Bigger than it looks
Africa is far bigger than most world maps suggest. The common Mercator map stretches places near the poles and shrinks those near the equator, so Greenland looks almost as big as Africa when Africa is actually about fourteen times larger. The United States, China, India and most of Europe could all fit inside Africa's outline at the same time. The continent has fifty-four countries, more than any other, and ALGERIA is the largest. Our map skills page explains why flat maps can never get everything right.
NIGERIA has the most people, over two hundred million, and it is one of the youngest countries in the world, with around half its people under twenty. Over two thousand languages are spoken across the continent.
Old universities and more pyramids than Egypt
The oldest university in the world still teaching was founded in Fez, MOROCCO, in 859 by a woman, Fatima al-Fihri, who used her inheritance to build a mosque and school. In the 1300s Timbuktu, in what is now MALI, was a great centre of learning, and families there still guard hundreds of thousands of old handwritten books and scrolls.
SUDAN has more pyramids than EGYPT, around two hundred of them, built by the kings of Kush in ancient Nubia. They are smaller and steeper than the famous ones at Giza. ZIMBABWE is named after Great Zimbabwe, a city of huge stone walls built without mortar between the 1000s and 1400s, whose name means great houses of stone.
Firsts, calendars and the rest of the grid
ETHIOPIA uses its own calendar, with twelve months of thirty days and a thirteenth month of just five or six, and it runs about seven or eight years behind the calendar used in most of the world. Ethiopia was one of only two African countries never colonised by Europeans, apart from a short Italian occupation, along with Liberia. GHANA, in 1957, was the first country south of the Sahara to win its independence from colonial rule, and many others followed within a few years.
RWANDA banned plastic bags in 2008, and on the last Saturday of every month most adults join in a morning of community work, cleaning streets and repairing buildings. Lake Chad, which gives CHAD its name, has shrunk by around ninety per cent since the 1960s. Our Kwanzaa page covers a festival that celebrates African heritage.
KENYA is famous for its long-distance runners, many from the high Rift Valley, where the thin air trains the body. TANZANIA has Kilimanjaro, UGANDA and RWANDA the mountain gorillas, NAMIBIA and BOTSWANA great deserts and wetlands, and SENEGAL the most westerly point of mainland Africa. ETHIOPIA is also where the famous fossil skeleton nicknamed Lucy, about 3.2 million years old, was found in 1974. EGYPT's Suez Canal, opened in 1869, links the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, so ships no longer have to sail all the way round Africa. SOMALIA has the longest coastline of mainland Africa, and Madagascar, off the east coast, is the fourth-largest island in the world; and TUNISIA, LIBYA, ANGOLA and ZAMBIA complete the list.