How we built the Africa governance map

This explains what Africa's Governance, 1800–Present shows, how each entry is classified, and where the dataset is still incomplete — the same standard of transparency as everything else on this site (see how we source and verify information).

What the map shows

For each African country and year from 1800 to the present, the map shows who or what governed that territory: a named ruler or government where one is on record, a broader political entity (an empire, caliphate, or colonial administration) where individual rulers aren't the relevant unit, or a marker that no single central authority existed for that place and year.

Muted countries are shown under colonial administration for the selected year. Green-family countries were independent African or settler polities before colonization. Pale countries had no single central government for that year. Gray countries have no confirmed record yet.

Pre-colonial classification

Entries before colonization are further classified as: a dominant African or settler polity, a settler republic, a fragmented territory with competing states, a contested frontier, or a decentralized area with no central authority. Colonial-era entries are additionally coded by colonial power (Britain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Ottoman Empire, or South Africa acting as a mandate power).

Verification status

Every entry in the underlying dataset carries a verified flag, checked against the sources used to build it. As of this page's last update: 668 of 678 entries across 54 countries are marked verified; 10 are not yet confirmed. The map's visual display does not currently distinguish verified from unverified entries — that distinction is only exposed in the downloadable dataset below, not yet in the map's own interface. Coverage is also uneven: some countries are tracked continuously from 1800, others have gaps, which is why the map itself carries the same caveat.

Limitations

Pre-colonial boundaries and political structures are inherently harder to pin to a single year than a modern head-of-state's term, and the classification into a handful of categories necessarily simplifies political situations that were often more fluid than any single label captures. Coup classification and succession dates follow whichever contemporaneous or scholarly source is most specific; where sources disagree, the dataset does not yet carry a documented resolution the way an article's "when historians disagree" note would.

Source and version

The dataset was compiled from africa-heads-of-state-1960-present-v5.xlsx — its filename's own "v5" reflects five rounds of revision before publication here. This methodology page is versioned separately from the underlying data: page v1, September 2026, the first time this map has had a dedicated methodology writeup.

Download the dataset

The full dataset — every entry, every field, including the verification flag not yet shown on the map itself — is available as a CSV: provenance-africa-governance-dataset.csv (678 rows).