Africa is the world's second-largest continent in both area and population, after Eurasia. At about 30,244,050 km2 (11,677,240 mi2) including its adjacent islands, it covers 20.3 percent of the total land area on Earth, and with over 800 million human inhabitants in 54 countries, it accounts for about one
seventh of world human population.
Etymology
The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans, who used the name
Africa terra — "land of the Afri" (plural, or "Afer" singular) — for the northern part of the continent, as
the province of Africa with its capital Carthage, corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.
The origin of Afer may either come from:
- the Phoenician `afar, dust;
- the Afri, a — possibly Berber — tribe who dwelt in North Africa in the Carthage area;
- the Greek word aphrike, meaning without cold;
- or the Latin word aprica, meaning sunny.
The historian Leo Africanus (1495-1554) attributed the origin to the Greek word phrike
(φρικε, meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix a-, so meaning a land free of cold
and horror. But the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century, so this cannot really be the origin of the name.
Egypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients, and first assigned to Africa by the
geographer Ptolemy (85 - 165 AD), who accepted Alexandria as Prime Meridian and made 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.
Geography
Main article: Geography of Africa
Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the main mass of the Earth's surface. It includes within
its remarkably regular outline an area, of c. 30,244,050 km2 (11,677,240 mi2), including
the islands.
Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez, 130 km (80
miles) wide. From the most northerly point, Ras ben Sakka in Morocco, a little west
of Cape Blanc, in 37°21′ N, to
the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa, 34°51′15″ S, is a distance approximately of 8,000 km (5,000 miles); 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 (also approximately) of 7,400 km (4,600 miles). The length of coast-line is 26,000
km (16,100 miles) and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is shown by the fact that Europe, which covers only 9,700,000 km2 (3,760,000 square miles), has a coast-line of 32,000 km (19,800
miles).
The main structural lines of the continent show both the east-to-west direction characteristic, at least in the eastern
hemisphere, of the more northern parts of the world, and the north-to-south direction seen in the southern peninsulas. Africa is
thus composed of two segments at right angles, the northern running from east to west, the southern from north to south, the
subordinate lines corresponding in the main to these two directions.
History
Main article: History of Africa
Africa is home to the oldest inhabited territory on earth,
and it is believed the human race originated from this continent. The Ishango Bone,
dated 25,000 years ago, shows tallies in mathematical notation.
Throughout humanity's prehistory, Africa (and all other continents) had no
nation states, and were instead inhabited by groups of hunter-gatherers. Later, agriculture was used in Egypt along the Nile river. Egypt was one of the earliest nation states ever
formed. Other civilizations include Ethiopia, the Nubian kingdom, and the kingdoms of the Sahel (Ghana, Mali, and Sanghay). In the search for the kingdom of Prester John, 14th century European explorers arrived in Africa.
In the millennia before the nineteenth century, indentured servants and slaves could be
had for capture by bargaining with local warlords or tribal leaders. This practice was spread across continents. Arabians and
Europeans were able to capture millions of Africans, and export them for labour around the world in what became known as the
global slave trade, which ceased by law by the nineteenth century in most
European countries.
But at the same time that serfdom was ending in Europe, in the early 19th century the European imperial powers staged a massive "scramble for
Africa" and occupied most of the continent, creating many colonial nation states,
leaving only two independent nations (Liberia and Ethiopia). This occupation continued until the conclusion of the Second World War, after which all colonial nation states gradually obtained formal independence.
Today, Africa is home to over 50 independent countries, many of which still have borders drawn during the era of European colonialism.
Migration from Africa continues to this day.
Politics
The vast majority of African nations are republics that operate under some form
of the presidential system of rule.
Colonialism had a destabilizing effect on what had been a number of ethnic groups that is still being felt in African
politics. Prior to European influence, national borders were not much of a concern, with Africans generally following the
practice of other areas of the world, such as the Arabian peninsula, where a group's territory was congruent with its military or
trade influence. The European insistence of drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial
powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by
side with no buffer between them. For example, the Congo River, although it
appears to be a natural geographic boundary, had groups that otherwise shared a language, culture or other similarity who resided on both sides. The
division of the land between Belgium and France along the river isolated these groups from each other. Those who lived in Saharan or Sub-Saharan Africa who had traded across the continent for centuries,
often found themselves crossing "borders" that often existed only on European maps.
