West Africa – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
simmons | July 14, 2015
West Africa Area 5,112,903 km2 (7th) Population 340,000,000 (2013 est.) (4th) Density 49.2/km2 (127.5/sq mi) Demonym West African Countries Time zones UTC+0 to UTC+1 Major Regional Organizations Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS; established 1975) Total GDP (PPP) $ 752.983 Billion (2013) (23rd)[2] GDP (PPP) per capita $ 2,500 (2013)[3] Total GDP (nominal) $ 655.93485 Billion (2013)[4][5] Total GDP (nominal) per capita $ 1,929.22 (2013)[4] Currency Largest cities Lagos,Nigeria Abidjan,Ivory Coast Accra,Ghana Abuja,Nigeria Kumasi,Ghana Port Harcourt,Nigeria West Africa, also called Western Africa and the West of Africa, is the westernmost subregion of the African continent. West Africa has been defined in Africa as including the 18 countries Benin, Burkina Faso, the island of Cape Verde, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, the island of Saint Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sao Tome and Principe and Togo.[6] The history of West Africa can be divided into five major periods: first, its prehistory, in which the first human settlers arrived, developed agriculture, and made contact with peoples to the north; the second, the Iron Age empires that consolidated both intra-African, and extra-African trade, and developed centralized states; third, Major polities flourished, which would undergo an extensive history of contact with non-Africans; fourth, the colonial period, in which Great Britain and France controlled nearly the whole of the region; fifth, the post-independence era, in which the current nations were formed. Early human settlers from northern Holocene societies arrived in West Africa around 12,000 B.C.[dubious discuss] Sedentary farming began in, or around the fifth millennium B.C, as well as the domestication of cattle
