ABSTRACT
The east-west zonal arrangement of relief, climates, vegetation and patterns of development does provide a reasonable basis for grouping together the countries from Mauritania and Senegal in the west to Nigeria and Chad in the east. The coastal states provided the Europeans with many of their earliest African footholds, and sections of the coast took their names from the principal trade commodities; the Grain, Ivory, Gold and Slave Coasts respectively from west to east. The overall political geography of West Africa is, then, a legacy of the colonial period. Some understanding of the nature of the drought is clearly important as a basis for finding solutions to the problems it causes. The strategy for dealing with generalized, irreversible, long-term climatic change will have to be different from those for dealing with a cyclic phenomenon on different time scales.