In nations that had substantial European populations, for example Rhodesia and
South Africa, systems of second-class citizenship were often set up in
order to give Europeans political power far in excess of their
numbers. However, the lines were not often drawn strictly across racial lines. In Liberia, the citizens who were descendants of American slaves managed to have a political system for over 100 years
that gave ex-slaves and natives to the area roughly equal legislative
power despite the fact the ex-slaves were outnumbered ten to one in the general population. The inspiration for this system
was the United States Senate, which ironically balanced the
power of free and slave states despite the much larger population of the former.
Europeans often changed the balance of power in the areas they controlled, despite often being largely outnumbered by native
Africans. For example, in what is now Rwanda, the Hutus were generally in control of political matters over the Tutsis
because the Hutus controlled ownership of cattle, the most important commodity.
However, when the Belgians arrived, the Tutsis sided with them and they soon took effective control of politics in the region.
However, when the Belgians finally left, the Hutus formed the first independent government and used the Tutsis' collaboration
with the Belgians as an excuse to shut them out of politics.
Since independence, African states have frequently been hampered by instability, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism. Until recently, few nations in Africa were able to
sustain democratic governments, instead cycling through a series of brutal
coups and military
dictatorships.
Many of Africa's post-colonial political leaders were very poorly educated or ignorant on matters of governance, which led to
great instability. Others were corrupt and dictatorial, outlawing opposition immediately upon assuming office, and suppressing
the European-made constitutions and parliaments.
As well, many used the positions of power to re-ignite old tribal conflicts which had been suppressed under colonial rule. In
many countries, the military was perceived as being the only group that could
effectively maintain order and ruled most nations in Africa during the 70s and early
80s.
During the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s Africa had over 70 coups and
13 presidential assassinations.
Cold War conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union also played a role
in the instability. When a country became independent for the first time, it was often expected to align with one of the two
superpowers. Many countries in Northern Africa received Soviet military aid, while many in Central and Southern Africa were supported by
the United States or France.
The 1970s saw an escalation as newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligned themselves with the Soviet Union
and the West and South Africa sought to contain Soviet influence.
Border and territorial disputes have also been common, with the European-imposed borders of many nations being widely
contested through armed conflicts.
Failed government policies and political corruption have also resulted in many widespread famines, and significant portions of Africa remain with distribution systems unable to disseminate enough food or
water for the population to survive. The spread of dangerous diseases is also
rampant, especially the deadly HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS.
Despite numerous hardships, there have been some signs the continent has hope for the future. Democratic governments seem to be spreading, though are not yet the majority. As well, many nations have at least
nominally recognized basic human rights for all citizens, and have created reasonably independent judiciaries.
As well, under pressure from international financial institutions like the IMF, many
African governments have been able to turn their economies around, so that they have started to show positive growth according to
conventional economic measurements after decades of negative or zero growth. It remains to be seen if such developments will be
able to survive long term, however.
There are clear signs of increased networking among African organisations and states. In the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), rather than rich, non-African countries intervening, about half-a-dozen neighbouring
African countries got involved (see also Second Congo War). The
death toll has been estimated by some to be 3.5 million since the conflict began in 1998.
This might play a role similar to that of World War II for Europe, after
which the people in the neighbouring countries decide to integrate their societies in such a way that war between them becomes as
unthinkable as a war between, say, France and Germany would be today.
Political associations such as the African Union are also offering
hope for greater co-operation and peace between the continent's many countries.
Economy
Main article: Economy of Africa
Africa is by far the world's poorest inhabited continent, and more saliently it is on average poorer than it was 25 years
ago.
The United Nations' Human Development Report 2003 (of 175 countries) found that positions 151 (Gambia) to 175
(Sierra Leone) were taken up entirely by African nations.
It has had (and in some ways is still having) a shaky and uncertain transition from colonialism, with the ensuing Cold War and increases in corruption and despotism being major
contributing factors to its poor economic situation. While rapid growth in China and now
India, and moderate growth in South
America, has lifted millions beyond subsistence living, Africa has stagnated, even going backwards in terms of foreign
trade, investment, and per capita income. This poverty has widespread effects, including low life expectancy, violence, and instability - factors intertwined with the continent's poverty. Over the decades a number of solutions have been proposed and many attempted, but no improvement scheme has shown much
success.
Part of the problem is that foreign aid has generally been used to
encourage the cultivation of cash crops such as cotton, cocoa and coffee in place
of subsistence farming. However, at the same time, industrialized nations have pursued policies that drive down the prices
of those commodities. For example, the real cost of producing cotton in West Africa is far less than half of that of producing it
in the United States, thanks to lower labor costs. However, American
cotton sells for less than African cotton as the cultivation of cotton is heavily subsidized in the United States. As a result,
the prices of these commodities is about the same now as they were in the 1960s.
