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The Regionalization of Africa in Undergraduate

Geography of Africa Textbooks, 1953 to 2004

Roy Cole

To cite this article: Roy Cole (2008) The Regionalization of Africa in Undergraduate
Geography of Africa Textbooks, 1953 to 2004, Journal of Geography, 107:2, 61-74, DOI:
10.1080/00221340802186851

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 The Regionalization of Africa in Undergraduate Geography of Africa
ABSTRACT
This study examines the regionalization
of Africa through analysis of forty-two
English-language geography of Africa
texts written for undergraduates between
1953 and 2004. Authors identify regions
with reference to one or more variables.
Some authors provided no explanation
for their regionalization; others labored
mightily to justify their assumptions.
The number of unique regions identified
was surprising. The results illustrate
the difficult problems of regionalizing
a complex region of the world—
particularly with the country as grouping
unit. In education, rather than reify
arbitrary but contiguous groupings of
countries, the process of regionalization
should be a creative, critical thinking
exercise for students and teachers.
Key Words: Africa, geography,
regionalization, regions
Roy Cole is associate professor in the De-
partment of Geography and Planning at
Grand Valley State University, Allendale,
Michigan, USA. He teaches Geography of
Africa, Research Methods, World Regional
Geography, and the senior thesis (capstone)
courses. He is author with Harm de Blij of
Survey of Subsaharan Africa: A Regional
Geography, Oxford University Press, 2007.
He can be contacted at coler@gvsu.edu.
Journal of Geography 107: 61–74

C 2008 National Council for Geographic Education
Textbooks, 1953 to 2004
Roy Cole
INTRODUCTION
In his poem, Heritage, Countee Cullen (1970) wrote of the ambivalence he felt
for Africa as one far removed in time and space from direct experience of life
on the continent. The poem is an ingenious amalgam of disparate images from a
variety of African cultural and physical geographies that fit imperfectly together
but exemplify well the geographic and cultural distance of the author from the
“scenes his fathers loved.” For me, the discordant geographical imagery represent
the uncertainty and ambiguity about Africa evinced in the forty-some, often
contradictory, scholarly regional definitions of Africa examined for this study.
WHAT IS REGIONALIZATION?
Grigg (1967) described three early paradigms of regionalization: (1) the “pays”
approach; (2) the “natural region” approach; and (3) the single feature region
approach. Although the terms have changed slightly, Haggett (2001) in his “global
synthesis” of geography described the process of regionalization in essentially the
same way as Grigg did in 1967. The “pays” approach to regionalization is exempli-
fied by early geographers such as Vidal de la Blache (1918) and Sauer (1925) who
believed that unique regions of people and place could be identified that were
rooted in long-term interactions between people and the environment and that
the delineation of discrete units with micro- to macro-level linkages was possible.
The second tradition of regionalization (Grigg 1967), natural regions, focuses on
the physical features of the environment: landforms, climate, soils, and vegetation
and attempted to find discrete natural boundaries where, for example, the
boundaries of soils, vegetation, and climate could be located. It was thought at the
time that such boundaries would be coincident. The third regionalization tradition
in geography, the single feature region, is probably the most familiar in contempo-
rary geography and has been used to map virtually everything: for example, vege-
tation, landforms, agriculture, language, and religion. More recently, geographers
have used regionalization as a form of classification. This approach uses empirical
evidence and summary statistics to define regions. These statistical regions are
not held to be constant but in flux, their definition dependent on the variable
under investigation and its state at any moment in time. Grigg (1965) argued that
regionalization is a way to organize and classify diversity and that any one re-
gionalization is merely one way of looking at the phenomena under investigation.
“Regionalization is a means to an end, not an end in itself” (Grigg 1967, 494).
Regionalization has always been a problematic process. The usefulness of the
regional paradigm as the central organizing concept in the discipline of geography
was questioned in the 1950s and 1960s and rejected (Kimble 1951; Burton 1963).
Kimble (1951) held that regional geography was incapable of resolving social
and political problems, and he called for more systematic study rather than the
compilation of facts about “regions.” Hartshorne expressed the ambiguity of
regionalization in 1959 in his seminal work, Perspectives on the Nature of Geography,
when he stated that
. . . it is very difficult to determine how best to break down the total
complex of phenomena of place into categories for concentrated study.
Because of the large numbers of elements involved and the varying
degrees in which they are interrelated . . . it is useful to study their areal
variation at different levels of complexity and in a variety of different
combinations. (Hartshorne 1959, 117)
61
Roy Cole

