Africa at a glance 

In the late 1400s, the Swazi people crossed the Limpopo river and settled in southern Tsongaland.

The dawn of mankind, the cradle of human civilization, an ancient land of myth, legends and mystery, Africa has now joined the march of modernity and globalization. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to the grand emperors of Abyssinia and the legendary kings of Ethiopia, Africa has been home to a myriad cultures and to knowledge and wisdom that continues to resonate in the African ethos today.

 

Africa, comprising 53 countries, is the world's second largest continent both in terms of land area and population, after Asia. The continent, at about 30.2 million km² (11.7 million sq mi) including adjacent islands, covers 6 per cent of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4 per cent of the total land area. It is home to a billion people that accounts for about 14.8 per cent of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.

 

Multi-lingual and multi-religious, around a 1,000 indigenous languages are spoken across the African continent, and nearly every religion has followers among African people. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, approximately 46.5 per cent of all Africans are Christian and another 40.5 per cent are Muslim, while 11.8 per cent follow indigenous African religions. A small number of Africans are Hindu, Baha'i, or have beliefs from the Judaic tradition. Examples of African Jews are the Beta Israel, Lemba peoples and the Abayudaya of Eastern Uganda. 

 

Africa is potentially the world's richest continent. It's blessed with a vast array of natural resources, including luxuriant forests, and minerals of just about every kind including gold, silver, diamond, copper, iron, zinc and chrome. True, the continent faces a spate of formidable problems including widespread poverty, illiteracy, underdevelopment, chronic conflicts and violence, some of them a spillover of colonial exploitation of the past, but it's a tribute to the grit and endurance of the African people that they have not allowed these afflictions to cramp their onward march to modernity and a better collective future. Although the resource-rich region is in the news for mostly negative reasons, largely due to biases of media, there is no dearth of success stories in Africa.

 

Africa is in the throes of a defining resurgence that promises to have lasting implications for global economy. Despite the global economic slowdown, the IMF has conjured up a robust future for the continent. According to the IMF, the African economy is expected to grow at an average rate of over 5 per cent, which will be above the global average. A recent survey by The Economist reveals that 6 of the 12 fastest-growing economies are in sub-Saharan Africa. Africa has also emerged as a new oil hub that has sparked an unprecedented global interest in the continent. Oil producers like Angola, Libya, Mauritania, Republic of Congo and Sudan are also some of the top-performing economies in Africa.

Two-thirds of African countries have successfully held multi-party elections and as many as 24 countries have signed up for the African peer review mechanism that allows a panel of “wise men” to benchmark the performance of African countries against four broad parameters, including democracy and good governance. “Something decidely is on the horizon in Africa, something that began in the 1990s. Many African countries are rewriting rules,” said a recent World Bank report, capturing the mood of economic buoyancy in the region. A host of factors like improved political stability, people-centric governance, economic reforms, a confident embrace of globalization, surplus oil revenues, robust commodity prices, and cautious monetary and fiscal policies have contributed to the ongoing economic resurgence.

 
Oil rigs in the harbour at Luanda, Angola's capital and chief seaport.Angola is rich in natural resources and is one of Africa's leading oil producers. The Blue Nile Falls(called locally the 'smoke of the Nile') in Ethiopia.
Fact Sheet:

Area: 30,221,532 km² (11,668,598.7 sq mi) 
Population: 922,011,000[1] (2005, 2nd) 
Density: 30.51/km² (about 80/sq mi) 
Countries: 53 
Languages: 

More than 1,000 indigenous African languages including several spoken by tens of millions such as Igbo, Swahili, Hausa, Amharic, and Yoruba; plus Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, Spanish, Indian languages, others

 

Time Zones: UTC-1 (Cape Verde) to UTC+4 (Mauritius)

 

Geography Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the largest landmass of the Earth. Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 163 km (101 miles) wide. (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.) From the most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Tunisia (37°21' N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51'15" S), is a distance of approximately 8,000 km (5,000 miles);[46] from Cape Verde, 17°33'22" W, the westernmost point, to Ras Hafun in Somalia, 51°27'52" E, the most easterly projection, is a distance of approximately 7,400 km (4,600 miles).[47] The coastline is 26,000 km (16,100 miles) long, and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is illustrated by the fact that Europe, which covers only 10,400,000 km² (4,010,000 square miles) – about a third of the surface of Africa – has a coastline of 32,000 km (19,800 miles).

 Africa's largest country is Sudan, and its smallest country is the Seychelles, an archipelago off the east coast. The smallest nation on the continental mainland is The Gambia.

 

 According to the ancient Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east. A definite line was drawn between the two continents by the geographer Ptolemy (85–165 AD), indicating Alexandria along the Prime Meridian and making the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge.

 

Geologically, Africa includes the Arabian Peninsula; the Zagros Mountains of Iran and the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey mark where the African Plate collided with Eurasia. The Afrotropic ecozone and the Saharo-Arabian desert to its north unite the region biogeographically, and the Afro-Asiatic language family unites the north linguistically.

