Africa covers about 30.37 million km² (11.7 million sq mi), including its islands, making it the second-largest continent after Asia and about a fifth of all the land on Earth. It is larger than the United States, China and India combined, with room left over, and about 14 times the size of Greenland, although many world maps draw the two almost the same size. Africa stretches about 8,000 km from Tunisia in the north to Cape Agulhas in the south, and about 7,400 km from Senegal in the west to the Horn of Africa in the east. It is home to 54 countries and around 1.5 billion people.
Africa Against Other Places
| Place | Area | Compared with Africa |
|---|---|---|
| Greenland | ~2.17 million km² | Africa is about 14 times larger |
| Europe | ~10.2 million km² | Africa is about 3 times larger |
| United States | ~9.8 million km² | Africa is about 3 times larger |
| Russia | ~17.1 million km² | Africa is about 1.8 times larger |
| North America | ~24.7 million km² | Africa is about 23% larger |
| Asia | ~44.6 million km² | About 1.5 times larger than Africa |
The best-known way of picturing this is a graphic published in 2010 by the designer Kai Krause, "The True Size of Africa". It fitted the outlines of the United States, China, India, Japan and most of Europe inside Africa's outline, with space to spare. The continent is also longer than it is wide: flying from Cairo to Cape Town covers about 7,200 km, roughly the distance from New York to Moscow.
Why Most Maps Make Africa Look Small
If Africa looks smaller than that in your mind, the map on the classroom wall is usually to blame. Most wall maps and many web maps use the Mercator projection, designed by Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for sailors. It keeps compass directions true, but to do so it stretches everything more and more the further it lies from the equator. Africa sits across the equator, so it is shown at close to its real size, while Europe, North America, Russia and Greenland are all enlarged. Greenland, about a fourteenth of Africa's area, looks roughly the same size.
The complaint is an old one. In 1973 the German historian Arno Peters promoted an equal-area projection, later known as Gall–Peters, as a fairer picture of the world. In 2017 the public schools of Boston adopted it for their classrooms. In 2025 the African Union backed a campaign to replace Mercator maps with equal-area projections such as Equal Earth in public and educational use. The issues are explained in our guide to the Mercator projection.
Fifty-Four Countries, Very Different Sizes
Africa is divided into 54 countries, more than any other continent. The largest, Algeria, covers about 2.38 million km², more than four times the size of France, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is almost as big at about 2.34 million km². Sudan, Libya and Chad are each more than a million km². At the other end, The Gambia, the smallest mainland country, is a strip only about 10,700 km² in area along the Gambia River, and the island state of Seychelles, at 459 km², is the smallest of all.
The large number of countries is a legacy of colonial partition. Most of today's borders were drawn by European powers between the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the First World War, often as straight lines across territory the negotiators had never seen. After independence, most of it between 1956 and 1990, African states agreed in 1964 to keep those colonial borders rather than risk endless wars over them. We list all of them in our guide to how many countries there are in Africa.
A Continent Built on a Plateau
Much of Africa is a high, old plateau. The south and east stand mostly more than 1,000 m above sea level, which is why cities such as Johannesburg, at about 1,750 m, and Addis Ababa, at about 2,350 m, are so high. The north and west are generally lower. The plateau's edge is marked by escarpments, where rivers plunge towards the coast in waterfalls and rapids. Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, the Livingstone Falls on the Congo and the cataracts of the Nile all made the great rivers hard to navigate inland from the sea, which is one reason European colonisers took so long to reach the interior.
Africa's coastline is also short for its size, about 30,000 km, and smooth, with few deep bays or natural harbours compared with Europe's. That shape, with a large interior far from any sea, helps explain why sixteen African countries are landlocked, more than on any other continent.
The Features That Match the Size
Africa's physical features are on the same huge scale as its area. The Sahara, the largest hot desert in the world, covers about 9.2 million km², close to the area of the United States or China, and reaches into about ten countries. Our guide to the Sahara describes it in detail. The Nile, about 6,650 km long, is usually listed as the world's longest river. The Congo basin holds the second-largest tropical rainforest on Earth after the Amazon, and the Congo River carries more water than any river except the Amazon.
In the east, the Great Rift Valley runs thousands of kilometres from the Red Sea to Mozambique. The Horn of Africa is slowly pulling away from the rest of the continent along it, at a few millimetres a year. Beside it stand Africa's highest mountains, Kilimanjaro at 5,895 m and Mount Kenya at 5,199 m, and its great lakes, including Lake Victoria, at about 68,800 km² the largest lake in the tropics, and Lake Tanganyika, the second-deepest lake in the world.
Off the south-east coast lies Madagascar, at about 587,000 km² the fourth-largest island in the world. It has been separated from Africa for about 160 million years and from India for about 90 million, which is why most of its wildlife is found nowhere else.
Climate Belts That Mirror Each Other
Because the equator runs almost through its middle, Africa's climate zones are arranged in rough mirror image. At the centre lies the equatorial rainforest of the Congo basin and the Gulf of Guinea coast, wet all year. North and south of it are broad belts of savanna, with a wet and a dry season, home to the great herds of the Serengeti and the Okavango. Beyond the savannas come the deserts: the Sahara in the north, and the Kalahari and the Namib in the south. The Namib, along the Atlantic coast, is often described as the oldest desert on Earth, dry for tens of millions of years. At each tip, the pattern ends in a Mediterranean climate, with hot dry summers and mild wet winters, around Tunis and Algiers in the north and around Cape Town in the south. Mountains break the pattern, above all in Ethiopia and East Africa, where altitude brings cool, green highlands close to the equator.
Crossing the Continent
Africa's size has always made it hard to cross. In the 1890s the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a railway from the Cape to Cairo, entirely through British territory. It was never completed. The continent's railways were mostly built to carry minerals and crops from the interior to the nearest port, not to link countries to each other, and many still use incompatible track gauges. The TAZARA railway, built with Chinese help and opened in 1975, runs about 1,860 km from Zambia's copper belt to the port of Dar es Salaam so that Zambia could avoid routes through white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. A network of Trans-African Highways has been planned since the 1970s, but several links remain unpaved, and crossing the Sahara or the Congo basin by road is still a serious expedition.
Six Time Zones and Two Hemispheres Each Way
Africa is the only continent that lies in all four hemispheres. The equator runs through Gabon, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Kenya and Somalia, and the prime meridian passes through Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, Mali and Algeria. The two lines cross in the Gulf of Guinea, just off the African coast. East to west, Africa's clocks run from UTC−1 in Cape Verde to UTC+4 in Mauritius and Seychelles, six time zones in all, although most of the mainland uses just four.
1.5 Billion People and Rising
About 1.5 billion people live in Africa, around 18 per cent of the world's population, and it is the fastest-growing continent. The United Nations expects its population to pass 2 billion around 2040, and by the end of the century roughly a third of all people may be African. Nigeria alone has more than 220 million people, the most of any African country, and Lagos, Cairo and Kinshasa are each home to more than 15 million. Because Africa is so large, its average density is still modest, about 50 people per km², lower than Europe's or Asia's. But people cluster along the Nile, the coasts, the highlands of East Africa and the West African belt.
More than 2,000 languages are spoken across the continent, roughly a third of all the world's languages. That figure alone suggests how much variety a single outline on the map contains.