Despite Hartshorne’s defense, regional geography was exemplify the application of multiscale, historical regional-
replaced as the dominant paradigm in geography by a ization under the World Systems theoretical framework.
more theoretical, statistical, and systems-oriented approach Other structuralists adopted a more flexible analysis of the
to understanding space (see Abler, Adams, and Gould relations between capital and labor (Massey 1984).
1971; Coffey 1981). The quantitative revolution (Burton The poststructualist, postmodern strand of the new
1963) aspired to a more systematic, scientific geography, regional geography approached regions using a nomi-
but was criticized for its narrow positivism (see Taylor nalist and idealist framework—“subjectivist,” according
1976). Negative response to the quantitative revolution to Johnson, Dandeker, and Ashworth (1984)—that uses
in geography came from many quarters, but the human- personal narratives, individual identities, and perceptions
ist, and later Marxist critiques, were significant (Gilbert as data to understand social process in contested space.
1988; Johnston and Sidaway 2004). Hurst (1985), a radical Such “literature” can be interpreted by the trained and
Marxist geographer, categorically rejected all geographic theoretically-informed observer (Thrift 1992). Regions be-
concepts (space, region, spatial diffusion, and interaction, come perception, part of the lived, taken-for-granted reality
etc.) because he felt that geography was an irrelevant of an individual that can be described. Newman and Paasi
anachronism in contemporary society and, more impor- (1998) used such a framework to study contingent identities
tantly, an “untheorized point of entry to knowledge” (1985, and territoriality along a national border.
85).
During the middle 1970s and early 1980s, however, new
regional concepts informed by social theory were reasserted REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY IN THE CLASSROOM
by geographers (Pudup 1988). Many called it the “new The regional geography presented to students in under-
regional geography” (Gilbert 1988; Thrift 1993, 1992, 1990) graduate classrooms today is rooted in the past but has
or “reconstructed regional geography” (Thrift 1992) or been influenced by the debates on regional geography over
“new regional geographies” (Gregson 1987). Holmen (1995), the past few decades. That the region itself is the product of
however, felt that there was no need to reconstruct and space-time processes seems to be generally understood, but
rehabilitate the old regional geography and saw nothing the regionalization method in practice seems to be similar
new about the putative new regional geography at all. The to that advanced by Grigg (1967): a process of dividing
region was reconceptualized by humanistic geographers as the earth or an area of the earth’s surface into smaller,
“place,” a locus of meaning and identity that could be un- more homogeneous, units (breaking down) or grouping
derstood through hermeneutics (Bradshaw 1990). Harvey like units into larger units (building up) for close analysis
(1981) reconceptualized the region as part of a dynamic (Fig. 1). For example, the regionalization paradigm used by
process in which space was conditioned, transformed, and the contemporary American geographers de Blij and Muller
reformed by, to use the words of the Austrian economist (2004) in their widely-used undergraduate world regional
Schumpeter (2005), “the creative destruction of capitalism.” geography text, Realms, Regions, and Concepts, is primarily
Other structuralists informed by so-
cial interaction theory borrowed from
sociology, saw the new region as
space (locale) where agency and
structure, power and place, met, in-
teracted, and transformed social rela-
tions across time (Gilbert 1988). Other
Marxist structuralists working with
the World Systems paradigm devel-
oped by the sociologist Immanuel
Wallerstein (1989, 1980, 1974), region-
alized a world comprised of three
areas: the core, semiperiphery, and
the periphery within which capital-
ism had differential effects. Agnew
(1982) noted that researchers in the
World System tradition tended to
reify Wallerstein’s regions, to work
at the macro-scale with consequent
lack of specificity, and to make possi-
bly fallacious inferences about social
process from present geographic pat-
terns without further evidence. Taylor Figure 1. Regionalization: building up or breaking down.
(1991) and de Wachter and Saey (2005)

