North Africa

"Algeria's been located in North Africa, and now look at it. It's now having a bloody war today, and everything has got even worse than I expected."

--Su Ji-Hoon, Fight for Algeria

North Africa is a collective term for a group of Mediterranean countries situated in the northern-most region of the African continent. The term "North Africa" has no single accepted definition. It is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of Morocco in the west, to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the east. Others have limited it to the countries of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, a region known by the French during colonial times as “Afrique du Nord” and by the Arabs as the Maghreb (“West”). The most commonly accepted definition includes Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, as well as Libya and Egypt. It is important to note that the term “North Africa," particularly when used in North Africa and the Middle East, often refers only to the countries of the Maghreb and Libya. Egypt, due to its greater Middle Eastern associations, is often considered separately. The US Census define North Africa as Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.

The countries of North Africa share a common ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity that is unique to this region. The original inhabitants of North Africa are the Berbers and the Egyptians. Between the A.D. 600s and 1000s, Arabs from the Middle East swept across the region in a wave of Muslim conquest. These peoples, physically quite similar, formed a single population in many areas, as Berbers and Egyptians merged into Arab society. This process of Arabization and Islamization has defined the cultural landscape of North Africa ever since.