Africa also suffers from sustained capital flight. Generally, any
income coming into African nations goes right out again, either because the assets sold were foreign owned (oil being a good example) and the money coming in is sent to the foreign owners, or the money is used to repay
loans to industrial nations or the World Bank. It has been estimated that
Africa could cease its dependence on foreign aid merely by insisting that all profits earned in an African country be invested in
the region for at least twelve months.
Botswana, which is the one poor nation in Africa that has not submitted to
controls suggested by the World Bank or the IMF has been one of the exceptions to the general
rule of African economic stagnation and has sustained healthy growth over recent years depite the lack of foreign investment, free flow of capital or trade liberalization.
The major exception is South Africa, which is as industrially and
economically developed as any industrialized European or American nation, to the extent that it has its own mature stock exchange. This is primarily due to its amazing wealth of natural resources, being the world's leading producer of both gold and diamonds.
Although Nigeria sits on one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, it
also has the highest population of any nation in Africa, and one of the fastest growing. Moreover, most of the oil industry is
foreign owned, and the industry is rife with corruption at the national level so that very little oil money stays in the country,
and what does goes to a very small percentage of the population.
Race and physical appearance
Approximately 80% of Africans live south of the Sahara Desert. There is a wide
variety of physical types found amongst the sub-Saharan African peoples (two particular extremes are the Masai who are known for their tall stature, and Pygmies who are
among the world's shortest adults). While "African" and "black" are often viewed as
synonymous in much of the West, a large minority of Africans, especially
in the northern and southern portions of the continent, are not dark-skinned. The physical differences of sub-Saharan Africans
from their neighbors to the north and the Western countries made, and continue to make, stereotyping easy. The dehumanization
required for slavery and apartheid
was made easier by racial stereotyping, and physical differences have been offered to explain why much of the world treats the
modern troubles of Africa as being alien from their own experience.
Africans from the eastern part of the continent have a different appearance from those on the West coast, which supplied the
vast majority of those blacks who were transported to the Americas as
slaves. Speakers of Bantu
languages predominate in much of western, central, and southern Africa. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, a distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related but distinct from "Hottentots") have long been present. The San and Xhosa people (among whom Nelson Mandela can be counted),
are physically distinct from other Africans.
The peoples of North Africa are primarily descended from the speakers of
Afro-Asiatic languages. These peoples include the
ancient Egyptians, the Berbers, and Nubians who developed civilizations in North Africa during
ancient times. The semitic Phoenicians, and the European Greeks and Romans settled in North Africa as well. In the 600s, Muslim Arabs swept across North Africa from the east and conquered the entire region within a hundred years. The North
Africans today are descended from indigenous North Africans such as the Berbers,
ancient Europeans, Arabs, and black Africans from south of the Sahara. Berber peoples remain a significant minority within
Morocco and Algeria, and 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.
Peoples such as Ethiopians and Somalis have links to both North African and sub-Saharan cultures. Several African nations, such as Sudan and Mauritania are divided between a
mostly Arab north and a black African south (though many of the "Arabs" are Arabized blacks of Arab culture). Some areas of
Eastern Africa, particularly the island of Zanzibar, received Arab and Asian Muslim
settlers and merchants during the Middle Ages.
Beginning in the 1500s, Europeans such as the Portuguese and Dutch began to establish trading posts and forts
along the coasts of western and southern Africa. Eventually a large number of Dutch, augmented by French Huguenots and Germans settled in what is
today South Africa. Their descendants, the Afrikaners, are the largest white group in South Africa today. In the 1800s, a second phase of colonization brought a large number of French and British settlers to Africa. The French settled in large numbers in Algeria and on a smaller scale in other areas of North and West Africa. The British settled in South Africa as well
as the colony of Rhodesia and in the highlands of what is now Kenya. Smaller numbers of European soldiers, businessmen, and officials also established themselves in
administrative centers such as Nairobi and Dakar. Decolonization during the 1960s often resulted in the mass exodus of
European-descended settlers out of Africa, especially in Algeria, Kenya, and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). However in South Africa, the white minority (10% of the population) largely remained in the country
after the end of white rule in 1994. South Africa also has a community of mixed-race people
(Coloured people).
