7 - The forest and the savanna of Central Africa

Summary

REGIONAL DIVISIONS

The history of Central Africa in the nineteenth century covers two broad geographical zones. The equatorial zone comprises Africa's largest surviving area of tropical rain forest, together with the adjacent woodland on the fringe of the central Sudan. The savanna zone, in the south, stretches from the Atlantic in the west to the middle Zambezi in the east, and is mainly light woodland, rather than true savanna grassland. The whole region was, and is, one of the most sparsely populated of the habitable areas of Africa, currently averaging about six people to the square kilometre, or about one sixth of the density found in the wooded areas of West Africa. Central Africa has no great concentrations of rural population, such as are found in the Niger delta to the west, or in the interlacustrine highlands to the east, and the only urban growth has been in recent commercial, administrative and mining centres such as Duala, Bangui, Kinshasa, Luanda and Ndola.

Late in the nineteenth century Central Africa was divided into four political zones which are reflected in the subsequent history of the area. The central and north-eastern zone consists of the republic of Zaïre, an area of about 1 million square miles and twenty million people, who were ruled during the first half of the twentieth century by Belgium. The south-west consists of Portuguese-speaking Angola, an area of half a million square miles and five million people. In the quarters adjacent to these two huge territories there developed the spheres of British influence in the south-east, and of French influence in the north-west.