62
 Regionalization and Geography Textbooks

classificatory and hierarchical, dividing the world into
realms and regions. A realm is the fundamental unit of any
world regionalization scheme and constitutes a “composite
of its leading cultural, economic, historical, political, and
appropriate environmental features” (de Blij and Muller
2004, G4). A region is an area on the earth’s surface, a
subunit of a realm that shares some characteristics, some
homogeneity that makes it different from the surrounding
units within the realm. The relationship between realm
and region is analogous to that of phylum and order
in biology according to the authors. Different editions
of Realms, Regions, and Concepts show that the “new old
regional geography” is flexible enough to change the
identity and the borders of regions based on changing
realities on the ground and demonstrate that contemporary
world regionalization is not the chorology of old. For
example, with the breakup of the Soviet Union, the former
Soviet republics of Central Asia, once part of the Russian
geographic realm, were classed as a transition zone adjacent
to Southwest Asia. Parts of northern “West Africa” have
been reclassified over several editions from “West Africa”
to the “Maghreb” as the growing economic and cultural
power of the Maghreb states (a product of recent social,
economic, and political changes in the Maghreb and its
greater integration into Europe) increases.
Outside of the world regional geography textbook con-
text, the “old” regional geography still exists. In a recent
study focused on textbook representations of Appalachia,
Martis (2005) underlined the importance of analyzing and
describing the characteristics of that region. He noted that
such geographical analysis not only reflected reality, it also
created reality. Elsewhere, the contemporary French geog-
rapher Paul Clavel, in a recent publication demonstrated
that the “pays” concept of the old regional geography is
very much alive. He describes the process of regionalization
much as Paul Vidal de la Blache would have in the early
twentieth century:
. . . starting from the ground level, where
it notes everything that characterizes the
physical and living environment, the in-
frastructure created by people, their meth-
ods for making the best possible use of
their lands and subterranean resources, in
short, all of their activities. It continues
by a change of scale which reveals how
component parts fit together to form fairly
extensive wholes, which are the real objects
it describes and explains. (Clavel 1998, 3)
METHOD
The ambition of the present study is descriptive, com-
parative, and empirical. The purpose is to examine how
Africa had been regionalized in geography texts written
for undergraduates. Two possible levels of regionalization
are conceptualized and examined: first, how Africa is
defined (bounded) in the text and, second, how that area
is further regionalized, if at all. The expectation was that
the major differences in the texts would be between the
systematic texts that treated Africa in its entirety and the

Table 1. Texts evaluated in the study: author, title, and date of edition reviewed.

Text Edition Text Edition

number Author reviewed number Author reviewed
1 Stamp 1953 22 Coysh and Tomlinson 1974
2 Kimble 1960 23 Clarke et al. 1975
3 Barbour and Prothero 1961 24 Hance 1975
4 Sillery 1961 25 Knight and Newman 1976
5 Kingsnorth 1962 26 Best and de Blij 1977
6 de Blij 1964 27 Harrison-Church 1977
7 Hance 1965 28 Boateng 1978
8 Harrison-Church 1964 29 Buckle 1978
9 Fordham 1965 30 Grove and Klein 1979
10 Fitzgerald 1967 31 Udo 1982
11 Grove 1967 32 Christopher 1984
12 Hance 1967 33 Mountjoy and Hilling 1988
13 Hodder and Harris 1967 34 Grove 1989
14 Mountjoy and Embleton 1967 35 Hickman 1990
15 Pollock 1968 36 Chapman and Baker 1992
16 Suggate 1968 37 Cleave 1992
17 Pritchard 1969 38 Binns 1994
18 Prothero 1969 39 Newman 1995
19 O’Connor 1971 40 Adams, Goudie, and Orme 1996
20 Prothero 1972 41 Aryteetey-Attoh 2003
21 Stamp and Morgan 1972 42 Stock 2004

63
Roy Cole

Table 2. Definition of the study area and approach for forty-two geography of Africa texts.

