Africa - The Birthplace of Modern Humans You either love it or hate it . . .

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Introduction 

Features of Africa

Africa is the second-largest continent, after Asia, covering 30,330,000 sq km; about 22% of the total land area of the Earth. It measures about 8,000 km from north to south and about 7,360 km from east to west.

The highest point on the continent is Mt. Kilimanjaro - Uhuru Point - (5,963 m/19,340 ft) in Tanzania. The lowest is Lake 'Asal (153 m/502 ft below sea level) in Djibouti.

The Forests cover about one-fifth of the total land area of the continent. 
The Woodlands, bush lands, grasslands and thickets occupy about two-fifth.
And the Deserts and their extended margins have the remaining two-fifths of African land.

World's longest river: The River Nile drains north-eastern Africa, and, at 6,650 km (4,132 mi), is the longest river in the world. It is formed from the Blue Nile, which originates at Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and the White Nile, which originates at Lake Victoria.

World's second largest lake: Lake Victoria is the largest lake in Africa and the is the world's second-largest freshwater lake - covering an area of 69,490 sq km (26,830 sq mi) and lies 1,130 m (3,720 ft) above sea level. Its greatest known depth is 82 m (270 ft).

World's second deepest lake: Lake Tanganyika is the deepest lake in Africa reaching at its greatest depth is 1,436 m (4,710 ft), making it the second deepest freshwater lake in the world after Lake Baikal.

The Great Africa Rift Valley extends more than 4,830 km from Syria in south-western Asia to Mozambique in south-eastern Africa. The width of the valley ranges from a few miles to more than 160 km. 
In eastern Africa, the valley splits into two branches: the Eastern Rift and the Western Rift. The fault in which the Rift sits is still moving: the western side of the rift is pulling away from the eastern ridge at about 6 mm per year, while in the south it is moving together at a rate of 2 mm per year.

Lake Malawi contains the largest number of fish species of any lake in the world, probably over 500 from ten families.

Africa contains an enormous wealth of mineral resources, including some of the world's largest reserves of fossil fuels, metallic ores, and gems and precious metals. This richness is matched by a great diversity of biological resources that includes the intensely lush equatorial rain forests of central Africa and the world-famous populations of wildlife of the eastern and southern portions of the continent. 

Countries

There are  52 Countries in Africa today:
Largest Country: Sudan, it has a total area of 2,505,800 sq km.
Smallest Country:Seychelles, covering an area of 453 sq km.

Algeria	Angola	Benin	Botswana	Burkina Faso	Burundi	Cameroon	Cape Verde	Central African Rep.	Chad
Congo	Dem. Rep. Congo	Djibouti	Equatorial Guinea	Egypt Flag	Eritrea	Ethiopia	Gabon	The Gambia	Ghana
Guinea	Guinea Bissau	Ivory Coast	Kenya	Lesotho	Liberia	Libya	Madagascar	Malawi	Mali
Mauritania	Mauritius	Morocco	Mozambique	Namibia	Niger	Nigeria	Reunion	Rwanda	South Africa
Senegal	Seychelles	Sierra Leone	Somalia	Sudan	Swaziland	Tanzania	Togo	Tunisia	Uganda
Zambia	Zimbabwe

Credit: Photos supplied by The Africa Guide 

Birthplace of the Modern Humans

Africa is now widely recognized as the birthplace of Hominidae (the family to which modern humans belong). The continent has been inhabited by humans and their hominid forebears for some 4 million years or more.

The modern African peoples are believed to have appeared about 100,000 years ago in sub-Saharan Africa and somewhat later in northern Africa

Population

Africa has more than 10 % of the world's population, distributed over a land area representing about 1/5 of the total land surface on Earth. A large number of countries in Africa with predominantly small populations.

Rwanda and Burundi, situated in the East African highlands, are the most densely populated countries in Africa, while Western Sahara, Mauritania, and Libya in the Sahara and Botswana and Namibia in the Kalahari and Namib are the least densely populated.

