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When they were French territories, they were designated as French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. Chad and Cameroun were included in Equatorial, everything west of that was in French West Africa. Most of what are now republics were recognized by the French as administrative districts, but France treated them as West Africa and Equatorial Africa..
Although huge amounts of some of those countries are lightly populated and sprawling into the Sahara, it is safe to regard them in accordance with their principle population centers. Mali 's population is a great deal more like Senegal, than like Algeria. Virtually all the population of Mali and Niger are along the Niger River, and fall within the same cultural and geographic zone as Nigeria.
Your question is a great deal like asking if West Virginia is in the east, the south, or the midwest. Or like refusing to call Omaha a midwestern city, because Nebraska sprawls all the way to Cheyenne. You'll get plenty of opinions, all based on different criteria, or no criteria at all.
Each more or less contiinuous red blotch is, for practical purposes, a "region of Africa", Some are pretty obvious, like West Africa and North Africa. At the Tanzania/Mozambique border, it nearly splits, making it a practical demarcation between East and Southern Africa. There is a fifth region, less pronounces in Congo and Angola, and then the Upper and Lower Nile Valleys. Everything else is so thinly populated, that it doesn't really matter what region you assign it to, 99% of Africans fall pretty clearly into one of the seven fairly distinct red regions on this map.
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