The second largest continent in the world after Asia in both geographic size and population, Africa covers one-fifth of the Earth's land surface and contains 54 countriesnote , 8 dependencies, two thousand languages, and upwards of a billion people. Its primary cultural and political divide is between the largely Arabic-speaking Muslim states north of the Sahara plus the country of Sudan (known collectively as North Africa), which have more in common with the Arab World than the rest of the continent, and "Black Africa" or sub-Saharan Africa further south. There are a lot of other divisions, though, including the differences between Southern Africa and the rest of sub-Saharan Africanote and the transition zones just south of the Sahara: the Sahel
and Sudan (which confusingly does not include the country of Sudan, where the people are for the most part culturally Arab but look "African" to outsiders).note Africa is sometimes also merged with Europe and Asia as Afro-Eurasia.
Africa is much bigger than most people realize, largely because of the distortions formed by creating a flat map of the round Earth, which also has the unfortunate side effect of making Greenland look a lot bigger than it actually is (in reality, Greenland is over 250 sq km (96.53 sq mi) smaller than Africa's second-largest country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo). To get an idea of Africa's scale, it is comparable to the continents of Antarctica, Europe and Oceania combined. Of course, this could also be attributed to the fact that Africa quite possibly constitutes the world's biggest Hufflepuff House despite housing a billion plus people. Out of about 55 countries, only Egypt, Nigeria, Libya, Somalia, Madagascar, and South Africa are really known by the general Western public (and Madagascar has DreamWorks to thank for much of its recognition).
Africa is widely believed by paleoanthropologists to be the place where humans originated; Homo sapiens arose in the Horn of Africa 300,000 years ago, and began to emigrate from the continent possibly as early as 270,000 years ago. Migrations of H. sapiens occurred in waves, with all modern non-Africans descending from a single expansion 50,000 years ago. H. sapiens managed to outdo their archaic precursors Homo erectus (themselves originating from Africa 2 million years ago) by colonizing North Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, places their predecessors never reached.
For most of prehistory, Africa was a very lush and green continent, a state of affairs that has persisted in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa to this day. Thousands of years ago, the area we now know as the Sahara desert was a fertile grassland, kept verdant by rivers and lakes, and inhabited by large populations of humans and animals. These human populations subsisted via hunter-gathering, and later through herding and primitive agriculture. However, some 4000 years ago, an abrupt climactic shift led to gradual desertification which, within a few centuries transformed most of Northern Africa into the sandy wasteland we know and love today. The only exceptions to this desertification were areas like the Atlas Mountains, the Lake Chad Basin, and the fertile banks of the Nile River. The birth of the Sahara desert created a geographical, cultural, and ethnic divide that has separated Africans ever since, with North Africa being primarily inhabited by olive-skinned peoples like the Amazigh and the Copts, while darker-skinned peoples like the Bantu and Hausa tend to predominate areas to the south of the Great Desert. However, it should be noted that this barrier is not impenetrable and at various times throughout African history, civilizations and cultures from both sides of the Sahara have engaged in extensive contact with each other. Ancient Egypt for example, was a society of mixed racial origin, where Northern and Sub-Saharan African populations lived side by side. All the same, as a result of continual climate change and environmental neglect, the Sahara continues to expand in the present day, swallowing up more and more land as global temperatures continue to rise.
