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Africa
Second largest of the five continents, Africa is connected with Asia by the isthmus of Suez, and seperated 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 Giza, Addis Ababa, Luanda, Dar es Salaam, Ibadan, Mogadishu, Maputo, Johannesburg, Harare.
Features: Great Rift Valley, containing most of the great lakes of E Africa (except Lake Victoria); Atlas Mountains in the NW; Drakensberg mountain range in the SE; Sahara Desert (world's largest desert) in the N; Namib, Kalahari, and Great Karoo deserts in the S; Nile, Zaïre, 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 E, Cape Almadies in the W, Ras Ben Sekka in the N, and Cape Agulhas in the S. The Sahel is a narrow belt of savanna and scrub forest which covers 700 million hectares/1.7 billion acres of W and central Africa; 75% of the continent lies within the tropics.
Industries: has 30% of the world's minerals including 51% of diamonds (Zaire, Botswana, South Africa) and 47% of gold (South Africa, Ghana, Zimbabwe); produces 11% of the world's crude petroleum, 58% of the world's cocoa (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria), 23% of the world's coffee (Uganda, Ivory Coast, Zaire, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Kenya), 20% of the world's groundnuts (Senegal, Nigeria, Sudan, Zaire), and 21% of the world's hardwood timber (Nigeria, Zaire, 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 W 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, N of the equator; Khoisan languages with 'click' consonants spoken in the SW by Kung, Khoikhoi, and Nama people of Namibia.
Religion: Islam in the N and on the east coast as far S as N Mozambique; animism below the Sahara, which survives alongside Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant) in many central and southern areas.