Sudan (region) - Geography

Geography

The Sudan extends in some 5,000 km in a band several hundred km wide across Africa. It stretches from the border of Senegal, through southern Mali (formerly known as French Sudan when it was a French colony), Burkina Faso, southern Niger and northern Nigeria, southern Chad and the western Darfur region of present-day Sudan.

In the north of the region lies the Sahel, a more arid Acacia savanna region which in turn borders the Sahara desert to the north, and the Ethiopian Highlands in the east (called al-Ḥabašah in Arabic). In the south-west lies the West Sudanian Savanna, a wetter, tropical savanna region bordering the tropical forest of West Africa. In the centre is Lake Chad, and the more fertile region around the lake, while to the south of there are the highlands of Cameroon. To the south-east is the East Sudanian savanna, another tropical savanna region, bordering the forest of Central Africa. This gives way further east to the Sudd, an area of tropical wetland fed by the water of the White Nile.

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