European colonization also brought sizeable groups of Asians, particularly people
from the Indian subcontinent to British colonies. Large
Indo-African communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya and Tanzania. A fairly large Indian
community in Uganda was expelled by the dictator Idi Amin in 1972, though many have since returned.
Languages
Main article: African languages
By most estimates Africa contains well over a thousand languages. There are four
major language families native to Africa.
- The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language
family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East 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 mainly spoken in Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia,
Uganda, Kenya, 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. A substantial number
of them are the Bantu languages spoken in Central and Southern
Africa.
- The Khoisan languages number about 50 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.
Languages of Europe have also acquired prominence; English and
French, for example, are official languages in several countries.
Culture
Rather than one culture, Africa has a number of cultures that overlap. The most conventional distinction is that between
sub-Saharan Africa and the northern countries from Egypt to Morocco, who largely associate themselves with Arabic culture. In this
comparison, the nations to the south of the Sahara, are considered to consist of many
cultural areas, in particular that of the Bantu linguistic group.
Divisions may also be made between Francophone Africa and the rest of Africa, in particular the former British colonies of southern and East Africa.
Another cultural fault-line is that between those Africans living traditional lifestyles and those who are essentially modern.
The traditionalists are sometimes subdivided into pastoralists and agriculturalists.
African art reflects the diversity of African cultures. The oldest
existing art from Africa are 6000-year old carvings found in Niger, while the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was the world's tallest architectural accomplishment for four thousand years until the creation of the Eiffel Tower. The Ethiopian complex of monolithic churches at Lalibela, of which the Church of St. George is representative, is regarded as another
marvel of engineering.
The music of Africa is one of its most dynamic art forms. Egypt
has long been a cultural focus of the Arab world, while remembrance of the rhythms of sub-Saharan Africa, in particular west
Africa, were transmitted through the Atlantic slave trade
to modern blues, jazz, reggae and rock and roll. Modern music of the
continent includes the highly complex choral singing of southern Africa and the dance rhythms of soukous, dominated by the music of the Democratic Republic of Congo. A recent development of the 21st
century is the emergence of African hip hop, in particular a form
from Senegal is blended with traditional mbalax.
Religion
Africa is home to a wide variety of different religious groups. As with the rest of the world, the earliest religions revolved
around animism and ancestor
worship. A common thread in traditional belief systems was the division of the spiritual world into helpful and harmful. Helpful spirits include ancestor spirits that help their descendants and powerful spirits that protected entire
communities from natural disaster or attacks from enemies. Harmful spirits include the souls of murdered victims who were buried without the proper funeral rites
and spirits used by hostile spirit mediums to cause
illness among their enemies. While the effect of these early forms of worship continues to have a profound influence, belief
systems evolved as they interacted with other religions.
The formation of the Old Kingdom of Egypt in the third millenium BCE marked the first
complex religious system on the continent. Around the ninth century
BCE, Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) was founded by the Phoenicians. Carthage went on to become a major cosmopolitan center of the ancient
world in which deities from neighboring Egypt, Rome and the Etruscan city-states were
worshipped.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church dates from the
fourth century CE and was thus one of the first Christian churches. The expansion of Islam
in the seventh century was more far-reaching as Muslims conquered the
whole of Africa north of the Sahara Desert. Islam followed the sea trade
down the coast of East Africa, while Islam diffused through the Sahara desert
into the interior of Africa, following in particular the paths of Muslim traders. Muslims were also among the Asian peoples who
settled in British-ruled Africa.The even greater disruption of the European slave trade that accompanied the colonial Scramble for Africa was followed by attempts to convert the colonized populations to Western Christianity.
Many Africans today subscribe to a syncretic belief system that mixes both
traditional religion and either Christianity or Islam. Muslims form the majority of the population north of the Sahara, and
significant minorities in sub-Saharan countries such as Nigeria and Kenya. In the last decades of the twentieth century, various sects of Charismatic Christianity rapidly grew. A number of Africans
have even been mentioned as possible papal candidates. African Christians appear to be more
socially conservative than their co-religionists in much of the industrialized world, which has led to tension within denominations such as the Anglican and Methodist Churches.
Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs. The two most widespread religious groups of Africa, Christianity and Islam, have their roots in
Southwest Asia. Approximately 40% of all Africans are Christians and another 40% Muslims. Roughly 20% of Africans primarily
follow indigenous African religions. A small number of Africans
also have beliefs from the Judaic tradition, such as the Beta Israel and Lemba.
Countries
East Africa
Central Africa
Northern Africa
Southern Africa
West Africa
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