Africa has thousands of miles of coastline, but sub-Saharan Africa has few or no usable deep-water ports. This has historically limited imports and exports and the accompanying exchanges of ideas with other cultures.
LIkewise, the Sahara Desert is an effective obstacle to land transportation between the southern part of the continent and the northern part.
It is the land itself which has kept the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa isolated from contact with the outside world.
This geography has also kept these cultures isolated from each other. The rivers of Africa are, on average, measurably less navigable than rivers on other continents. This has led, in turn, to less contact between the various nations of sub-Saharan Africa, as Tim Marshall writes:
Africa, being a huge continent, has always consisted of different regions, climates and cultures, but what they all had in common was their isolation from each other and the outside world. That is less the case now, but the legacy remains.
A glance at a map of Africa can be misleading. One might think that it would be a straightforward overland journey from, e.g., Libya to Angola. But it is not. Likewise, one might imagine that Namibia (German South-West Africa) or Mozambique would be situated to engage in large-scale international trade by means of cargo ships. This, however, is not the case.
The map fails to reveal the impediments to travel within the continent, and the barriers to shipping from and to other continents, as Tim Marshall notes:
The world’s idea of African geography is flawed.
For cultural, social, political, and economic purposes, Africa could be considered as two continents, with the impassible Sahara between the two.
The geography of this immense continent can be explained in several ways, but the most basic is to think of Africa in terms of the top third and bottom two-thirds.
Understanding the physical geography of Africa will help the reader to understand why the continent is filled with ‘developing nations’ that don’t develop. All manner of aid from other parts of the world, and all types of schemes to encourage development - formulated both by native Africans and by outsiders - cannot change the shape and structure of the land itself.
