Africa
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Wikipedia-Article "Africa"
- For other uses, see Africa (disambiguation).
Africa is the world's second-largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30,370,000 km² (11,730,000 sq mi) including its adjacent islands, it covers 5.9% of the Earth's total surface area, and 20.3% of the total land area. With over 840,000,000 people (as of 2005) in 57 territories, it accounts for more than 12% of the world's human population.
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Etymology
The name Africa came into Western use through the Romans, who used the name Africa terra — "land of the Afri" (plural, or "Afer" singular) — for the northern part of the continent, as the province of Africa with its capital Carthage, corresponding to modern-day Tunisia.
The Afri were a tribe — possibly Berber — who dwelt in North Africa in the Carthage area. The origin of Afer may be connected with Phoenician `afar, dust (also found in most other Semitic languages); some other etymologies that have been postulated for the ancient name 'Africa' that are much more debatable include:
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- the Latin word aprica, meaning "sunny";
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- the Greek word aphrike, meaning "without cold" (see also List of traditional Greek place names). The historian Leo Africanus (1495-1554) attributed the origin to the Greek word phrike (φρικε, meaning "cold and horror"), combined with the negating prefix a-, so meaning a land free of cold and horror. However, the change of sound from ph to f in Greek is datable to about the first century, so this is unlikely to be the origin.
Egypt was considered part of Asia by the ancients, and first assigned to Africa by the geographer Ptolemy (85 - 165 AD), who accepted Alexandria as Prime Meridian and made the isthmus of Suez and the Red Sea the boundary between Asia and Africa. As Europeans came to understand the real extent of the continent, the idea of Africa expanded with their knowledge.
Geography
Main article: Geography of Africa
Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the main mass of the Earth's surface. It includes within its remarkably regular outline an area, of c. 30,360,288 km² (11,722,173 mi²), including the islands.
Separated from Europe by the Mediterranean Sea, it is joined to Asia at its northeast extremity by the Isthmus of Suez (transected by the Suez Canal), 130 km (80 miles) wide. (Geopolitically, Egypt's Sinai Peninsula east of the Suez Canal is often considered part of Africa, as well.) From the most northerly point, Cape Blanc (Ra’s al Abyad) in Tunisia (37°21′ N), to the most southerly point, Cape Agulhas in South Africa (34°51′15″ S), is a distance approximately of 8,000 km (5,000 miles); from Cape Verde, 17°33′22″ W, the westernmost point, to Ras Hafun in Somalia, 51°27′52″ E, the most easterly projection, is a distance (also approximately) of 7,400 km (4,600 miles). The length of coast-line is 26,000 km (16,100 miles) and the absence of deep indentations of the shore is shown by the fact that Europe, which covers only 9,700,000 km² (3,760,000 square miles), has a coast-line of 32,000 km (19,800 miles).
The main structural lines of the continent show both the east-to-west direction characteristic, at least in the eastern hemisphere, of the more northern parts of the world, and the north-to-south direction seen in the southern peninsulas. Africa is thus composed of two segments at right angles, the northern running from east to west, the southern from north to south, the subordinate lines corresponding in the main to these two directions.
History
Main article: History of Africa
Africa is home to the oldest inhabited territory on earth, with the human race originating from this continent. During the mid 20th century, anthropologists discovered many fossils and evidence of human occupation perhaps as early as 7 million years ago. The famous Leakey family, with ties to both Britain and Africa, discovered several species of early ape-like humans thought to have evolved into modern day man, such as Australopithecus afarensis (radiometrically dated to 3.9-3.0 million years BCE), Paranthropus boisei (2.3-1.4 million BCE) and Homo ergaster (c. 600,000-1.9 million BCE). These are significant findings in the pursuit of the study of human evolution.
The Ishango Bone, dated to c. 25,000 years ago, shows tallies in mathematical notation. Throughout humanity's prehistory, Africa (like all other continents) had no nation states, and was instead inhabited by groups of hunter-gatherers such as the Khoi and San (formerly known as bushmen).
Around 3300 BC, the historical record opens in Africa with the rise of literacy in Egypt, which continued with varying levels of influence over other areas until 343 BC. Other prominent civilizations include Ethiopia, the Nubian kingdom, the kingdoms of the Sahel (Ghana, Mali, and Songhai) and Great Zimbabwe.