Africa entered history at a very early stage, with the Ancient Egyptian civilization arising in the 31st century BCE, alongside its sister civilization Nubia to the south. Empires like Egypt and Carthage played significant roles in the historical development of the Middle East and the greater Mediterranean, influencing religion, politics, science, and culture. As did the various Berber and Arab sultanates that emerged after the rise of Islam. Meanwhile, South of the Sahara, cultures like the Nok and Djenne-Djenno were flourishing, and groups like the Bantu were expanding into Eastern and Southern Africa, bringing iron-working and agriculture with them. During the next few millennia, these cultures would develop into a dense tapestry of kingdoms, confederations, and empires of similar complexity to those found in Europe and Asia. These included the likes of Aksum (one of the first civilizations to adopt Christianity as a state religion, only to be cut off from the rest of the Christian world by the advent of Islam), the Mali Empire (an immensely wealthy trading power, that developed the fabled Timbuktu into a center of culture and learning), the city-states of the Swahili Coast, the Benin Empire, the Ashanti, the Kingdom of Kongo, and Great Zimbabwe. These civilizations grew wealthy by harnessing Africa's plentiful natural resources, shipping immense amounts of gold, iron, salt, timber, ivory, and enslaved people, to buyers in the Islamic World, Asia, and Europe. However, thanks to the geographical boundary created by the Sahara, for most of the ancient and medieval era, Europeans had minimal direct contact with Sub-Saharan Africans. As such, the exploits and achievements of Sub-Saharan African civilizations tend to be ignored in most Western accounts of history, leading to the misconception that pre-colonial Sub-Saharan Africa was some primordial timeless wilderness where primitive bands of tribal people lived without any semblance of civilization. Ignorance of this history has been further enforced by the fact that most pre-colonial Sub-Saharan African societies did not utilize writing, so when their societies were disrupted by colonialism, many of their histories, usually maintained via oral transmission, were permanently lost or distorted.
During the early modern period, European navigators explored the African continent for the first time and brought news of its tremendous natural wealth — and abundance of people — back home. Already in the market for slaves for their plantations in the New World, the European powers saw Sub-Saharan Africa as the ideal place to find them. They justified this tactic by inventing the notion of scientific racism, which claimed that humanity was divided into four or so distinct races and that black Africans were the worst of the lot. Thus was born the Atlantic Slave Trade, which, over roughly 300 years, ferried millions of captured Africans away from their homes and onto slave plantations in the Americas, and had tremendous political, economic, and demographic consequences for both Africa and the New World. For starters, the societal disruption caused by the slave trade and the introduction of firearms led to the gradual collapse of many powerful African states, leaving much of the continent ripe for the taking. At first, with the noted exception of the Dutch Cape Colony, Europeans were only interested in trade with the existing African powers, and maintaining the slave trade. However by the 19th century, with the advent of New Imperialism, the focus shifted to obtaining control of the continent's immense resources, and slowly but surely Africa came under the control of the European powers. This so-called Scramble for Africa left Liberia and Ethiopia as the only modern-day African countries never to be colonized by Europeans.note
Following World War II, calls for the decolonization of imperial colonies echoed throughout the world, and Africa was no exception. It took decades of negotiations, political bickering, and bloody independence wars, but one by one, the colonies gradually achieved de jure independence. Unfortunately, these independence movements were complicated by the fact that many of the colonies were drawn up from arbitrary borders without regard to the people who lived there. Africans, contrary to popular perception, are not a homogeneous people and are just as varied in ethnicity, culture, language, and religion as anyone else in the world, if not more so. But as a result of this misconception, ethnic and religious groups who varied greatly from each other, and in some cases were even outright enemies, were often forced to share a country, which led to inevitable conflict. This is before mentioning the European power's overexploitation of African resources, pervasive neglect of the state of affairs in the colonies thanks to years of racism, and their insistence on maintaining political and economic dominance over the continent even decades after independence, via neocolonialism. Thus were created tropes of Africa being a hot, dusty hellhole where people live in straw huts, speak uncouth, dumb-sounding languages, are perpetually in need of assistance from mighty rich whites, are ruled by corrupt dictators, and whose only contribution to the world is a mass of refugees who cross the Mediterranean yearly in search of a better life in utopian, civilized European countries.
If you are curious about African-Americans, they are the American-born descendants of Africans brought over to the United States as slaves in the Atlantic slave trade, particularly West and Central Africans. They are not to be confused with Africans from the continent itself, though African-Americans did establish a country in West Africa, Liberia, with that country having its own unique ethnic group, Americo-Liberians, as a result, and they also founded Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. Most Afro-Caribbeans and Afro-Latinos are also descended from Africans brought to the New World by Europeans in the same slave trade, with The Caribbean having many aspects of West African culture in general as a result.
