Africa
Second largest of the five continents. Africa is connected with
Asia by the isthmus of Suez, and separated from Europe by the Mediterranean
Sea. The name Africa was first given by the Romans to their African
provinces with the city of Carthage, and it has since been extended
to the whole continent.
Area:
30,097,000 sq km/ 11,620,451 sq mi (three times the area of Europe)
Largest Cities:
(population over 1 million) Cairo, Algiers, Lagos, Kinshasa, Abidjan,
Cape Town, Nairobi, Casablanca, El Gîza, Addis Ababa, Luanda, Dar
es Salaam, Ibadan, Mogadishu, Maputo, Johannesburg, Harare, Alexandria,
Antananarivo, Rabat, Dakar, Durban, East Rand, Pretoria, Tunis.
Features:
Great Rift Valley, containing most of the great lakes of East Africa
(except Lake Victoria); Atlas Mountains in the northwest; Drakensberg
mountain range in the southeast; Sahara Desert (world's largest
desert) in the north; Namib, Kalahari, and Great Karoo deserts in
the south; Nile, Congo-Zaire, Niger, Zambezi, Limpopo, Volta, and
Orange rivers.
Physical:
Dominated by a uniform central plateau comprising a southern tableland
with a mean altitude of 1,070 m/3,000 ft that falls northwards to
a lower elevated plain with a mean altitude of 400 m/1,300 ft. Although
there are no great alpine regions or extensive coastal plains, Africa
has a mean altitude of 610 m/ 2,000 ft, two times greater than Europe.
The highest points are Mount Kilimanjaro 5,900 m/19,364 ft, and
Mount Kenya 5,200 m/ 17,058 ft; the lowest point is Lac Assal in
Djibouti -144 m/-471 ft. Compared with other continents, Africa
has few broad estuaries or inlets and therefore has proportionately
the shortest coastline (24,000 km/15,000 mi). The geographical extremities
of the continental mainland are Cape Hafun in the east, Cape Almadies
in the west, Ras Ben Sekka in the north, and Cape Agulhas in the
south. The Sahel is a narrow belt of savanna and scrub forest which
covers 700 million hectares/1.7 billion acres of west and central
Africa; 75% of the continent lies within the tropics.
Industries:
Has 30% of the world's minerals including 45% of diamonds (Democratic
Republic of Congo), Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, Angola) and
31% of gold (South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe); produces 11% of the
world's crude petroleum, 51% of the world's cocoa (Côte d'Ivoire,
Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria), 19% of the world's coffee (Uganda, Côte
d'Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Madagascar,
Kenya), 20% of the world's groundnuts (Senegal, Nigeria, Sudan,
Democratic Republic of Congo), and 21% of the world's hardwood timber
(Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Tanzania, Kenya).
Population:
(1988) 610 million; more than double the 1960 population of 278
million, and rising to an estimated 900 million by 2000; annual
growth rate 3% (10 times greater than Europe); 27% of the world's
undernourished people live in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated
25 million are facing famine.
Language:
Over 1,000 languages spoken in Africa; Niger-Kordofanian languages
including Mandinke, Kwa, Lingala, Bemba, and Bantu (Zulu, Swahili,
Kikuyu), spoken over half of Africa from Mauritania in the west
to South Africa; Nilo-Saharan languages, including Dinka, Shilluk,
Nuer, and Masai, spoken in central Africa from the bend of the Niger
River to the foothills of Ethiopia; Afro -Asiatic (Hamito-Semitic)
languages, including Arabic, Berber, Ethiopian, and Amharic, north
of the Equator; Khoisan languages with ` click´ consonants spoken
in the southwest by Kung, Khoikhoi, and Nama people of Namibia.
Religion:
Islam in the north and on the east coast as far south as northern
Mozambique; animism below the Sahara, which survives alongside Christianity
(both Catholic and Protestant) in many central and southern areas.
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