Where in Africa does Africa start?

Abstract

For the most part, the boundaries of African Studies remain fixed at the shores of that continent, with periodic excursions into diasporic communities across the seas. The northern limits of this enquiry into `Africa' are, however, more vaguely located, placed somewhere in the Sahara when they are thought of at all. This imprecision in the northern frontiers of `Africa' is closely related to traditional conceptions of race on the continent, and especially of a distinction between `Negroid' and `Caucasoid' peoples and histories. Recent genetic research in and to the south of the Sahara suggests that such distinctions are false, and that human biological variability in these regions does not accord with racialized models. Nevertheless, such models continue to be widely used in popular interpretations of events in these regions — most strikingly, today, in Darfur.