This Is Africa

By Berkshire Publishing

What is Africa? Africa is vast savannas and teeming cities, oil wells and village water holes, gated suburbs and crumbling shantytowns, Great Lakes and the world's largest hot desert, visionary leaders and petty corruption, diamond mines and workers living on $2 a day, thriving art and music scenes and war-torn cultures. This Is Africa is a book about a continent of enormous diversity.

 

Africa is big, far bigger than many people may realize. Those who may be accustomed to the Mercator projection commonly shown in maps may think that Africa is about the size of Greenland. The state of California would fit into Africa more than seventy times, and Africa is nearly fourteen times the size of Greenland. The continent is home to just over one billion people: about fifteen percent of the world's population. Africans speak over two thousand languages and dialects, adhere to three different major religious traditions, and live in sixty-four nations and territories.

 

The phrase "This is Africa" can mean different things. We use it in the descriptive sense to mean, literally, this is what Africa is and always has been. Some people mutter "This is Africa" out of frustration with a place where things do not run on time or work as they should. These same people may exclaim "This is Africa" in reaction to the beautiful landscape, the wildlife, and the diversity of cultural expression thriving on the continent. Our goal in this book is to present all sides of Africa today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berkshire Publishing
• Release date: Feb 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781614725701

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WE THANK THE BERKSHIRE authors whose contributions to our major encyclopedias inspired this addition to our This World of Ours series. Anthropologist David Levinson and staff editorial assistant Bill Siever did a great deal of the work involved in creating this book, with the advice of the Africa specialists who had worked with us on other projects.

EPUB: 978-1-61472-570-1

INTRODUCTION: WHAT Is Africa?

What is Africa? Africa is vast savannas and teeming cities, oil wells and village water holes, gated suburbs and crumbling shantytowns, Great Lakes and the world’s largest hot desert, visionary leaders and petty corruption, diamond mines and workers living on $2 a day, thriving art and music scenes and war-torn cultures. This Is Africa is a book about a continent of enormous diversity.

The phrase This is Africa can mean different things. We use it in the descriptive sense to mean, literally, this is what Africa is and always has been. Some people mutter This is Africa out of frustration with a place where things do not run on time or work as they should. These same people may exclaim This is Africa in reaction to the beautiful landscape, the wildlife, and the diversity of cultural expression thriving on the continent. Our goal in this book is to present all sides of Africa today.

Africa is big, far bigger than many people may realize. Those who may be accustomed to the Mercator projection commonly shown in maps may think that Africa is about the size of Greenland. The state of California would fit into Africa more than seventy times, and Africa is nearly fourteen times the size of Greenland, with nearly 20,000 times the population. The continent is home to just over one billion people: about fifteen percent of the world’s population. Africans speak over two thousand languages and dialects, adhere to three different major religious traditions, and live in sixty-four nations and territories.

To say that Africa is a developing continent is an outsider’s way of saying that Africa faces many serious problems, some a product of colonialism and neocolonialism, others of Africans’ own making. Among the issues facing Africa in the twenty-first century are an exploding population, poverty and gross income and wealth inequality, religion- and ethnic-based violence and wars, political instability and corruption, disease, and environmental degradation as a result of resource extraction. Africa has some significant strengths, including a relatively young population and a resource-rich environment, together with slow gains in political stability in some nations. The end of apartheid in South Africa, some successes in the battle against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and an increasingly educated and cosmopolitan population are all bright signs for the future.