Approach
Regional Systematic Total
Definition
of Africa Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent
Continent 20 76.9 6 23.1 26 100
Subsaharan 5 71.4 2 28.6 7 100
Tropical 3 42.9 4 57.1 7 100
Variable focus 0 0 2 100 2 100
Total 28 14 42 100

regional approaches that subdivided it. Of the regional
texts, the hypothesis was that there would be a consistent,
empirically-rooted rationale for regionalization over time
following the classification logic of the models described
by Grigg (1967) and de Blij and Muller (2004).
Forty-two geography of Africa texts copyrighted and
published between 1953 and 2004 (Table 1 and Appendix
A) were examined. Regionalization schemes and criteria
the authors used to divide (or not to divide) the continent
into smaller units (regions) were analyzed. Texts chosen for
review were geared toward university students, but some
were advanced British texts for secondary education (A
levels) that seemed to have the appropriate level of content.
More than one edition was reviewed if there were ten years
or more between copyrighted editions. Because of the rapid
pace of change in Africa, I believe that ten years would be
sufficient length of time to warrant substantial revision and
updating. In addition, it seems reasonable to assume that
the publication of a second or third edition signaled peer
and publisher acceptance of the concepts, principles, and
regionalization schemes presented in the text.
The material assembled is exhaustive with regard to
English-language texts; however, I was unable to locate
one geography text on Africa published during this time
period (i.e., Gould 1961). In developing a method to analyze
the texts, my reasoning was that each author needed
to address several fundamental issues before, or during
the early stages of, writing a geography of Africa text.
For example, each author had to answer the following
questions:

1. What constitutes “Africa?”

2. Will Africa be subdivided
into smaller areas (regions)?
3. If Africa is to be subdivided
into regions, what is the
best method to make the
regions?
4. What unit will be used to
make the regions?
The most important question had to
do with the rationale the authors pro-
vided to justify their choices; what
criteria they used to identify the
Africa that they would study; and,
for the texts that subdivided the area
of study, what criteria were used to
distinguish one region from another.
Texts were examined to find the
answers to these questions, and in
the process other questions emerged.

RESULTS
Twenty-six (61.9%) of the texts
treated Africa as a continent,
Figure 2. Defining Tropical Africa. although inclusion of the smaller
islands varied. Madagascar was

