LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Africa: Western Africa
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Africa is a continent fraught with problems. This series spotlights five former Western colonies (Somalia, Mali, Senegal, South Africa, and Zimbabwe), putting in clear perspective the gravity of the situation that wars, refugees, famine and disease have brought on them. Globalization has forced some African nations into heavy debt. While industrial nations argue for human rights, the series shows that there are survival issues that may be even more pressing. (more)
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Africa is not a densely populated continent. With an estimated population of 743,000,000, its average density is 64 per square mile (26 per square kilometer). However, some areas have large concentrations, including the Nile valley, the coastal areas of northern and western Africa, the highland and volcanic regions of eastern Africa, and parts of southern Africa. These are mostly areas of economic or political significance.
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Beginning in the 16th century, Europeans such as the Portuguese and Dutch began to establish trading posts and forts along the coasts of western and southern Africa. Eventually, a large number of Dutch augmented by French Huguenots and German settled in what is today South Africa. Their descendants, the Afrikaners and the Coloureds, are the largest European-descended groups in Africa today. In the 19th century, a second phase of colonization brought a large number of French and British settlers to Africa. The Portuguese settled mainly in Angola, but ... in Mozambique. The French settled in large numbers in Algeria where they became known collectively as pieds-noirs, and on a smaller scale in other areas of North and West Africa as well as in Madagascar.
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Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the main mass of the Earth's exposed surface. Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 163 km (101 miles) wide.[7] (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.[2][3]) From the most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia (37°21' N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51'15" S), is a distance of approximately 8,000 km (5,000 miles);[8] from Cape Verde, 17°33'22" W, the westernmost point, to Ras Hafun in Somalia, 51°27'52" E, the most easterly projection, is a distance of approximately 7,400 km (4,600 miles).[9] The coastline is 26,000 km (16,100 miles) long, and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is illustrated by the fact that Europe, which covers only 10,400,000 km² (4,010,000 square miles) – about a third of the surface of Africa – has a coastline of 32,000 km (19,800 miles).[9]
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Western travellers and explorers ... photographed in East Africa. Joseph Thomson (1858-95), for example, used the camera not only to record and classify Africans but also, fusing photography and local magic, as ‘medicine’, a ‘soul-stealing machine’, and a ‘magic gun’. Such behaviour provoked considerable indigenous resistance to being photographed. Despite initial opposition, however, photography was widely accepted in coastal towns by c. 1900, in the urban hinterland by the 1920s, and in rural areas by the 1950s-1960s.
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Remittances to rural areas are significant and predominantly related to intraregional migration, particularly in Western and Southern Africa. The mobility of Africans within these regions has been followed by the sending of regular amounts of money. Two thirds of West African migrants in Ghana remit to rural areas in their countries of origin.
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Western Africa