Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Ocean, coast had existed for centuries and was far more developed—the chief reason that Islam was well
established in many parts of Africa long before nineteenth-century Christian missionaries began to set up
shop.
To the Arabs, Africa was not so dark. The Mali Empire, centered in the capital of Timbuktu (Tom-
bouctou) was founded in the 1200s and flourished for the next two hundred years as an Islamic religious
and trading center. Unfortunately, it was also a center for the slave trade as well, which existed among na-
tions within Africa long before the first Europeans arrived and began the mass deportation of black Afric-
ans to the West Indies and the Americas.
A vast landmass straddling the equator and extending 5,000 miles from top to bottom and 4,600 miles
from east to west, Africa is the world's second-largest continent. Its area of 11,677,239 square miles (about
29.8 million square km) is equal to about 20 percent of the world's land area. Curiously, it is the only con-
tinent with land in all four hemispheres: northern, southern, eastern, and western. The only place it meets
another landmass is the tenuous connection to Asia at the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt. Although English is
widely spoken, and Swahili is the most prominent native language, there are more than a thousand separate
languages spoken in Africa. Fifty of these are considered major languages, used by more than a million
people.
In modern Africa, drought, soil erosion, deforestation, and a population explosion are combining to
produce one food crisis after another. The African AIDS crisis dwarfs the problem in other countries; some
estimates envision a quarter of the African population eventually being infected. These desperate situ-
ations are worsened by the instability of governments that spend inordinate amounts of money on military
hardware. Civil wars, as well as the last vestiges of superpower jousting, have added to Africa's woes. In
1986, at the end of the well-publicized African drought that led to the “We Are the World” charities, ten
of Africa's thirteen worst-affected countries had suffered from some form of war, civil strife, or a massive
influx of refugees fleeing such conditions.
An estimated 300 million people live in the forty countries of sub-Saharan Africa and another 300 mil-
lion live in the North African countries. But by the year 2025, Africa is expected to have a population
greater than the combined populations of Europe, North America, and South America, barring a possible
AIDS-related population decline. The population of the East African country of Kenya increases at the rate
of about 4 percent a year, the highest growth rate in the world. By the year 2020, its population is expected
to be about 46 million. (By contrast, the United States has a fairly low population growth rate, less than 1
percent annually.) By 2100, Nigeria is expected to be the third most populous nation, after India and China.
Other African nations with rapidly expanding populations are Ethiopia, Zaire, Tanzania, and Egypt.
One of the greatest problems for millions of Africans is water. Drought and the desertification of Africa
will continue to make feeding the continent a nightmare for the foreseeable future. One answer is desalin-
ation of seawater, but it is a costly answer. Africa's first desalination plant was opened in 1969 in Nouak-
chott, the capital of Mauritania, in northwestern Africa, where the population has burgeoned from 12,000
in 1964 to more than 350,000 today. Drought has lowered the country's water level so much that only the
very deepest wells produce. Most of Mauritania's livestock has starved to death.
In the other countries of North Africa, similar situations are often only marginally better. In Egypt, the
birthplace of one of the greatest and longest-lived civilizations in human history, the peace treaty with Is-
rael has allowed a shift away from grossly inflated military spending, but its population explosion looms
intractably. Crammed into the thin strip of usable land along the Nile, it is a country facing enormous prob-
lems. In Egypt, 95 percent of the country's 84 million people live within a dozen miles of the Nile River
or one of its delta distributaries. If the Aswan Dam upstream were breached, almost every Egyptian would
be drowned within three days. That threat became real when Israel reportedly threatened to bomb the dam,
leading to negotiations between the two countries.