64

almost never excluded. Of those texts that defined Africa in
continental terms, 76.9 percent were regional while only
23.1 percent were systematic. The majority of the texts
reviewed (twenty-eight or 66.7%) were regional in their
approach to Africa (Table 2). Definitions of Tropical Africa
were variable. Kimble (1960) cut off the northern half of
Mauritania and the northern areas of Mali, Niger, Chad, and
Sudan to rigidly follow the Tropic of Cancer (Fig. 2). The
Tropic of Capricorn followed political boundaries and all
of South Africa and all of Southwest Africa (Namibia) were
considered out of the Tropics. The status of Botswana was
never made unambiguously clear by the author. Udo (1982)
and Binns (1994) were in agreement on the definition of
Tropical Africa: any country that fell on the Tropic of Cancer
was included in the African Tropics while only South Africa,
Lesotho, and Swaziland were deemed to be extra-Tropical
in the south. Hance (1967), O’Connor (1971), and Gleave
(1992) excluded Southwest Africa (Namibia) and Botswana
from their definitions of Tropical Africa, but the northern
boundary was the same as all but Kimble (1960). Why the
tropics would be important in delimiting the study area
was never made explicitly clear by any author.
Four regional and three systematic geographies of Africa
did not include Africa north of the Sahara as part of the
Figure 3. Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.
Regionalization and Geography Textbooks
study area. Of this group Kingsnorth (1962) and Fordham
(1965) are particularly interesting because, in addition to
excluding Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt,
their definition of Africa did not include Sudan, Ethiopia,
the French territory of the Afars and Issas (Djibouti), or
Somalia (Fig. 3). This is a peculiar definition of the study
area but closely corresponds to the old Semitic-Hamitic
linguistic boundary that has been used in the past as a rough
proxy to divide “black” from “white” Africa (see Seligman
1930). That said, however, the same definition of sub-
Saharan Africa was probably more common at the time than
these two instances suggest. For example, a lengthy article
on tropical African population written by Trewartha and
Zelinsky published in 1954 in the Annals of the Association
of American Geographers also excluded these countries. That
article was not used in this article because the focus is on
undergraduate textbooks rather than scholarly articles.
A more conventional definition of sub-Saharan Africa
is presented in de Blij (1964), Grove (1967), Stock (2004)
and Aryeeteh-Atoh (2003). In each of these definitions, the
countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt
are excluded from the text (Fig. 3). The obvious problem
the authors had to grapple with is that the Sahara does
not respect political boundaries. Located in the middle of
a large land mass, the Sahara is a natural hinterland for
countries whose core lies in more humid areas and, as a
consequence, the northern or southern reaches of a dozen
countries’ borders extend into it.
REGIONALIZATION
The number of regions of Africa ranged from four to
twelve (Figs. 4 through 8) with a mean number of 7.3.
The results show that the number of regions has been
declining from an average of 8.2 regions for the first five
texts reviewed to an average of 5.6 regions for the last five
examined. Sixty-one unique names were used by the au-
thors to refer to the regions of Africa. Physical, political, and
geographic information included in these names gave a clue
as to the rationale each author used in defining the region
(Table 3). Mixed regions, formed by appending the name of
a country to the name of a region, were relatively common;
for example, “Central Africa and Cameroon” and “The
Horn and Sudan.” For the purpose of classification some
names that were very similar were grouped together. For
example, “Nile Basin” was considered to be equivalent to
“Nile Valley” and “Nile Lands.” The adjectives “Western,”
“Eastern,” “Northern,” and “Southern” were considered
to be less geographically restrictive in their connotation
than the nouns “West,” “East,” “North,” and “South,”
and were reported separately in the text but grouped
together in Table 4. Similar names meant different things for
differentgeographers. For example, “Equatorial Africa” for
de Blij (1964) referred to a region that straddled the entire
length of the equator on the African land mass (Fig. 4).
The logic for such a region appears to be relative location.
The author distinguishes two very different physiographic
provinces of Equatorial Africa, lowland and highland, with
65
Roy Cole

Figure 4. Regions of six geographies of Africa, 1953 to 1964.

very different climates, but they are not different enough for
de Blilj (1964), as they were for Pritchard (1969), to constitute
separate regions (Fig. 6). For almost all other texts that
Table 3. Type of region defined by the author, classifying variable, defined a region called “Equatorial Africa,” the reference
frequency, and percent of total regions for all texts. was geographically more limited than de Blij (1964) and
focused on a physical or environmental criterion: the Congo
Type of Classifying
Basin, the Equatorial Rain Forest, and so on.
region variable Frequency Percent In the earlier texts, physical geography appears to be
Single feature Physical 19 31.1 the variable of choice in grouping countries, although
regions Political 16 26.2 some (Sillery 1961; Hickman 1990) tried to distinguish
Relative location 15 24.6 the “physical” from the “cultural” West Africa with a
Mixed feature Physical and political 2 3.3 line separating the two different regions. The difficulty of
regions∗ Political and physical 3 4.9 regionalizing Africa is evident in the numerous exceptions
Relative location and 6 9.8 that early authors made. For example, Stamp (1953) made
physical Mauritania and Libya part of a discontiguous “Sahara”
Total 61 100.0 region. In his 1953 text and in a later collaboration with
∗ Thefeature mentioned first is considered the main criterion. Thus Morgan (Stamp and Morgan 1972), Stamp put Sudan into a
“physical and political” and “political and physical” classes can occur. region by itself. There were many references in the names
of the regions to rivers and their surrounding areas, for

66
 Regionalization and Geography Textbooks

Figure 5. Regions of six geographies of Africa, 1965 to 1967.

example, “Nile Valley,” “Zambezi and Limpopo Lands,”
and the like. The creation of a separate region consisting of
Chad in Fitzgerald (1967) is of dubious value. In addition,
Chad’s ungainly appendage to the regions of Central
Africa (Boateng 1978), Equatorial Africa (Hance 1965, 1975;
Hodder and Harris 1967; Coysh and Tomlinson 1974), and
West Central Africa (Prothero (1969) seems to have little to
recommend it.
Of the entire group of texts and regions that were identi-
fied by name by 25 percent or more of the authors are West

Table 4. Most common regional names, classifying variables, frequency, and percent of use.