Geological history

The African continent essentially consists of five ancient Precambrian cratons (Kaapvaal, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Congo, and West African) that were formed between about 3.6 and 2.0 billion years ago and that basically have been tectonically stable since that time.

After the Precambrian, Africa's geologic history is characterized by the following events: 
- The formation of fold belts in the Paleozoic Era (570 to 245 million years ago) in South Africa (the Cape fold belt), Morocco (the Anti-Atlas belt), and Mauritania (the Mauritanide belt) bordering the older cratons; 
- Voluminous basaltic volcanism some 230 to 200 million years ago in South Africa, Namibia, and East Africa, known as the Karoo System, that was probably related to the beginning of the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent; 
- The formation of a young mountain belt in northwestern Africa some 100 to 40 million years ago as a result of collision between the African and European plates, together with the closure of the ancestral Mediterranean Sea (the Tethys Sea); 
- The development of the East African Rift System during and after the Tertiary Period (i.e., the last 66.4 million years), leading to the opening of the Red Sea, the northeast drift of the Arabian Plate, and the fracturing of the ancient crust of Africa along several long rift valleys, accompanied by extensive volcanism.

The continent is cut almost equally in two by the equator, so that most of Africa lies within the tropical region. Because of the bulge formed by western Africa, the greater part of Africa's territory lies north of the equator. Africa is crossed from north to south by the prime meridian (0° longitude), which passes a short distance to the east of Accra, Ghana.

The whole of Africa can be considered as a vast plateau rising steeply from narrow coastal strips and consisting of ancient crystalline rocks. The plateau's surface is higher in the southeast and tilts downward toward the northeast. In general the plateau may be divided into a southeastern portion and a northwestern portion.

 The northwestern part, has two mountainous regions—the Atlas Mountains and the Ahaggar (Hoggar) Mountains.

The southeastern part of the plateau includes the Ethiopian Plateau, the East African Plateau, and—in eastern South Africa, where the plateau edge falls downward in a scarp—the Drakensberg range.

The People

Africa is now overwhelmingly populated by the European geographic race in the north and the African geographic race in the south.
In all African countries the majority of the population is indigenous. People in northern Africa tend to have less skin pigmentation than those in sub-Saharan Africa.

In South Africa there are large numbers of Europeans (about one-seventh of the population). Other countries with significant European populations are Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique, Kenya, and Senegal. 
Other substantial minority groups are Asian peoples (chiefly in southern and East Africa), Arabs (in West and East Africa), and people of mixed origin.

Cultural Regions

The basic units of African society are almost 3,000.ethnic groups, tribes, or peoples. Groups that have a common sense of culture and identity, especially in terms of a distinct language and religion.

the principal cultural regions are northern, western, west-central, eastern, and central,  southern Africa and Madagascar.

(A) Northern Africa cultural region

These peoples include the Berbers of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia who speak languages that belong to the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) group. 

And the Semitic-speaking Arabs who migrated into North Africa from Arabia in a number of waves; the first of these waves occurred in the 7th century AD. In the Sahara such Arab peoples as the Shuwa live side by side with Berber peoples

(B) Western Africa cultural region

A remarkable diversity of ethnic and cultural groups in the two east–west-trending zones of the savanna along the southern Saharan borderland and the rain forest along the Atlantic coastline. Most of the large traditional societies are kingdoms, each surrounded by lesser and politically weaker communities.

Among the more important of the savanna peoples are the three main clusters known as : 
Mande - in Senegal and Mali and including the Bambara, Malinke, and Soninke. 
Voltaic group  - in the savanna zone to the east - including the Senufo, Lobi, Gurunsi, Dogon, and Mossi -  and in northern Nigeria, Niger, and Cameroon; the many small, mainly non-Muslim tribes of the plateau and highland areas.

Fulani - known also as Fulbe and Peul, a cattle-keeping Muslim people who have either conquered indigenous peoples (such as the numerous Hausa) or live in a symbiotic relationship with agricultural peoples. 