In 1482, the Portuguese established the first of many trading stations along the Guinea coast at Elmina. The chief commodities dealt in were slaves, gold, ivory and spices. The European discovery of America in 1492 was followed by a great development of the slave trade, which, before the Portuguese era, had been an overland trade almost exclusively, and never confined to any one continent.
But at the same time that slavery was ending in Europe, in the early 19th century the European imperial powers staged a massive "scramble for Africa" and occupied most of the continent, creating many colonial nation states, and leaving only two independent nations: Liberia, the Black American colony, and Ethiopia. This occupation continued until after the conclusion of the Second World War, when all colonial states gradually obtained formal independence.
Today, Africa is home to over 50 independent countries, all but 2 of which still have the borders drawn up during the era of European colonialism.
Politics
Precolonial Africa
Colonial Africa
Colonialism had a destabilizing effect on what had been a number of ethnic groups that is still being felt in African politics. Prior to European influence, national borders were not much of a concern, with Africans generally following the practice of other areas of the world, such as the Arabian peninsula, where a group's territory was congruent with its military or trade influence. The European insistence of drawing borders around territories to isolate them from those of other colonial powers often had the effect of separating otherwise contiguous political groups, or forcing traditional enemies to live side by side with no buffer between them. For example, the Congo River, although it appears to be a natural geographic boundary, had groups that otherwise shared a language, culture or other similarity who resided on both sides. The division of the land between Belgium and France along the river isolated these groups from each other. Those who lived in Saharan or Sub-Saharan Africa and traded across the continent for centuries often found themselves crossing "borders" that existed only on European maps.
In nations that had substantial European populations, for example Rhodesia and South Africa, systems of second-class citizenship were often set up in order to give Europeans political power far in excess of their numbers. However, the lines were not often drawn strictly across racial lines. In Liberia, the citizens who were descendants of American slaves managed to have a political system for over 100 years that gave ex-slaves and natives to the area roughly equal legislative power despite the fact the ex-slaves were outnumbered ten to one in the general population. The inspiration for this system was the United States Senate, which had balanced the power of free and slave states despite the much larger population of the former.
Europeans often changed the balance of power, created ethnic divides where they did not previously exist, and introduced a cultural dichotomy detrimental to the native inhabitants in the areas they controlled. For example, in what is now Rwanda and Burundi, two ethnic groups Hutus and Tutsis had merged into one culture by the time Belgian colonists had taken control of the region in the 19th century. No longer divided by ethnicity as intermingling, inter-marriage, and merging of cultural practices over the centuries had long since erased visible signs of a culture divide, the Belgians instituted a policy of racial categorization, upon taking control of the region, as racial based categorization and philosophies was a fixture of the European culture of that time. The term Hutu originally referred to the agricultural-based Bantu speaking tribes that moved into present day Rwandan and Burundi from the West, and the term Tutsi referred to North Eastern cattle-based tribes that migrated into the region later. The terms to the indigenous peoples eventually came to describe a person's economic class. Those individuals who owned roughly 10 or more cattle were considered Tutsi, and those with fewer were considered Hutu, regardless of ancestral history. This was not a strict line but a general rule of thumb, and one could move from Hutu to Tutsi and vice versa.
The Belgians introduced a racialised system. Those individuals who had characteristics the Europeans admired - fairer skin, ample height, narrow noses, etc. - were given power amongst the colonized peoples. The Belgians determined these features were more ideally Hamitic, Hamitic in turn being more ideally European and belonged to those people closest to Tutsi in ancestry. They instituted a policy of issuing identity cards based on this philosophy. Those closest to this ideal were proclaimed Tutsi and those not were proclaimed Hutu.
Post-colonial Africa
Since independence, African states have frequently been hampered by instability, corruption, violence, and authoritarianism. The vast majority of African nations are republics that operate under some form of the presidential system of rule. Few nations in Africa have been able to sustain democratic governments, instead cycling through a series of brutal coups and military dictatorships.
A number of Africa's post-colonial political leaders were poorly educated and ignorant on matters of governance; great instability, however, was mainly the result of marginalization of other ethnic groups and graft under these leaders.