Name of Classifying Frequency Percent of Percent of five Percent of five

region variable all texts all texts earliest texts latest texts
West (or, Western) Relative location 30 100.0 100 100
East (or, Eastern) Relative location 25 80.0 100 80
Southern Relative location 20 66.7 51 80
Central Relative location 14 46.7 80 80
Equatorial Physical 12 40.0 41 20
Northeast Relative location 8 26.7 20 20

67
Roy Cole
Figure 6. Regions of six geographies of Africa, 1967 to 1972.
(90.0%), East (73.3%), Southern (66.7%), Central (46.8%),
Equatorial (40.0%), and Northeast (26.7%). Eighty-three
percent of these high agreement regions make reference
to relative location in their rationale (Table 4). Agreement
is even higher if the “West” and “Western” regions are
grouped together (100% of all texts) and the “East” and
“Eastern” regions are grouped together (80% of all texts).
Some regional names increased in use (Southern), and
others decreased (Equatorial), while the use of some names
(Northeast) remained constant over the fifty-year span of
the texts. Despite the apparent similarity in the use of some
of these names, authors often used the same name, but
included different countries in their region. In some cases,
the differences were quite dramatic (see Figs. 4 through 8).
With the exception of the regions listed in Table 4, the vast
majority of the sixty-one regions identified by the authors
were used once or just a few times by particular authors. The
criteria used to define regions changed over time, moving
away from physical and political explanations to focus
68
simply on relative location. Figure 9 illustrates the changing
classifying variables, the declining numbers of regions, and
the diminishing references to colonial entities (Former Bel-
gian Congo, Portuguese Angola, British East Africa, etc.).
VARIABILITY IN REGIONAL DEFINITIONS
With a couple of exceptions, there was little agreement on
the constituents of the regions of Africa. Forty-three percent
of the authors agreed that East Africa is comprised of Bu-
rundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda, while only
32 percent did not include Burundi and Rwanda. Only 21.4
percent of the authors of the twenty-eight regional texts,
agreed that Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia,
Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania,
Niger, Nigeria, Sénégal, Sierra Leone, and Togo make up
West Africa. And a mere 19 percent of the texts agreed
that Southern Africa was made up of Angola, Botswana,
Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Moçambique, South Africa,
Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Figure 7. Regions of six geographies of Africa, 1974 to 1988.
As for the rest of the texts, there was disagreement about
almost everything. Regions consisting of a single country
were much more common in the earlier texts than in the
later ones, and the impulse to combine physical and cultural
criteria diminished as well. Countries that were consistently
disagreed on (i.e., consistently included in different regions
by different authors) were typically those in the middle
or on the edges: Chad (West Africa and Central Africa),
Cameroon (West and Central/Equatorial), Rwanda and
Burundi (Central/Equatorial and East). Central Africa
is a region that was identified in the many texts, but
the use of the term varied considerably. Stamp (1953)
used “Central Africa and Southern Savannah lands” to
refer to a band of countries south of the Congo Basin,
including Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi and south-
ern Moçambique, without ever specifying what made it
“central.” Udo’s (1982) region of Central Africa straddled
the Congo Basin including countries from Angola and
Zambia to Chad. One can infer that at the heart of Stamp’s
Regionalization and Geography Textbooks
(1953) region was the ill-fated Central African Federation.
The Central African Federation (1953 to 1963) between
Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland
(today’s Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, respectively)
complicated the subregional picture as it was neither
central nor entirely African, but was dominated by the
white-minority population of Zimbabwe. What “Savannah
Lands” have to do with the Central African Federation
was not made clear by the author. That the Central
African Federation was used as the principal variable of
identity for a region (Southern Central Africa) as late as
1974 (Coysh and Tomlinson 1974), eleven years after the
demise of the three-state federation, suggests that once they
have been identified regions may acquire a life of their
own, a taken-for-granted reality that on inspection is not
warranted.
Some “over-reporting” of a region occurred after an early
text was republished. For example, without any reflection
on changes that have occurred over the years that might
69
Roy Cole
Figure 8. Regions of four geographies of Africa, 1990 to 2003.
have made such regionalization anachronistic, the regions
of Stamp (1953) were used again in Stamp and Morgan
(1972), those of Suggate (1956) appeared again in 1968,
those of Hance (1965) appeared again in 1975, Mountjoy and
Embleton’s (1967) regions were reused again in Mountjoy
and Hilling (1988), and those of Harrison-Church et al.
(1964) resurfaced in 1977.
Over the period of time of this study, and especially
over the last fifteen years, geographers have moved away
from dividing Africa into smaller units for closer study
(regional geography) to focus on a systematic (topical)
treatment of much larger areas instead. This change models
that in the discipline as a whole. In the seven geographies
published during the ten years from 1953 to 1963, 71
percent regionalized Africa. Only 25 percent did so during
the last ten years of texts from 1994 to 2004. The two
regional geographies that were published between 1994
and 2004 were exceptional as regional geographies because
70
one dealt with Africa and the Mid-
dle East (Chapman and Baker 1992)
while the other, Newman (1995), The
Peopling of Africa, may be an example
of the new regional geography. New-
man employs the regional concept
very loosely in his investigation of
African cultural prehistory; his text is
focused on understanding sociocul-
tural process over space and time at a
variety of scales across the continent
and in their regional “unfoldings.”
CONCLUSION
Hartshorne’s remark that region-
alization is a difficult endeavor has
been borne out by the findings of
this study. In addition, this study
has shown that the process of re-
gionalizing Africa has been less sys-
tematic, and more arbitrary, than
perhaps even he would have ex-
pected. The evidence suggests that
the complex physical, environmen-
tal, and cultural geographies of
Africa make regionalization of the
continent based on putatively ob-
jective criteria seem inadequate, id-
iosyncratic, sometimes anachronis-
tic, and perhaps impossible, partic-
ularly when the country is used as
the grouping unit. Although several
authors tried to transcend the limits
of the country as the regionalization
unit, every author leaned heavily on
the country to build his or her regions
of Africa with the exception of those
texts that purported to be systematic.
The more advanced systematic texts
that focused on a specific topic in geography, for example
political geography (Boateng 1978) or physical geography
(Adams, Goudie, and Orme 1996; Buckle 1978), had a
commendable level of specificity in academic content and
were generally superior to most regional treatments on the
specific theme of the text. But the systematic texts that were
not narrowly focused (Aryeetey-Attoh 2003; Stock 2004)
lacked the overall detail of the average regional text. One
of these latter two texts (Aryeetey-Attoh 2003) identified
the author’s notion of the regions of Africa, but did not use
them to organize content.
There is danger in the pretense of objective regional-
ization based on the use of the country as the grouping
unit, especially in an area as complex as Africa where
country boundaries are among the most artificial in the
world. The real danger is that a particular regionalization,
perhaps a mere convenience held together by a few loose
concepts presented by an author in defense of his or