(C) West-central Africa cultural region

It is ethnically very mixed, with Arabs in the north, Pygmies in Congo (Brazzaville) and Gabon, and Sudanic- and Bantu-speaking peoples in the more southern areas.

The savanna includes many peoples of the Cameroon area, divided into many small kingdoms, of which the Bamileke tribes are the most numerous.

Between Cameroon and the Nile are many large Sudanic-speaking peoples, such as the Sara, Mangbetu, and Azande. Southward are Bantu peoples, of which the more important include the Fang of Gabon and the Kongo, Mongo, Kuba, Luba, Lunda, and Chokwe of Congo (Kinshasa) and Angola.

(D) Eastern Africa cultural re3gion

In the north and east are the arid Sudan and Somalia separated by the Ethiopian Plateau; in the centre are the fertile areas of the East African lakes—Victoria, Albert (Mobutu Sese Seko), Tanganyika, Nyasa (Malawi)—and the highlands around Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro. The remainder consists of savanna, with the depression of the East African Rift Valley running from north to south. The areas of densest population are the more fertile highlands.

This ethnically complex region includes the Eastern Sudanic-speaking pastoralists of the Nile valley (Shilluk, Dinka, Luo, Lango, and others, formerly called Nilotes), those of the central plains (Masai, Nandi, and others, formerly known as Nilo-Hamites), and the Cushitic-speaking Somali and Oromo (Galla) of the Horn of Africa. 
In Ethiopia also are the Semitic-speaking Amhara, Tigre, and others. 
Most of the remaining peoples of the region are Bantu speakers who, although they vary widely in other ways, are all peasant farmers. 
Near the East African lakes are several formerly powerful Bantu kingdoms (Ganda, Nyoro, Rwanda, Rundi, and others). 
In the Kenya highlands are the Kikuyu, Luhya, and others. 
On the coast are the various Swahili-speaking tribes, while in Tanzania are the Bantu-speaking Chaga (Chagga), Nyamwezi, Sukuma, and many more. There are also remnants of other groups: the hunting Okiek (Dorobo), Hadza, and some Pygmies. And on the coast are the remnants of the once politically powerful Arabs, formerly based on Zanzibar.

(E) Central and southern Africa cultural region

A single large culture area. The region was once populated by San (Bushmen) and Khoikhoi (Hottentots), both Khoisan-speaking peoples, the former being hunters and the latter pastoralists.

The San are today restricted to the arid areas of southwestern Africa and Botswana, and most of the Khoikhoi are merged into the racially mixed Coloured people of the Cape region of South Africa with European and Asian admixtures. 

The other indigenous groups are all Bantu-speaking peoples, originally from the area of Cameroon, who dispersed across this region some 2,000 years ago.

After contact with Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Bantu speakers turned upon one another, establishing the conquest states of the Zulu, Swazi, Tswana, Ndebele (Matabele), Sotho, and others. To the north are the Central Bantu speakers of Congo (Kinshasa), Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania, as well as farmers with many kinds of political systems but who differ markedly from the Southern Bantu speakers in their kinship systems; they include the Bemba, Tonga, Chewa (Cewa), Nyanja, and Yao. In southwestern Africa are the Southwestern Bantu, including the Ovambo and Herero.

(F) Madagascar cultural region

The island of Madagascar forms a distinct culture area.

The various Malagasy ethnic groups are mainly of Indonesian origin following migrations across the Indian Ocean probably during the 5th and 6th centuries AD.

Languages

In Africa, there are known to be at least 1,000 distinct languages.

The great majority of African languages have no indigenous forms of writing. 
Many African languages (such as Swahili) have for centuries been written in Arabic script. There are exceptions, however. The best known are those of the Vai of Sierra Leone, the Mum of Cameroon, and the Tuareg and other Berber groups of the southern Sahara, all of whom invented their own scripts.

English, French, and other languages of the former colonial powers; some of them are today the national languages of independent nation-states. 

French is the official language in the states that formerly made up French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, as well as in Madagascar (Malagasy is also an official language) and Congo (Kinshasa). 

