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Africa

Second largest of the seven 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 2 million; population given in millions, 2001 est) Abidjan (2.9), Addis Ababa (2.6), Alexandria (3.7), Algiers (3.8), Cairo (9.9), Casablanca (3.2), Johannesburg (2.2), Khartoum (2.3), Kinshasa (6.1), Lagos (10.9), Luanda (2.1), Maputo (2.1)

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, 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 savannah 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

Population

(2002 est) 841.2 million; more than double the 1970 population of 364 million, and rising to an estimated 1 billion by 2010; 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. Largely through famine and wars, Africa has some 4 million refugees.

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).

Language

Over 1,000 languages are 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.