Countries In Africa and 10 Facts About Africa – Africa is a continent with clearly defined borders. In the north it is separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, in the northeast, is separated from Asia by the Suez Canal and farther by the Red Sea. From the east and southeast, it is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, from the west by the Atlantic Ocean.
Africa is the second-largest continent in the world in both area and population. It is an almost entirely isolated landmass with only a small land bridge in the northeast, connecting the African Mainland with Western Asia.
Talking about Countries In Africa, the total number of independent states in Africa is 54. The transcontinental country in this region is Egypt, also having a small part of its territory in Asia, on the other side of the Suez Canal, but politically it is a member of the African Union.
Among the African countries, the biggest one is Algeria, occupying around 7% of the continent’s territory. And the smallest nation is Seychelles, the worldwide famous luxurious beach holiday destination, occupying 115 islands stretching along the mainland’s eastern coast.
Population of Africa
An estimated 1.34 billion people live in the second-largest continent, representing about 14 percent of the world’s population (as of 2020). By far the most populous country in Africa is Nigeria, with a population of more than 190 million.
Are there 56 countries in Africa?
All in all, there are 54 sovereign African countries and two disputed areas, namely Somaliland and Western Sahara (see the list of Countries In Africa below).
Which country is the first country in Africa?
Ethiopia is Africa’s oldest independent country and its second largest in terms of population
54 Countries In Africa
-
- Algeria
- Angola
- Benin
- Botswana
- Burkina Faso
- Burundi
- Cabo Verde
- Cameroon
- Central African Republic (CAR)
- Chad
- Comoros
- Congo, Democratic Republic of the
- Congo, Republic of the
- Cote d’Ivoire
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Equatorial Guinea
- Eritrea
- Eswatini (formerly Swaziland)
- Ethiopia
- Gabon
- Gambia
- Ghana
- Guinea
- Guinea-Bissau
- Kenya
- Lesotho
- Liberia
- Libya
- Madagascar
- Malawi
- Mali
- Mauritania
- Mauritius
- Morocco
- Mozambique
- Namibia
- Niger
- Nigeria
- Rwanda
- Sao Tome and Principe
- Senegal
- Seychelles
- Sierra Leone
- Somalia
- South Africa
- South Sudan
- Sudan
- Tanzania
- Togo
- Tunisia
- Uganda
- Zambia
- Zimbabwe
Division Of African Continent:
1. North Africa
Northern Africa (as used by the United Nations) refers to the portion of Africa along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea (except for Sudan). In the northwest, the Atlas Mountains dominate the area.
South of the Mediterranean coastal strip stretches the Sahara from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east.
There are six countries in Northern Africa and one disputed territory, Western Sahara. According to the United Nations Population Division, approximately 242 million people live in Northern Africa.
2. West Africa
Western Africa mostly refers to the countries north of the Gulf of Guinea in the north-western part of the continent.
West Africa is located in the southern part of the so-called hump of Africa; it is bounded in the north by the Sahara desert and the Sahel zone.
There are sixteen countries in West Africa and one British Overseas Territory, Saint Helena. According to the United Nations Population Division, an estimated 392 million people live in West Africa.
3. Central Africa
Middle Africa (as used by the United Nations) refers to the tropical central portion of the African continent. There are nine countries in Central Africa, including the island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe.
According to the United Nations Population Division, approximately 174 million people live in Central Africa.
4. East Africa
Eastern Africa, is the eastern portion of the African continent; it includes Madagascar and other, smaller islands.
In a narrower sense, the term East Africa may refer to the former British colonial areas of present-day Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
According to the United Nations Population Division, roughly 445 million people live in East Africa.
5. Southern Africa
Southern Africa is the southern portion of the African continent, bounded by the South Atlantic Ocean in the west and the Indian Ocean in the east.
The United Nations geoscheme lists five countries in Southern Africa, with a total population of about 67 million people.
10 Facts About Africa
1. The human race is of African origin. The oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans (or homo sapiens sapiens) were excavated at sites in East Africa.