The origin of the name Africa is contentious. The most common scholarly explanation is that it comes from the Roman Africa terra, or land of the Afri, in reference to a Berber-speaking society that once lived in what is now Tunisia. Another explanation is that it comes from the Latin aprica (sunny) or the Phoenician term afar (dust). An Arabic term, Ifriqiya, is often assumed to come from the Roman, although some argue that the Latin term came from the Arabic. There is also an argument that the term is actually ancient Egyptian in origin, from Af-Rui-Ka, meaning place of beginnings. Whatever the origins of the term, by the fifteenth century Africa was winning out against competing terms such as Ethiopia and Libya to become the common identifier for the continent. The controversy over the landmass’s name foreshadows the deeper conflicts over its meaning and relevance in the world. Prior to the modern era, Africa was seen as not a very different part of the world. Given the long interactions between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, all had previously been seen as part of a single world, as is evident from early maps. The third-century Iranian religious leader Mani ranked Aksum, in northeastern Africa, with Rome, Persia, and China as one of the four great empires of the world. We will discuss Aksum, and the many other kingdoms and empires in Africa’s long history, in Chapter 2. First, let’s take a short tour of Africa’s many regions.

Chapter One: An Overview of Africa’s Regions

AFRICA IN 2014 IS COMPOSED of fifty-four nations, two dependent territories, one disputed territory, and eight administered territories belonging to European nations. The newest nation is South Sudan, established in 2011 following a genocidal civil war within Sudan. African nations vary widely in size, population, degree of urbanization, ethnic complexity, and religion. The most populous nations are Nigeria (177 million, eighth-most populous nation in the world); Ethiopia (97 million); Egypt (87 million); the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or DRC (77 million); Tanzania (50 million); South Africa (48 million); and Kenya (45 million).

The simplest division of Africa is into two regions—North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa, or what was formerly labeled Black Africa, is conventionally subdivided into West Africa, Central Africa, East Africa, and Southern Africa. We follow the conventions of the African Development Bank Group in the divisions that follow.

North Africa

Algeria—Egypt—Libya—Mauritania—Morocco—Tunisia—Western Sahara

North Africa is composed of the nations of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, as well as Western Sahara, a disputed territory on the northwest coast of Africa that is occupied by Morocco but claimed by the Polisario Front, a group that operates a government-in-exile from Algeria. The exclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, both located on peninsulas on the coast of Morocco, are possessions of Spain but are on the African mainland. (An exclave is a part of a nation that is not within the boundaries of the mother nation.) The total population of North Africa is around 175 million, with Egypt the most populous nation with 87 million people. Algeria, Morocco, Libya, and Tunisia form the Maghreb (land of the Berbers, the region’s indigenous people) in the west, while Egypt in the east is dominated by the Nile valley.

For thousands of years North Africa has been part of three worlds—Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. Because it has been influenced by the Arab and Muslim Middle East for more than 1,500 years, it is now often classified politically and culturally as part of the Muslim / Arab Middle East, along with the nations of southwestern Asia. North Africa’s dual identity as Middle Eastern and African is clear: all but Western Sahara are members of the Arab League and all but Morocco and Western Sahara are members of the African Union. North Africa is nonetheless geographically part of Africa, and it has had a continual flow of people, ideas, and goods with sub-Saharan Africa. Among major influences on sub-Saharan Africa to the south were the spread of Islam to West Africa starting in the eighth century ce, and the extensive precolonial slave trading by European and Arab traders.

The Mediterranean coastal region, along with the Nile valley and mountain valleys, forms the region’s agricultural center, with key products including cotton, cereals, olives, dates, figs, oranges, cedar, and cork. The coastal region is highly urbanized; major urban centers are, from west to east, Rabat (Morocco), Algiers (Algeria), Tunis (Tunisia), Tripoli (Libya), and Alexandria and Cairo in Egypt. South of the coastal zone, stretching across Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, lie the Atlas Mountains, which rise to a height of 4,165 meters (13,665 feet) at Jbel Toubkal in the High Atlas range of southwestern Morocco.

To the south is the vast Sahara desert. The desert is the chief geographical feature of northern Africa, with one of the hottest climates in the world. It is the largest hot desert in the world. The mean annual temperature usually exceeds 30°C (86°F) and can rise to more than 50°C (122°F) during the summer, during which it experiences hot and dust-filled winds. Nighttime temperatures can fall well below freezing in the winter. The rains in the region are rare and unpredictable; annual rainfall is less than 25 millimeters (1 inch), and even less than 5 millimeters in the eastern part of the desert. Extensive aquifers underlying many parts of the Sahara in some places are close enough to the surface to produce natural oases, called wadi(s).

