Sub-Saharan Africa’ is Undoubtedly a Racist Geopolitical Signature

"It appears increasingly fashionable in the West for a number of broadcasters, websites, news agencies, newspapers and magazines, the United Nations/allied agencies and some governments, writers and academics to use the term ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ to refer to all of Africa except the five predominantly Arab states of north Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) and the Sudan, a north-central African country. Even though its territory is mostly located south of the Sahara Desert, the Sudan is excluded from the ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ tagging by those who promote the use of the epithet because the regime in power in Khartoum describes the country as ‘Arab’ despite its majority African population.

‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical signature in which its users aim repeatedly to present the imagery of the desolation, aridity, and hopelessness of a desert environment. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of one billion Africans do not live anywhere close to the Sahara, nor are their lives so affected by the implied impact of the very loaded meaning that this dogma intends to convey. Except this steadily pervasive use of ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ is robustly challenged by rigorous African-centred scholarship and publicity work, its proponents will succeed, eventually, in substituting the name of the continent ‘Africa’ with ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ and the name of its peoples, ‘Africans’, with ‘sub-Saharan Africans’ or, worse still, ‘sub-Saharans’ in the realm of public memory and reckoning."

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

A political scientist and historian, and director of the Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, Senegal.