Human remains were discovered at Omo in Ethiopia that were dated at 195,000 years old, the oldest known in the world.
2. Skeletons of pre-humans have been found in Africa that date back between 4 and 5 million years. The oldest known ancestral type of humanity is thought to have been the australopithecus ramidus, who lived at least 4.4 million years ago.
3. Africans were the first to organise fishing expeditions 90,000 years ago. At Katanda, a region in northeastern Zaïre (now Congo), was recovered a finely wrought series of harpoon points, all elaborately polished and barbed.
Also uncovered was a tool, equally well crafted, believed to be a dagger. The discoveries suggested the existence of an early aquatic or fishing based culture.
4. Africans were the first to engage in mining 43,000 years ago. In 1964 a hematite mine was found in Swaziland at Bomvu Ridge in the Ngwenya mountain range.
Ultimately 300,000 artefacts were recovered including thousands of stone-made mining tools. Adrian Boshier, one of the archaeologists on the site, dated the mine to a staggering 43,200 years old.
5. Africans pioneered basic arithmetic 25,000 years ago. The Ishango bone is a tool handle with notches carved into it found in the Ishango region of Zaïre (now called Congo) near Lake Edward. The bone tool was originally thought to have been over 8,000 years old, but a more sensitive recent dating has given dates of 25,000 years old. On the tool are 3 rows of notches.
Row 1 shows three notches carved next to six, four carved next to eight, ten carved next to two fives and finally a seven. The 3 and 6, 4 and 8, and 10 and 5, represent the process of doubling. Row 2 shows eleven notches carved next to twenty-one notches, and nineteen notches carved next to nine notches.
This represents 10 + 1, 20 + 1, 20 – 1 and 10 – 1. Finally, Row 3 shows eleven notches, thirteen notches, seventeen notches and nineteen notches. 11, 13, 17 and 19 are the prime numbers between 10 and 20.
6. Africans cultivated crops 12,000 years ago, the first known advances in agriculture. Professor Fred Wendorf discovered that people in Egypt’s Western Desert cultivated crops of barley, capers, chick-peas, dates, legumes, lentils and wheat.
Their ancient tools were also recovered. There were grindstones, milling stones, cutting blades, hide scrapers, engraving burins, and mortars and pestles.
7. Africans mummified their dead 9,000 years ago. A mummified infant was found under the Uan Muhuggiag rock shelter in south western Libya.
The infant was buried in the foetal position and was mummified using a very sophisticated technique that must have taken hundreds of years to evolve. The technique predates the earliest mummies known in Ancient Egypt by at least 1,000 years.
Carbon dating is controversial but the mummy may date from 7438 (±220) BC.
8. Africans carved the world’s first colossal sculpture 7,000 or more years ago. The Great Sphinx of Giza was fashioned with the head of a man combined with the body of a lion.
A key and important question raised by this monument was: How old is it? In October 1991 Professor Robert Schoch, a geologist from Boston University, demonstrated that the Sphinx was sculpted between 5000 BC and 7000 BC, dates that he considered conservative.
9. On the 1 March 1979, the New York Times carried an article on its front page also page sixteen that was entitled Nubian Monarchy called Oldest.
In this article we were assured that: “Evidence of the oldest recognizable monarchy in human history, preceding the rise of the earliest Egyptian kings by several generations, has been discovered in artifacts from ancient Nubia” (i.e. the territory of the northern Sudan and the southern portion of modern Egypt.)
10. The ancient Egyptians had the same type of tropically adapted skeletal proportions as modern Black Africans.
A 2003 paper appeared in American Journal of Physical Anthropology by Dr Sonia Zakrzewski entitled Variation in Ancient Egyptian Stature and Body Proportions where she states that: “The raw values in Table 6 suggest that Egyptians had the ‘super-Negroid’ body plan described by Robins (1983).
The values for the brachial and crural indices show that the distal segments of each limb are longer relative to the proximal segments than in many ‘African’ populations.”