 

Climate, fauna, and flora

 

The climate of Africa ranges from tropical to subarctic on its highest peaks. Its northern half is primarily desert or arid, while its central and southern areas contain both savanna plains and very dense jungle (rainforest) regions. In between, there is a convergence where vegetation patterns such as sahel, and steppe dominate.

 

Africa boasts perhaps the world's largest combination of density and "range of freedom" of wild animal populations and diversity, with wild populations of large carnivores (such as lions, hyenas, and cheetahs) and herbivores (such as buffalo, deer, elephants, camels, and giraffes) ranging freely on primarily open non-private plains. It is also home to a variety of jungle creatures (including snakes and primates) and aquatic life (including crocodiles and amphibians)(see also: Fauna of Africa).

 

 

 

Demographics

Boats arrive with fresh fish for the busy market on the Petite Cote at Mabour.Senegal was once the administrative centre of French West Africa.
Africa's population has rapidly increased over the last 40 years, and consequently it is relatively young. In some African states half or more of the population is under 25 years of age.

 

Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger-Congo family) are the majority in southern, central and East Africa proper. But there are also several Nilotic groups in East Africa, and a few remaining indigenous Khoisan ('San' or 'Bushmen') and Pygmy peoples in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "Hottentots") have long been present. The San are physically distinct from other Africans and are the indigenous people of southern Africa. Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of central Africa.

 

The peoples of North Africa comprise two main groups; Berber and Arabic-speaking peoples in the west, and Egyptians in the east. The Arabs who arrived in the seventh century introduced the Arabic language and Islam to North Africa. The Semitic Phoenicians, the Iranian Alans, the European Greeks, Romans and Vandals settled in North Africa as well. Berbers still make up the majority in Morocco, while they are a significant minority within Algeria. They are also present in Tunisia and Libya. The Tuareg and other often-nomadic peoples are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa. Nubians are a Nilo-Saharan-speaking group (though many also speak Arabic), who developed an ancient civilisation in northeast Africa.

 

Some Ethiopian and Eritrean groups (like the Amhara and Tigrayans, collectively known as "Habesha") speak Semitic languages. The Oromo and Somali peoples speak Cushitic languages, but some Somali clans trace their founding to legendary Arab founders. Sudan and Mauritania are divided between a mostly Arabized north and a native African south (although the "Arabs" of Sudan clearly have a predominantly native African ancestry themselves). Some areas of East Africa, particularly the island of Zanzibar and the Kenyan island of Lamu, received Arab Muslim and Southwest Asian settlers and merchants throughout the Middle Ages and in antiquity.

 

Prior to the decolonisation movements of the post-World War II era, Whites were represented in every part of Africa.[59] Decolonisation during the 1960s and 1970s often resulted in the mass emigration of European-descended settlers out of Africa – especially from Algeria (pieds-noirs), Kenya, Congo, Angola, Mozambique and Rhodesia. Nevertheless, White Africans remain an important minority in many African states. The African country with the largest White African population is South Africa. The Afrikaners, the Anglo-Africans and the Coloureds are the largest European-descended groups in Africa today.

 

European colonisation also brought sizeable groups of Asians, particularly people from the Indian subcontinent, to British colonies. Large Indian communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya, Tanzania, and some other southern and East African countries. The islands in the Indian Ocean are also populated primarily by people of Asian origin, often mixed with Africans and Europeans. The Malagasy people of Madagascar are a Austronesian people, but those along the coast are generally mixed with Bantu, Arab, Indian and European origins. Malay and Indian ancestries are also important components in the group of people known in South Africa as Cape Coloureds (people with origins in two or more races and continents). During the 20th century, small but economically important communities of Lebanese and Chinese have also developed in the larger coastal cities of West and East Africa, respectively.

 

Languages 

By most estimates, well over a thousand languages (UNESCO has estimated around two thousand) are spoken in Africa. Most are of African origin, though some are of European or Asian origin. Africa is the most multilingual continent in the world, and it is not rare for individuals to fluently speak not only multiple African languages, but one or more European ones as well. There are four major language families indigenous to Africa.

 

Afro-Asiatic extends from North Africa to the Horn of Africa to Southwest Asia. Niger-Congo is divided to show the size of the Bantu sub-family.

The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout the Horn of Africa, North Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia.

 

The Nilo-Saharan language family consists of more than a hundred languages spoken by 30 million people. Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by Nilotic tribes in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, and northern Tanzania. The Niger-Congo language family covers much of Sub-Saharan Africa and is probably the largest language family in the world in terms of different languages.

 

The Khoisan languages number about fifty and are spoken in Southern Africa by approximately 120,000 people. Many of the Khoisan languages are endangered. The Khoi and San peoples are considered the original inhabitants of this part of Africa.

 

 

 

Following the end of colonialism, nearly all African countries adopted official languages that originated outside the continent, although several countries also granted legal recognition to indigenous languages (such as Swahili, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa). In numerous countries, English and French (see African French) are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Malagasy are other examples of originally non-African languages that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres.