Africa is the second-largest continent, with 54 countries and about 1.5 billion people. It is so big that you could fit the United States, China, India and most of Europe inside it all at once and still have space left. It also has the world's longest river, its largest hot desert, and more countries than any other continent.
Africa Is Bigger Than It Looks
Most world maps make Africa look far smaller than it is. That is because flat maps have to stretch a round planet, and the usual style — called the Mercator projection — stretches things near the poles and squashes things near the equator.
On a Mercator map, Greenland looks about the same size as Africa. In reality Africa is about fourteen times bigger. Greenland is around 2.2 million square kilometres and Africa is over 30 million.
If you want to see the real sizes, look at a globe instead of a flat map, or search for the true-size comparison images that let you drag countries around. Africa's actual area is about 30.3 million square kilometres.
Fifty-Four Countries
Africa has more countries than any other continent. The biggest by area is Algeria; the biggest by population is Nigeria, with over 230 million people.
The smallest mainland country is The Gambia, a thin strip of land following a river and almost completely surrounded by Senegal. The smallest overall is Seychelles, a group of islands in the Indian Ocean with fewer than 130,000 people.
The newest country is South Sudan, which became independent in 2011. It is the youngest country in the world.
The Sahara
The Sahara is the largest hot desert on Earth, covering about 9.2 million square kilometres — roughly the size of the whole United States, or of China.
It is not all sand dunes. Only about a fifth is sand; the rest is rock, gravel and bare mountain. Temperatures can pass 50 degrees Celsius in the day and drop below freezing at night, because dry air does not hold heat.
Dust blown out of the Sahara crosses the Atlantic Ocean and falls on the Amazon rainforest, thousands of kilometres away. It carries phosphorus, a nutrient the rainforest soil needs, so one of the driest places on Earth helps feed one of the wettest.
The Nile
The Nile is usually called the longest river in the world at around 6,650 kilometres, though the Amazon is a close rival and some measurements put it ahead.
It flows north, which surprises a lot of people. Rivers flow downhill, and in this part of Africa the land is higher in the south, so north is downhill.
It has two main branches: the White Nile, starting in the Great Lakes region, and the Blue Nile, starting at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. They meet at Khartoum in Sudan. The Blue Nile carries most of the water and almost all of the fertile silt that made ancient Egyptian farming possible.
Animals You Will Not See Anywhere Else
Africa has the largest land animal alive today: the African bush elephant, which can weigh six tonnes and stand four metres at the shoulder.
It also has the tallest — the giraffe, up to 5.5 metres — and the fastest, the cheetah, which can hit around 100 kilometres per hour but only for about 20 seconds before it has to stop and cool down.
The hippopotamus is one of the most dangerous. It looks slow but can outrun a person on land, and it kills more people in Africa each year than lions and crocodiles combined. Lemurs, meanwhile, live only on Madagascar, an island that broke away from the mainland around 88 million years ago and grew its own set of animals.
The Great Migration
Every year, around 1.5 million wildebeest, plus hundreds of thousands of zebra and gazelle, walk in a giant circle between the Serengeti in Tanzania and the Maasai Mara in Kenya.
They are following the rain and the fresh grass. The route is roughly 800 kilometres and takes a year to complete, and the animals do it again and again for their whole lives.
The most dangerous part is crossing the Mara River, where crocodiles wait. Thousands of animals die every year on the crossings, and the herd keeps going anyway. It is the largest overland animal migration on the planet.
Make Your Own Africa Map
Here is something to try. Trace the outline of Africa onto a big sheet of paper. Now draw the equator across it — it runs through Gabon, Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Somalia, almost exactly through the middle.
Colour the top third yellow for the Sahara. Colour a green band across the middle for the rainforests of the Congo Basin. Colour the bottom third in browns and greens for the savannah and the Kalahari.
Now mark the Nile going north from the middle, the Congo River looping through the green band, and Lake Victoria where Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania meet. That simple map explains most of what Africa's geography does.
Mountains and Lakes
Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania is the highest point in Africa at 5,895 metres. It is a volcano, and it stands alone on a flat plain rather than in a mountain range, which makes it look even taller than it is. It has glaciers at the top despite sitting almost on the equator, though they are melting fast.
Lake Victoria is Africa's largest lake and the world's largest tropical lake. Lake Tanganyika is the deepest in Africa and the second-deepest on Earth, at nearly 1,470 metres.
The Great Rift Valley runs about 6,000 kilometres from Lebanon down through East Africa to Mozambique. It is a place where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart, and in a few million years it may split East Africa off into its own landmass.
Rainforest, Savannah and Desert
Africa's landscapes come in bands, and they are arranged almost symmetrically around the equator.
Right on the equator is rainforest, mostly in the Congo Basin, which is the second-largest rainforest on Earth after the Amazon. Move north or south and the trees thin out into savannah — grassland with scattered trees, which is where most of the famous safari animals live. Keep going and you reach desert: the Sahara in the north, the Kalahari and Namib in the south.
The Namib is thought to be the oldest desert in the world, at around 55 million years, and its dunes at Sossusvlei are among the tallest anywhere at over 300 metres. Some plants there survive entirely on fog rolling in from the Atlantic.
Ten Cities to Know
Lagos in Nigeria is Africa's largest city, with a metropolitan population usually estimated above 20 million and growing faster than almost any city on Earth. Cairo is the second largest and the oldest of the giants, founded in 969.
Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the largest French-speaking city in the world — larger than Paris. Johannesburg grew from a gold rush in 1886 and is one of the biggest cities in the world not built on a river, a lake or a coast.
Others worth knowing: Nairobi, with a national park on its edge; Addis Ababa, at 2,355 metres one of the highest capitals in the world; Casablanca, Dar es Salaam, Accra and Cape Town, which sits under a flat-topped mountain and between two oceans.
Languages and People
Between 1,500 and 2,000 languages are spoken in Africa — somewhere between a quarter and a third of all the languages on Earth.
Nigeria alone has over 500. Many Africans grow up speaking three or four languages: a home language, a regional one, and a national one such as English, French, Arabic, Portuguese or Swahili.
Africa also has the youngest population in the world. The average age is around 19, compared with about 44 in Europe. By 2050, roughly one in four people on Earth will be African.
What Grows There
A lot of the food in your kitchen came originally from Africa. Coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia, and the story goes that a goatherd noticed his goats getting lively after eating the berries. Watermelon comes from Africa, and so do okra, black-eyed peas, sorghum, millet and yams.
Cocoa is not African by origin — it comes from Central and South America — but Africa now grows most of the world's supply. Ivory Coast and Ghana together produce well over half the cocoa beans that become chocolate.
The baobab is the continent's most recognisable tree. It stores water in its enormous trunk, can live for over a thousand years, and is often called the upside-down tree because its bare branches look like roots sticking into the air.
The Oldest Story
Every human being alive is descended from people who lived in Africa. The oldest fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and are around 300,000 years old.
People began spreading out of Africa around 70,000 years ago and eventually reached every other continent. That means Africa is not just a continent with a long history — it is where the human story starts.
It is also where some of the oldest cities and kingdoms were: ancient Egypt, the kingdom of Kush, Great Zimbabwe, Aksum in Ethiopia, and the empires of Mali and Songhai, whose city of Timbuktu held libraries of thousands of manuscripts. To keep exploring, see the full list of countries in Africa and find out about how rainforests work like the one in the Congo Basin.