Africa is a continent that covers 6% of the land surface and 20% of the land surface. Its area is 30,415,873 km2 with the islands, making it the third largest in the world if you count America as one continent. With more than 1.2 billion inhabitants, Africa is the second most populous continent after Asia and represents 16.4% of the world population in 2016. The continent is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast and the Atlantic Ocean to the west.
Africa is crossed, almost in its middle, by the equator and presents several climates: hot and humid close to the equator, tropical in the regions between the equator and the tropics, hot and arid around the tropics , temperate in the highlands. The continent is characterized by the lack of regular rainfall. In the absence of glaciers or mountainous aquifer systems, there is no natural means of regulating the climate except for the coasts. Drylands account for 60% of its territory. Its environment is nevertheless very rich - it is called the "biodiversity paradise" - and the continent is home to the world's second largest continuous forest, but this environment is threatened by deforestation and the decline in biodiversity, as a result of climate change. of anthropic pressure.
The continent is considered the cradle of humanity, where the ancestors of man first appeared, then, about 200,000 years ago, the modern man who then spread over the rest of the globe. The Sahara, the world's largest hot desert, has created a hiatus, leading to distinct historical evolutions between north and south. In the historical period, the civilization of ancient Egypt developed along the Nile, sub-Saharan Africa sees the birth of its own civilizations in the savannah areas and North Africa, southern shore of the Mediterranean, is under the influence Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans. From 3000 BC BC Africa knows the Bantu expansion. It is a population movement in several phases, oriented generally from the north, from the grassland of present Cameroon, to the south, to southern Africa, reached at the beginning of the Christian era. The Bantu expansion explains the current ethno-linguistic map of the sub-Saharan zone.
The Christian religion began to spread in Africa in the first century, mainly in northern Roman Africa and then in Ethiopia. The seventh century saw the beginnings of Islam in Africa, which settled on the east coast and in the north of the continent to the northern fringe of the sub-Saharan zone. North Africa is, at the same time, Arabized. In sub-Saharan Africa, from the twentieth century up to the seventeenth century, powerful and rich empires succeeded each other. Towards the end of this period, in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese, followed by other European nations, installed on the west coast a slave trade, the Atlantic Treaty, which was added to the intra-African trade and the Eastern slave trade already plaguing the continent.
The eighteenth century marked the beginning of European explorations, followed by the massive colonization of the continent between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The slave trade ceased at the beginning of the twentieth century, but Africa was almost entirely under colonial rule until the end of the twentieth century, which until today modeled the borders and economies of the countries concerned.
Most states get their independence between the late 1950s (Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana ...) and the mid-1970s (Angola, Mozambique ...). Independent Africa consists essentially of "imperfect democracies" or even "authoritarian regimes" and there are many conflicts. Since South Sudan's independence in 2011, Africa, including Madagascar, has 54 sovereign states (not including SADR and Somaliland).
The continent's countries have the largest population growth in the world and a health situation that is improving markedly while growing at a slower pace than in other developing countries.
Africa is based on a social organization based on extended family and ethnicity; there are 1,000 ethnic groups on the continent. It also has the highest linguistic diversity in the world with nearly 2,000 living languages.
Contemporary Africa is in a situation where the weight of its demography is difficult to manage (unemployment, financing of education ...) because it remains the least developed continent economically despite a strong growth since the beginning of the twenty-first century, which has allowed the emergence of a less fertile middle class, with higher incomes. It is also confronted with terrorist violence among the most dying
