Ethnic Diversity and Colonial Border Legacies

Sub-Saharan Africa is home to an extraordinary density of distinct peoples and languages: linguists working from databases such as Ethnologue count well over 2,000 living languages spoken on the continent, and anthropological surveys commonly cite more than 3,000 distinct ethnic groups, ranging from populations of tens of millions, such as the Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo of Nigeria or the Amhara and Oromo of Ethiopia, to small communities of a few thousand speakers. This diversity long predates European colonization and reflects millennia of migration, state formation, and trade — including, notably, the Bantu expansion that carried related languages and agricultural techniques across most of the continent south of the equator over roughly the past 3,000 years — but the political map that governs it today was drawn overwhelmingly by outsiders in a remarkably compressed period.