As well, many used the positions of power to ignite ethnic conflicts that had been exacerbated, or even created, under colonial rule. In many countries, the military was perceived as being the only group that could effectively maintain order and ruled most nations in Africa during the 70s and early 80s.
During the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s Africa had over 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations.
Cold War conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union also played a role in the instability. When a country became independent for the first time, it was often expected to align with one of the two superpowers. Many countries in Northern Africa received Soviet military aid, while many in Central and Southern Africa were supported by the United States and/or France. The 1970s saw an escalation as newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligned themselves with the Soviet Union and the West and South Africa sought to contain Soviet influence.
Border and territorial disputes have also been common, with the European-imposed borders of many nations being widely contested through armed conflicts.
Failed government policies and political corruption have also resulted in many widespread famines, and significant portions of Africa remain with distribution systems unable to disseminate enough food or water for the population to survive. The spread of disease is also rampant, especially the spread of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and the associated Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which has become a deadly epidemic on the continent.
Despite numerous hardships, there have been some signs the continent has hope for the future. Democratic governments seem to be spreading, though are not yet the majority (National Geographic claims 13 African nations can be considered truly democratic). As well, many nations have at least nominally recognized basic human rights for all citizens, though in practice these are not always recognized, and have created reasonably independent judiciaries.
There are clear signs of increased networking among African organisations and states. In the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire), rather than rich, non-African countries intervening, about half-a-dozen neighbouring African countries got involved (see also Second Congo War). The death toll has been estimated by some to be 3.5 million since the conflict began in 1998. This might play a role similar to that of World War II for Europe, after which the people in the neighbouring countries decide to integrate their societies in such a way that war between them becomes as unthinkable as a war between, say, France and Germany would be today.
Political associations such as the African Union are also offering hope for greater co-operation and peace between the continent's many countries.
Extensive human rights abuses still occur in several parts of Africa, often under the oversight of the state. Most of such violations occur for political reasons, often times as a 'side-effect' of civil war. Countries where major human rights violations have been reported in recent times include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, and Côte d'Ivoire.
Modern Africa
Most western countries place limitations on aid to African nations. These limitations are often used to control the governments of these African nations; as a result, these nations are turning to non-traditional sources of financial aid. China has increasingly provided financial aid to Africa in order to secure contracts on natural resources. There usually is no political prescription.
Economy
Main article: Economy of Africa
Africa is the world's poorest inhabited continent: the United Nations' Human Development Report 2003 (of 175 countries) found that positions 151 (Gambia) to 175 (Sierra Leone) were taken up entirely by African nations.
It has had (and in some ways is still having) a shaky and uncertain transition from colonialism, with increases in corruption and despotism being major contributing factors to its poor economic situation. While rapid growth in China and now India, and moderate growth in South America, has lifted millions beyond subsistence living, Africa has gone backwards in terms of foreign trade, investment, and per capita income. This poverty has widespread effects, including lower life expectancy, violence, and instability - factors intertwined with the continent's poverty.
The major economic successes are Botswana and South Africa, which is developed to the extent that it has its own mature stock exchange. This is partly due to its wealth of natural resources, being the world's leading producer of both gold and diamonds, and partly due to its well-established legal system. South Africa also has access to capital, markets and know how.
Nigeria sits on one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world and has the highest population among nations in Africa, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It is believed that with the country's rapidly expanding economy and increasing actions against corruption, Nigeria's status as Africa's economic powerhouse will soon be firmly established.
Demographics
Africans may be grouped according to whether they live north or south of the Sahara Desert; these groups are called North Africans and Sub-Saharan Africans, respectively. Arabic-speaking Arab-Berber peoples predominate in North Africa, while Sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by a number of disparate populations often grouped according to their language, Niger-Congo predominately in West Africa, Nilo-Saharan in the Eastern highlands and Khoisan in the south. Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger-Congo family) are the majority in southern, central and east Africa proper; but there are also several Nilotic groups in East Africa, and a few remaining indigenous Khoisan ('San' or 'Bushmen') and Pygmy peoples in southern and central Africa, respectively. Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon and southern Somalia. In the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa, the distinct people known as the Bushmen (also "San", closely related to, but distinct from "