists Sudan in its Eastern region, with Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and South Sudan. Both filings are recorded here and neither is corrected.

One river, counted at Aswan

The Blue Nile reaches Khartoum from the Ethiopian highlands and the White Nile from the equatorial lakes. The Atbara joins a few hundred kilometres downstream, and from there the river crosses about 2,700 kilometres of desert without receiving another perennial tributary.

The Agreement for the Full Utilization of the Nile Waters, signed at Cairo on 8 November 1959, is that river written as arithmetic. It set the mean natural supply at Aswan at 84 milliard cubic metres a year, subtracted 10 milliards for the losses expected from the reservoir the Aswan High Dam was about to create, and divided the remainder: 55.5 milliards a year to Egypt and 18.5 to Sudan. No other state in the basin was a party to it.

The reservoir crosses the border, and each country names its own half: Lake Nasser above the dam, Lake Nubia above the line. Filling it took the old town of Wadi Halfa and the villages along both banks, and about 50,000 Sudanese Nubians were moved from the Wadi Halfa district to Khashm el-Girba from January 1964. Both governments had asked UNESCO in 1959 for help with what stood in the flood zone. The campaign that followed opened on 8 March 1960 and closed on 10 March 1980, having lifted twenty-two architectural complexes to higher ground, Abu Simbel and Philae among them.

One border, drawn twice

The same administration drew the line between Egypt and Sudan twice. An agreement of 19 January 1899 defined Sudan as the territory south of the 22nd parallel, a straight cut across the desert. An arrete of 4 November 1902 replaced part of that with an administrative line following the ground the local tribes actually used.

Where the two versions disagree they leave two remainders. The Halayeb Triangle sits on the Red Sea coast between them, north of the parallel and south of the administrative line; Egypt has administered it since 1992 and Sudan claims it. Bir Tawil lies inland, and each country's preferred line hands it to the other, so no state claims it at all. Sovereign Limits puts 32% of the boundary's length in dispute. This catalogue records that the dispute exists and takes no position on it.

What the pair holds besides the river

Arabic is official in both. Both sit in the Arab League, Egypt as a founding party on 22 March 1945 and Sudan from 19 January 1956, eighteen days after the Anglo-Egyptian condominium that had governed it since the 1899 agreement came to an end. Both joined the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation at its founding in 1969, both belong to the African Union and the African Continental Free Trade Area, and both hold a coast on the Red Sea.