For Africa in fiction, see Afrofuturism, Bulungi and Darkest Africa. See also Amoral Afrikaner, Great White Hunter and Mighty Whitey. And despite what you may have heard, Africa is not a country.
Countries
North Africa
- Egypt (Transcontinental)
Southern Africa
West Africa
- Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast)
East Africa
Central Africa
Unrecognized Countries
North Africa
- Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (Western Sahara) (de facto independent country, claimed by Morocco)
East Africa
- Somaliland (de facto independent country, claimed by Somalia)
Dependencies
West Africa
- Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha (owned by the United Kingdom)
East Africa
- French Southern and Antarctic Lands (owned by France)
- Mayotte (de facto owned by France, claimed by Comoros)
- Réunion Island (owned by France)
Defunct countries, empires, and other entities
Useful Notes and other articles related to Africans and African Culture
Africa in General
- Aardvark Trunks
- Africa Is a Country
- African Chant
- African Mythology
- African Terrorists
- Afrobeat
- Afrofuturism
- Africans
- Angry, Angry Hippos
- Arab World
- Arabic Language
- Bible Times
- Bulungi
- Child Soldiers
- Clamshell Currency
- Cruel Elephant
- Darkest Africa
- Developing Nations Lack Cities
- The Dutch-Portuguese War
- Elephant Graveyard
- Forces with Firepower
- Egyptians with Eagle Fighters (Egyptian military)
- South Africans with Surface-to-Air Missiles (South African National Defense Force)
- French Language
- The Generalissimo
- Genial Giraffe
- Gentle Gorilla
- Gratuitous Foreign Language
- Great White Hunter
- Heinous Hyena
- Honorable Elephant
- Huggy, Huggy Hippos
- Hungry Jungle
- Islamic Dress
- Killer Gorilla
- King of Beasts
- Magical Negro
- Malicious Monitor Lizard
- Other Royal Families
- Panthera Awesome
- Portuguese Language
- President for Life
- Rhino Rampage
- Ruthless Modern Pirates
- Sea of Sand
- Tuareg Mythology
- Where da White Women At?
- White Like Me
- World War II
North Africa
See Egypt, Libya and Morocco for everything solely related to those countries- Algerian Civil War
- All Muslims are Arab
- The Arab Spring
- Barbarous Barbary Bandits
- Barbary Coast Wars
- Bedouin Rescue Service
- Build Like an Egyptian
- Crossing the Desert
- Curse of the Pharaoh
- Deadly Dust Storm
- Desert Bandits
- Desert Warfare
- Egyptian Mythology
- Eye of Horus Means Egypt
- God-Emperor
- History of Modern Egypt
- Hollywood Mirage
- Kabyle Mythology
- Legion of Lost Souls
- Mummy
- Nepharious Pharaoh
- Ouroboros
- Philosopher's Stone
- Punic Wars
- Pyramid Power
- The River War
- Scarab Power
- Thirsty Desert
- Qurac
- War Elephants
- The War on Terror
Southern Africa
See South Africa for everything solely related to South Africa- Amoral Afrikaner
- Anglo-Zulu War
- Castles
- Former Regime Personnel
- Mandela Effect
- Micro Monarchy
- Monstrous Seal
- Private Military Contractors
- The Second Boer War
- Sluggish Seal
- Sweet Seal
West Africa
See Nigeria for everything solely related to Nigeria- 419 Scam
- Akan Mythology
- Fulani Mythology
- Gbe Mythology
- G.I.R.L.
- Hausa Mythology
- Ibibio Efik Mythology
- Igbo Mythology
- Ijaw Mythology
- Jukun Mythology
- Mande Mythology
- Nollywood
- Serer Mythology
- Songhai Mythology
- Yoruba Mythology
East Africa
See Kenya, Madagascar and Somalia for everything solely related to those countries- Alur Mythology
- Coffee
- Doofy Dodo
- Freddie Mercopy
- Great Lakes Bantu Mythology
- Maa Mythology
- Malagasy Mythology
- Swahili Mythology
- A Taste of the Lash