Figure 9. Criteria used for regional definition, number of regions, and percent colonial rationale by text, 1953
to 2003.
her particular scheme, may come to form the reader’s
taken-for-granted understanding of what that area is really
like. In other words, the reification of an arbitrary but
contiguous grouping of countries in Africa could lead to
false inferences and understanding. Although there are
instances when the country is an appropriate grouping unit
for regionalization, for example when dealing with customs
unions, treaties, and the like, the regionalization of complex
areas like Africa should go beyond (or below) the country
level. Regional geography is a useful project because it
can bring the reader close to the ground in a consistent
way across space. It also permits an author to pursue a
theme at a higher level of detail in one region but focus
on something different but important in another region
(drought in the Sahel or European settlement in Southern
Africa, for example). But at the macro-level such regions
Regionalization and Geography Textbooks
should be viewed as a device to bring the reader closer to
the ground in an organized fashion. As such, large divisions
of the continent based on relative location (North, Southern,
West, East, and Central) have the potential to be useful.
In the classroom, whether the analysis concerns the entire
continent of Africa or merely a part thereof, regionalization
can be a thoughtful exercise involving both teacher and
student where empirical evidence and critical thinking are
combined to move the geographic lens closer to the ground
to yield greater detail of people, place, and process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author thanks two anonymous reviewers who made
helpful comments on a draft of this article.
71
Roy Cole

