AFRICA - THE SECOND LARGEST CONTINENT IN THE WORLD

AFRICA

Africa is the second largest continent in the world with landmark of 30,370,000 Km2 (11,730,00sq mi), population of about 1,225,080,510 ranking the second continent behind Asia in both categories. It covers about 6% of Earth total surface area and 20% of land area.
Africa is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.
Africa contains 54 recognized countries, large diversity of ethnicities, cultures and language with almost 1250 – 3000 native languages.
Algeria is the largest country by area in Africa and Nigeria is its largest by population. European countries colonized almost all of Africa. African nations cooperate through the establishment of African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa.
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LARGEST CITIES IN AFRICA
Lagos, Cairo, Kinshasa, Johannesburg, Abuja, Khartoum, Dar es Salaam, Alexandria Abidjan, Algiers, Kano, Casablanca, Ibadan, Nairobi, Addis Ababa and Accra.
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HISTORY
Africa is considered to be the oldest inhabited territory on Earth with the human species originating from the continent. During the mid 20th century, many fossils were discovered by anthropologist and evidence of human occupation perhaps about 7 million years ago BP (Before Present). Fossil are species of early apelike humans to have evolved into modern man such as Australopithecus afarensis date approximately 4 - 3.9 million years BP, Parenthropus boisei 2.3 -1 million years BP and the Home ergaster 1.9 million – 600,000 years BP discovered.
After the evolution of Homo sapiens approximately 150,000 – 100,000 years BP in Africa, the continent was populated mainly by groups of hunter-gatherers. The first modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the globe during the #Out of Africa II migration approximately 50,000 years BP, exiting the continent either across Bab el Mandeb over the Rea Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar in Morocco or the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt.
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EARLY CIVILIZATIONS

Colossal statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, Egypt, date from around 1400 BC.

The historical record opens in Northern Africa with the rise of literacy in the Pharaonic civilization of Ancient Egypt about 3300 BC. One of the world’s earliest and longest-lasting civilizations, the Egyptian state with varying levels of influence over others until 343 BC.
An independent centre of civilization with trading links of Phoenicia was established by Phoenicians from Tyre on the north-West African coast at Carthage. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great was welcomed as a liberator in Persian occupied Egypt. He found Alexandria in Egypt which would become the prosperous capital of Ptolemaic dynasty after his death.
Christianity spread across these areas at an early date from Judaea via Egypt and beyond the borders of Roman world into Nubia by AD 340. It had become the state religion of Aksumite Empire. Syro-Greek missionaries who arrived by way of the Read Sea were responsible for the theological development.
In early 7th century, the newly formed Arabic Islamic Caliphate expanded into Egypt and then into North Africa. While the Berber elite had been integrated into Muslim Arab tribes. When the Umayyad capital Damascus fell in the 8th century, the Islamic centre of the Mediterranean shifted from Syria to Qayrawan in North Africa. Islamic North African had become diverse and hub for mystics, scholars, jurist and philosophers. During the period, Islam spread to sub-Saharan Africa through trade routes and migration.