Under the force of natural climate change, the Sahara evolved from an ocean of grassland that supported pastoralism to an imposing arid vastness that separated sub-Saharan Africa from the societies that surrounded the Mediterranean Sea.

The Sahara has been inhabited by Berbers, pre-dynastic Egyptians, and Nubians for millennia. Greeks, Phoenicians, Arabs, Ottomans, British, and French invaded and occupied the region in later periods. In the first millennium ce, North African peoples adopted the use of the dromedary camel, which originated in northeastern Africa. The camel made it possible for human groups both to develop a nomadic culture in the extremely arid sections of the desert and to make regular crossings of the Sahara, linking North Africa with the areas and societies to the south.

Compared to the other regions of Africa, North Africa’s population is homogeneous in terms of ethnicity, language, and religion. More than 90 percent of the population is Arab or mixed Arab and Berber, and about 95 percent are adherents of Sunni Islam. Islam came to North Africa during the Pious caliphate from 632 to 655 ce. (A caliphate refers to the dominions of successors of the Prophet Muhammad, as temporal and spiritual heads of Islam; the Pious caliphate refers to the collective rule of the first four successors to Muhammad.) The largest minority are the Berbers, who are on the whole integrated into the national societies. Other minorities include the Coptic Christians and Nubians in Egypt. North Africa also has a large refugee population of people fleeing poverty and political repression in sub-Saharan Africa, who use northern ports as departure points to Italy and Spain.

Starting in late 2010, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco experienced public political protests collectively labeled the Arab Spring, while Libya went through a civil war. Autocratic governments were overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, with mixed results. A democratically elected government in Egypt was overthrown and replaced by a military dictatorship in 2014; Libya has disintegrated into a near-failed state ruled by regional warlords. Despite its new freedoms, in 2014 Tunisia was the source of more foreign fighters joining the extremist group ISIS in Iraq and Syria than any other nation, according to the New York Times.

West Africa

Benin—Burkina Faso—Cape Verde—Cote d’Ivoire—The Gambia—Ghana—Guinea—Guinea-Bissau—Liberia—Mali—Niger—Nigeria—Senegal—Sierra Leone—Togo

Nearly all people of African ancestry in the Western hemisphere today are descended from people brought to the Americas from West Africa from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the result of West Africa’s large population and proximity to Europe and the Americas.

West Africa, the westernmost region of the African continent, is home to about 308 million people, slightly less than one-third of Africa’s people. This geopolitical region, going by the conventions of the African Development Bank Group, includes Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

The abundance of western African resources desired elsewhere is reflected in its resource-oriented historical names: the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), the Pepper Coast (modern Liberia), the Ivory Coast (still known by the name, but in French: Cote d’Ivoire), and the Slave Coast (a large region centered on the Bight of Benin). Nigeria today could be called the Oil Coast. West Africa continues to attract international trade in new products such as cacao and oil, and illegal trade in waste products. Deforestation, soil erosion, and global climate change, which put the region at the risk of severe droughts, contribute to the challenges facing the region, alongside political instability, corruption, and violence between Muslims and Christians in some nations, especially Nigeria.

Most of West Africa is made up of plains lying less than 300 meters (1,000 feet) above sea level. The environment includes arid deserts, mainly in the northern part, and tropical rain forests. The climate is influenced by the interaction of two air masses: the maritime air mass originating over the Atlantic Ocean is associated with southwestern winds, and the continental air mass originating over the African continent is associated with the dry and dusty Harmattan winds.

Ancient western Africa, also referred to as the Sudan region, was situated to the south of the Sahara and extended west to the Atlantic Ocean, comprising the Chad and Niger river basins, the White and Black Volta river basins, and the Fouta Djallon highlands. Ancient western Africa can be characterized by three major geographical regions characterized by distinctive terrain, climate, and natural vegetation: coastal, forest, and the Sudan savanna. Each of these life zones yielded natural resources such as lumber, gold, iron, and