Similarly, English is the official language or is widely spoken in the states of West, central, and East Africa formerly under British administration and is also the official language in Liberia. 

Portuguese is the language, officially and otherwise, in the countries formerly under Portugal. 

In South Africa, Afrikaans (which developed out of a colloquial version of 17th-century Dutch) and English are among the official languages. Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and other languages of the Indian subcontinent are spoken among the Asian communities.

In West Africa, forms of Creole (Krio) and Pidgin are widespread in the coast towns of very heterogeneous ethnic composition. 

Religions

In general, northern Africa is predominantly Islamic and southern Africa largely Christian, although their distributions are not discrete. 
For example, the Coptic church is found in Egypt and Ethiopia, and Islam is common along the coast of eastern Africa and is expanding southward in western Africa. 
Many of the Sudanic peoples—such as the Malinke, Hausa, Songhai, and Bornu—are Islamized, and the religion has also achieved substantial gains among such Guinea Coast people as the Yoruba of Nigeria and the Temne of Sierra Leone. 
Much conversion to Christianity also has occurred, most notably to Roman Catholicism and in the coastal regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

In most of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa the people practice a variety of traditional religions, which have certain common features. All of those known include the notion of a high or creator God, remote from humans and beyond their comprehension or control. This God is typically not attributed a sex but in some cases is male or female; often God is given an immanent and visible aspect as well. 
The most important “spiritual” powers are usually associated with things or beings with which people have day-to-day contact or that they know from the past. There may be mythical heroes who led the people to their present land and founded their society as it is known today.

A central element of every indigenous African religion is its cosmology—which tells of tribal origins and early migrations and explains the basic ideological problems of any culture, such as the origin of death, the nature of society, the relationship of men and women and of living and dead.

The ritual functionaries found in most African societies include priests, lineage and clan elders, rainmakers, diviners, prophets, and others.  Typically they hold ritual authority by virtue of age, genealogy, or political office and are primarily responsible for the ritual well-being only of the members of the social groupings that they head.

In the past, witchcraft and sorcery were given widespread credence and served to explain or control the misfortunes of people who were aware of their lack of mastery and understanding of nature and society. 

Family  

Family consisting of several generations of kin and their spouses, the whole being under the authority of the senior male.  The chiefs and rulers usually need many wives to give them a mark of high position and to enable them to offer hospitality to their subjects.

However in cities and in major labour-supplying areas, such as most of southern Africa, the joint or extended family is giving way to the independent nuclear family of husband, wife, and children. 

Climate

Africa can be divided into 8 climatic regions.

(1) Hot desert - Sahara and Kalahari deserts and the northern Kenya–Somali desert.

(2) Semiarid climatic region - fringe the desert areas and include the greater part of the land south of the Zambezi River which receiving more rainfall. Temperatures are about the same as those in the desert regions.

(3) tropical wet-and-dry region - This region covers about half of the surface area of the continent, extending toward the equator from the semiarid areas. The seasonal character of its up to six months of rainfall—the length of the rainy season depending on nearness to the equator. The rest of the year is dry.

(4) Equatorial (tropical wet) region - The wettest in Africa. There are two peak periods of rainfall.

(5) Mediterranean region - A dry summer subtropical climate. Rain falls only in winter (December–January in North Africa, June–July in southern Africa), 

(6) Humid subtropical marine region - The southeast coast of Africa. This region is characterized by rainfall throughout the year, but it is heaviest in summer.

(7) Warm temperate upland region - Highveld of southern Africa. Its rainfall regime is similar to that of the tropical wet-and-dry climate, but temperatures are greatly modified by the altitude.

(8) Mountain region - The high mountain areas of Ethiopia and the lake region of East Africa. Temperatures are even lower and snow occurs on the tops of the highest peaks, such as Kilimanjaro.

Southern Africa Wildlife Expeditions: 

Complete List

TG01 - Africa's Super Predators and Mammals Safari - South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana
With Specialist Guide - Paul de Bruyn