APPENDIX A: THE TEXTS ANALYZED

Adams, W. M., A. S. Goudie, and A. R. Orme, eds. 1996. The Physical Geography of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aryeetey-Attoh, S. 2003. Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa, 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Barbour, K. M., and R. M. Prothero, eds. 1961. Essays on African Population. London: Routledge.
Best, A., and H. J. de Blij. 1977. African Survey. New York: John Wiley.
Binns, T. 1994. Tropical Africa. London: Routledge.
Boateng, E. A. 1978. A Political Geography of Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buckle, C. 1978. Landforms in Africa: An Introduction to Geomorphology. Essex: Longman.
Chapman, G. P., and K. M. Baker, eds. 1992. The Changing Geography of Africa and the Middle East. London: Routledge.
Christopher, A. J. 1984. Colonial Africa. London: Croom Helm.
Clark, J. I. et al. 1975. An Advanced Geography of Africa. Huddersfield, UK: Hulton.
Coysh, A. W., and M. E. Tomlinson. 1974. Africa. London: University Tutorial Press.
de Blij, H. J. 1964. A Geography of Subsaharan Africa. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Fitzgerald, W. 1967. Africa: A Social, Economic, and Political Geography of Its Major Regions. London: Methuen.
Fordham, P. 1965. The Geography of African Affairs. Baltimore: Penguin.
Gleave, M. B. 1992. Tropical African Development: Geographical Perspectives. London: Longman.
Grove, A. T. 1989. The Changing Geography of Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1967. Africa South of the Sahara. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grove, T., and F. M. G. Klein. 1979. Rural Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hance, W. A. 1975. The Geography of Modern Africa. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1967. African Economic Development. New York: Praeger.
———. 1965. The Geography of Modern Africa. New York: Columbia University Press.Harrison-Church, R. J., et al. 1964. Africa and the
Islands. New York: John Wiley.
———, 1977. Africa and the Islands. New York: John Wiley.
Hickman, G. 1990. The New Africa. 4th ed. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Hodder, B. W., and D. R. Harris, eds. 1967. Africa in Transition: Geographical Essays. London: Methuen.
Kimble, G. H. T. 1960. Tropical Africa. New York: Twentieth Century Fund.
Kingsnorth, G. W. 1962. Africa South of the Sahara. London: Cambridge University Press.
Knight, C. G., and J. L. Newman. 1976. Contemporary Africa: Geography and Change. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Mountjoy, A. B., and D. Hilling. 1988. Africa: Geography and Development. London: Hutchinson.
Mountjoy, A. B., and C. Embleton. 1967. Africa: A New Geographical Survey. New York: Praeger.
Newman, J. L. 1995. The Peopling of Africa: A Geographic Interpretation. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
O’Connor, A. M. 1971. The Geography of Tropical African Development. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Pollock, N. C. 1968. Africa: A Systematic Regional Geography. London: University of London Press.
Pritchard, J. M. 1969. Africa: The Geography of a Changing Continent. New York: Longman.
Prothero, R. M. 1972. People and Land in Africa South of the Sahara: Readings in Social Geography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. ed. 1969. A Geography of Africa. London: Routledge.
Sillery, A. 1961. Africa: A Social Geography. London: Duckworth.
Stamp, L. D. 1953. Africa: A Study in Tropical Development. New York: John Wiley.
Stamp, L. D., and W. T. W. Morgan. 1972. Africa: A Study in Tropical Development, 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley.
Stock, R. 2004. Africa South of the Sahara: A Geographical Interpretation. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Suggate, L. S. 1968. Africa. London: Harrap.
Udo, R. K. 1982. The Human Geography of Tropical Africa. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

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