Introduction Where is ‘West Africa’?

On the pages of a world atlas, it is relatively easy to recognize the vast land mass which faces the Atlantic Ocean in the south and stretches inland towards the Sahara Desert in the north (Map 1.1). The region known as West Africa is composed of approximately a dozen states with clearly demarcated national boundaries. Edged by sea and desert, the postcolonial countries that make up this region are linked together by their shared history of slavery and European colonial rule: names such as ‘Freetown’ and ‘Liberia’ testify to these aspects of their collective history.

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