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Africa

Africa …

With an area of 30.3 million square-kilometres this is the third largest continent after Asia and America.
Its coastal length is 30,490 km. Tropical rain forest covers most of Central and West Africa. The second largest rainforest area of the earth is the Congo basin – the largest still is Amazonia.  
Gambia is the smallest state on the mainland with about the size of Cyprus, whereas Sudan is the biggest state and is approximately 8 times the size of Germany.  
The African continent has a population of about 906 million which is 14 % of the actual world population. This 14 % will presumably be increasing in the years to come due to the high birth rates.

The Sahara ranks among the biggest deserts in Africa, which is only disrupted by the river oasis of the Nile. The latter divides Africa into Northern Africa, which is mainly populated by Arabs, and into Sub-Saharan-Africa (Black Africa). The Namib Desert in the south is a fog desert whereas the Kalahari which is also located in the south is a dry savannah zone.

The Nile is among the longest rivers in Africa and has a length of 6,671 km. It thus is also the longest river worldwide followed by the Congo with a length of 4,374 km, the Niger with a length of 4,184 km and the Zambezi with a length of 2,736 km.
Lake Victoria shows a size of 68,817 km² and is thus the largest lake in Africa followed by Lake Tanganyika with a size of 32,893 km² and by Lake Malawi with a size of 29,600 km².

Cultural diversity, colonial inheritance and the consequences of extreme poverty of most of the African population make up Africa’s imprint. 
From around the 7th century Berberic people settled in the mainly mountainous regions of the Magreb in the north of Africa, even before the Arabs arrived. During the centuries the Arabic and the Berberic people got mixed and thus a Magrebian culture was created.
Semites like e.g. the Amharians are living in North-East-Africa, while the nomadic Tuareg are staying at the south of the Sahara together with thousands of different black-african people.
People from the Mande and Voltaic tribes are living in West Africa.
The eastern part of West Africa is populated by the Hausa and Yoruba tribes whereas the Wolof and Fulbe tribes are living in the western part. The people of the Bantu tribe, on the other hand, are living in Central and East Africa.
The Boers in South Africa are the largest group of people that immigrated in the course of colonialization. As a result of modern migration movements also people from the Lebanon, India and China settled in West and East Africa.

With a rate of 41 % the Islam is the main religion in North, East and West Africa. Furthermore roughly 10 % of the Africans are members of the Animism (a kind of naturalism). About 48 % of the total population belong to various Christian denominations of which the majority is living in the south of Africa.

There are more than 2000 self-contained languages, 50 of which are seen as widespread ones spoken by more than a million people each. Swahili, Hausa and Fulbe are the most important languages, but also the former colonial languages such as English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch (Afrikaans) are spoken in many areas even today. In the course of the decolonisation during the 1950s a couple of African states could achieve their independence. 1960 is the year of independence because the majority of the French colonies were declared independent during that year. In 1977 Djibouti,

the last European colony, was declared independent. And it was not before 1994 that the black majority was forming the government in South Africa.

The Human Development Index (HDI) shows clearly the state of human development in the individual states. Each year the HDI is published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in the form of a World Development Report.  
The HDI takes into account the gross domestic product (GDP) per resident of a country, as well as life expectancy, level of education or the literacy rate of the residents, respectively.