Africa: Unveiling the Facts About This Diverse Continent

Nov 08, 2025 0

Africa is a unique continent filled with history, culture, and commerce. This incredible continent is home to some of the oldest civilizations in the world and is incredibly rich in culture, diversity, and history. It is a truly remarkable place. Let’s explore some of the amazing facts about Africa!

Map of Africa

Basic Facts About Africa

It is the second largest continent of the world. It is one of the 7 continents of the world and is only smaller than Asia.
Africa's total land area is approximately 11,724,000 square miles (30,365,000 square km), and the continent measures about 5,000 miles (8,000 km) from north to south and about 4,600 miles (7,400 km) from east to west.
The continent is bounded on the west by the Atlantic Ocean, on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, on the east by the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, and on the south by the mingling waters of the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Arabian Plate and the Gulf of Aqaba to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.
Paradoxically, the coastline of Africa-18,950 miles (30,500 km) in length-is shorter than that of Europe, because there are few inlets and few large bays or gulfs.
It contains 54 fully recognized sovereign states, eight cities and islands that are part of non-African states, and two de facto independent states with limited or no recognition. These include Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, and Ethiopia.
The continent has 54 independent states and one “non-self-governing territory” (Western Sahara).
Africa straddles the equator and the prime meridian.

Geography and Environment

Africa is the world's hottest continent and the second driest after Australia. Although it is nearly four times the size of Europe, it has a shorter overall coastline because of its straighter shores.

Africa has the world’s largest desert - sort of! The Sahara desert is the largest desert in the world - well technically the largest hot desert. It is the third largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Arctic. The Sahara alone is bigger than the continental USA.
It is home to the world’s longest river, The Nile. The Nile is the longest river in the world - although some researchers are arguing that The Amazon is longer. It flows through many different African countries and is the main water source of Egypt, Sudan and South Sudan.
Botswana’s Okavango Delta, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is one of the three largest inland deltas in the world, all found in Africa.
Lake Assal, a crater lake in the Afar Triangle, lies on the northern tip of the Great Rift Valley. At 155 metres (509 feet) below sea level, the lake is the lowest point on land in Africa and the third-lowest on Earth after the Dead Sea and Sea of Galilee.
Lesotho is the only country in the world which lies, in its entirety, over a kilometre above sea level.

However, Africa is also heavily affected by a wide range of environmental issues, including desertification, deforestation, water scarcity, and pollution. These entrenched environmental concerns are expected to worsen as climate change impacts Africa.

Animals of Africa 4K - Scenic Relaxation Film With Calming Music

Economy and Resources

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.

Read also: Discover Lesotho

African Economy

Most of the world’s diamonds come from Africa. As much as 95 percent of the world’s diamonds and 50 percent of the world’s gold comes from Africa.
Africa makes 70% of the world’s cocoa beans. Cocoa beans are used to make chocolate. Most of the world’s beans come from 4 West African countries: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon.
Almost half of the gold ever mined on Earth has come from a single place - Witwatersrand, South Africa.
The continent’s richest country is Equatorial Guinea, with over $33,000 of GDP per capita. This puts the country comparable to Spain.
Between 2000 and 2010 the continent achieved average real annual GDP growth of 5.4 percent, adding $78 billion annually to GDP (in 2015 prices). But growth slowed to 3.3 percent, or $69 billion, a year between 2010 and 2015.

People and Culture

With nearly 1.4 billion people as of 2021, it accounts for about 18% of the world's human population. Africa's population is the youngest among all the continents; the median age in 2012 was 19.7, when the worldwide median age was 30.4. Based on 2024 projections, Africa's population will exceed 3.8 billion people by 2100.

Our earliest ancestors originated from Africa. Africa is sometimes called The Cradle of Humankind because there have been many fossils, tools which indicate that early human life originated here. These people are the earliest known homo-sapiens, which is the species we belong to.
1.2 billion people live in Africa. That’s 16% of the world’s population.
There are over 2000 different languages spoken in Africa. Arabic is the most spoken language in Africa.
Africa is home to 55 countries, an ancient and complex history, modern cities, some 3,000 languages and over a billion people.
Ethiopia is the only African country with its own alphabet.
In 2034, Africa is expected to have the world’s largest working-age population of 1.1 billion.

Historical Perspective

The history of Africa is long, complex, and varied, and has often been under-appreciated by the global historical community. The size of the Sahara has historically been extremely variable, with its area rapidly fluctuating and at times disappearing depending on global climatic conditions.

In African societies the oral word is revered, and they have generally recorded their history via oral tradition, which has led anthropologists to term them "oral civilizations", contrasted with "literate civilizations" which pride the written word. In African societies, the historical process is largely a communal one, with eyewitness accounts, hearsay, reminiscences, and occasionally visions, dreams, and hallucinations crafted into narrative oral traditions which are performed and transmitted through generations.

Africa is considered by most paleoanthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth, with the Human species originating from the continent. Fossil remains of several species of early apelike humans thought to have evolved into modern humans, such as Australopithecus afarensis radiometrically dated to approximately 3.9-3.0 million years BP, Paranthropus boisei (c. 2.3-1.4 million years BP) and Homo ergaster (c.

Read also: Understanding the Horn of Africa