NINTH TO EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
By the ninth century AD, a string of dynastic states, including the earliest Hausa states, stretched across the sub-Saharan savannah from the western regions to central Sudan. The most powerful of these states were Ghana, Gao, and the Kanem-Bornu Empire. Ghana declined in the eleventh century, but was succeeded by the Mali Empire which consolidated much of western Sudan in the thirteenth century. Kanem accepted Islam in the eleventh century.
In the forested regions of the West African coast, independent kingdoms grew with little influence from the Muslim north. The Kingdom of Nri was established around the ninth century and was one of the first. It is also one of the oldest kingdoms in present-day Nigeria and was ruled by the Eze Nri. The Nri kingdom is famous for its elaborate bronzes, found at the town of Igbo-Ukwu. The bronzes have been dated from as far back as the ninth century.
The Kingdom of Ife, historically the first of these Yoruba city-states or kingdoms, established government under a priestly oba ('king' or 'ruler' in the Yoruba language), called the Ooni of Ife. Ife was noted as a major religious and cultural centre in West Africa, and for its unique naturalistic tradition of bronze sculpture. The Ife model of government was adapted at the Oyo Empire, where its obas or kings, called the Alaafins of Oyo, once controlled a large number of other Yoruba and non-Yoruba city-states and kingdoms; the Fon Kingdom of Dahomey was one of the non-Yoruba domains under Oyo control.
The breakup of Mali, a local leader named Sonni Ali (1464–1492) founded the Songhai Empire in the region of middle Niger and the western Sudan and took control of the trans-Saharan trade. Sonni Ali seized Timbuktu in 1468 and Jenne in 1473, building his regime on trade revenues and the cooperation of Muslim merchants. His successor Askia Mohammad I (1493–1528) made Islam the official religion, built mosques, and brought to Gao Muslim scholars, including al-Maghili (d.1504), the founder of an important tradition of Sudanic African Muslim scholarship. By the eleventh century, some Hausa states – such as Kano, Jigawa, Katsina, and Gobir – had developed into walled towns engaging in trade, servicing caravans, and the manufacture of goods. Until the fifteenth century, these small states were on the periphery of the major Sudanic empires of the era, paying tribute to Songhai to the west and Kanem-Borno to the east.

HEIGHT OF SLAVE TRADE
Slavery had long been practiced in Africa. Between the 7th and 20th centuries, the Arab slave trade (also known as "slavery in the east") took 18 million slaves from Africa via trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean routes. Between the 15th and the 19th centuries, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 7–12 million slaves to the New World. In addition, more than 1 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries.
In West Africa, the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1820s caused dramatic economic shifts in local polities. The gradual decline of slave-trading, prompted by a lack of demand for slaves in the New World, increasing anti-slavery legislation in Europe and America, and the British Royal Navy'sincreasing presence off the West African coast, obliged African states to adopt new economies. Between 1808 and 1860, the British West Africa Squadron seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were aboard.
Action was also taken against African leaders who refused to agree to British treaties to outlaw the trade, for example against "the usurping King of Lagos", deposed in 1851. Anti-slavery treaties were signed with over 50 African rulers. The largest powers of West Africa (the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire) adopted different ways of adapting to the shift. Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil, cocoa, timber and gold, forming the bedrock of West Africa's modern export trade. The Oyo Empire, unable to adapt, collapsed into civil wars.

POPULATION
Africa's population has rapidly increased over the last 40 years and consequently. In some African states, more than half the population is under 25 years of age. The total number of people in Africa increased from 229 million in 1950 to 630 million in 1990. As of 2016, the population of Africa is estimated at 1.2 billion. Africa's total population surpassing other continents is fairly recent; African population surpassed Europe in the 1990s, while the Americas was overtaken sometime around the year 2000; Africa's rapid population growth is expected to overtake the only two nations currently larger than its population, at roughly the same time – India and China's 1.4 billion people each will swap ranking around the year 2022.

Woman from Benin

San Bushman man from Botswana

COUNTRIES OF AFRICA

Algeria
Togo
Benin
Botswana
Cameroon
Cent Afr Rep
Chad
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Egypt
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Ethiopia
Cape*Verde
Libya
Mali
Ghana
Sierra Leone
Ivory Coast
Burkina Faso
Mauritania
Morocco
Gabon
Namibia
Niger
Nigeria
Congo
Somalia
South Africa
Sudan
South Sudan
Tunisia
Western Sahara
Senegal
The Gambia
Guinea-Bissau
Guinea
Kenya
Liberia
Madagascar
Malawi
Mozambique
Burundi
Rwanda
Uganda
Tanzania
Angola
Lesotho
Swaziland
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Mauritius*
Réunion*
*Comoros

REGIONS OF AFRICA
North Africa
West Africa
Central Africa
East Africa
Southern Africa