Why do we still use the term “sub-Saharan Africa”?

随便谷歌一下你就发现，CNN，美联社、路透社、《纽约时报》以及Quartz都经常用「撒哈拉以南非洲」这一令人困惑的说法。A quick google shows the CNN, AP, Reuters, The New York Times and our good selves at Quartz regularly use “sub-Saharan Africa,” a term as confusing as it is historically loaded.

联合国开发计划署将非洲54个国家中的46个视为「撒哈拉以南」，除了阿尔及利亚、吉布提、埃及、利比亚、摩洛哥、索马里、苏丹和突尼斯。然鹅，这从地理上讲不通啊，其中四个国家地处撒哈拉沙漠，完了吉布提的邻居厄立特里亚却被视为「撒哈拉以南」。The UN Development Program lists 46 of Africa’s 54 countries as “sub-Saharan,” excluding Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Somalia, Sudan and Tunisia. This doesn’t make geographical sense—four countries included are on the Sahara, while Eritrea is deemed “sub-Saharan” but its southern neighbor Djibouti isn’t.

世界银行生怕大家不够混淆，又把苏丹和索马里加入了「撒哈拉以南」的行列中。The World Bank muddies the waters further, adding Sudan and Somalia to total 48 countries under the label.

相比之下，非盟就几乎不用这个说法，他们通常用「东非共同体」或者「西非国家经济共同体」来指代一大片国家。哥伦比亚大学非洲研究教授Rosalind Morris说：“‘撒哈拉以南非洲’是几乎没用的口号。尼日利亚的国情跟肯尼亚截然不同，跟博茨瓦纳也完全不一样。”By contrast, the African Union barely uses the term, instead referring to regional organizations like the East African Community and the Economic Community of West African States as its “building blocks”.“‘Sub-Saharan Africa’ is such an enormous catchphrase that it’s almost useless,” says Rosalind Morris, an African Studies professor at Columbia University. “Nigeria as a state doesn’t look anything like Kenya as a state, doesn’t look anything like Botswana.”

所以，为何大家都在用这个意思模糊而又地理错误的说法呢？它到底从哪里来的？So, why use this vague term that few can agree on and is geographically inaccurate? And where does it come from?

根据哥大人类学家Brian Larkin的介绍，这个说法是用来代替上世纪五十年代略带种族歧视的「热带非洲」和「黑非洲」说法。这一分界线来源自Larkin所说的「种族主义」殖民理论，即认为北非在文化上更加先进。“它根据白人的种族观对非洲进行划分，北非人比较白因此沾了光，但是还不够白，”维克森林大学国际关系专家Tatenda Chinondidyachii Mashanda说。“相比‘黑非洲’和非洲黑人，这是一种听起来相对不那么种族主义的说法。”The term spread as a replacement for the racially-tinged phrases “Tropical Africa” and “Black Africa” that were used until around the 1950s, says Columbia University anthropologist Brian Larkin.The dividing line itself also has some troubling origins in what Larkin calls “racist” colonial theories that thought northern Africa more culturally developed.“It divides Africa according to white ideas of race, making North Africans white enough to be considered for their glories, but not really white enough,” Tatenda Chinondidyachii Mashanda, a politics and international affairs scholar at Wake Forest University, wrote earlier this year for The African Exponent. ”[It] is a way of saying ‘Black Africa’ and talking about black Africans without sounding overtly racist.”

不要把某些北非国家当非洲！应该当做半个欧洲+半个中东。一家美国组织觉得这个说法太“侮辱人了”，于是在2010年发起请愿废除它，结果收效甚微。One US diaspora group found the phrase so “disparaging and contemptuous” it launched a 2010 petition to abolish it—but found scant success.

随着世界银行和其他组织仍然在使用它来归类那些缺乏可靠统计数据的国家，新闻记者们已经习惯于用这个说法理解人口和经济话题，并且用在文章里。非洲政府和学术机构甚至也不得不就范，因为援助机构也是根据这个概念分配资金，Morris说。“人们经常被迫接受那些不愉快的命名系统，仅仅是为了得到资助。”With the World Bank and others employing it to sort data about a region lacking in reliable statistics, journalists have depended on this grouping to try to make sense of demographic and economic trends, propagating it even further. African governments and even academics also have to fall into line, since aid organizations use it to assign funds, says Morris.“People are often forced into unhappy or at least sometimes awkward complicity with those systems of naming, in order to just get funding,” Morris said.

并不是说按照殖民历史给国家集体贴标签是完全没用的——毕竟很多国家拥有类似的体系、语言和国际关系。但是「撒哈拉以南」指代的范围实在是太广泛了，国情差异太大，而且会强化我们所想象的北非阿拉伯国家和非洲其余国家之间的差距，Larkin说。That’s not to say grouping nations by shared colonial history isn’t analytically helpful—their similar institutions, languages and close relations make for good comparisons. But “sub-Sahara” is too vast to shed light on those traits and can strengthen an often imagined divide between northern Arab countries and the rest of Africa, Larkin says.

所以，也许我们是该减少这一主题上的争议了，耶鲁大学人类学家Louisa Lombard说“学术界已经习惯人们把非洲视作一个国家了”。So, maybe it’s time for some nuance around a subject where debate is so reductive that Yale anthropology professor Louisa Lombard says “academics are used to people speaking about Africa as one country.”

所以我们不妨多用更加精确的地理划分，比如东非、西非、中非和南非？或者直接称呼尼日利亚本来的名字。What’s wrong with more accurate geographic markers, like East, West, Central and Southern Africa? Or even just calling Nigeria, the world’s seventh biggest country, by its own name?