Africa Background to Exuberance

Abstract

A delineation of the zoogeography of Africa was attempted first by Schmarda in 1853. Excluding the northern littoral he divided the continent into three broad regions: Sahara, West Africa, and High Africa. But it was Wallace’s division in 1876 which Chapin (1932) described as surprisingly accurate (Fig. 1.1). Wallace had described a West African subregion as stretching eastward “as far as the sources of the Upper Nile and the mountains forming the western boundary of the basin of the great lakes… Its southern limits are undetermined, but are probably somewhere about the parallel of 11°S Latitude.” He showed how the western subregion is largely encircled by the eastern, the latter extending across the Sudan to the Niger Bend and Senegal River, separating the subregion from the desert. The Ethiopian Region, comprising Africa south of the Sahara and part of Arabia, has stood with few modifications. Chapin divided it into two subregions: the West African Subregion, which includes a broad belt along the Gulf of Guinea, almost the entire Congo Basin (except the High Katanga), and most of Uganda. The remainder formed the East and South African Subregion.