Facts about Africa

African dances are an important mode of communication, and dancers use gestures, masks, costumes, body painting and a number of visual devices.

The South African rugby team hosted and won the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

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.

During the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, Africa had more than 70 coups and 13 presidential assassinations.

Africa has a wealth of history which is largely unrecorded.

Political associations such as the African Union offer hope for greater cooperation and peace between the continent's many countries.

Africans generally followed 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 music of Africa is one of its most dynamic art forms.

Many African languages are tone languages, in which pitch level determines the meaning.

Extensive human rights abuses still occur in several parts of Africa, often under the oversight of the state.

Pre-colonial Africa possessed perhaps as many as 10,000 different states and polities characterized by different sorts of political organization and rule.

South Africa also has access to financial capital, numerous markets, skilled labor, and first world infrastructure in much of the country and the opening of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

A number of Roman Catholic African bishops were mentioned as possible papal candidates in 2005.

The largest powers of West Africa: the Asante Confederacy, the Kingdom of Dahomey, and the Oyo Empire, adopted different ways of adapting to the shift.

Modern music of the continent includes the highly complex choral singing of southern Africa and the dance rhythms of soukous, dominated by the music of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Sudan and Mauritania are divided between a mostly Arabized north and a native African south (although the "Arabs" of Sudan clearly have a predominantly native African ancestry themselves).

Speakers of Bantu languages (part of the Niger-Congo family) are the majority in Southern, Central and East Africa.

Some copper objects from Egypt, North Africa, Nubia, and Ethiopia have been excavated in West Africa dating from around 500 B.C.E., suggesting that trade networks had been established by this time.

The San are physically distinct from other Africans and are the indigenous people of Southern Africa.

Gertrude Ibengwe Mongella is the head of state and chief of government of the African Union.

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.

A number of Africa's post-colonial political leaders were military generals who were poorly educated and ignorant on matters of governance.

The peoples of North Africa comprise two main groups: Berber and Arabic-speaking peoples in the west and Egyptians in the east.

Asante and Dahomey concentrated on the development of "legitimate commerce" in the form of palm oil, cocoa, timber, and gold, forming the bedrock of West Africa's modern export trade.

Africa's largest country is Sudan, and its smallest country is the Seychelles, an archipelago off the east coast.

Malay and Indian ancestries are also important components in the group of people known in South Africa as Cape Coloureds (people with origins in two or more races and continents).

in areas of East and West Africa, though other regions did not begin ironworking until the early centuries C.E.

Africa is home to some of the most remarkable natural wonders in the world.

The climate of Africa ranges from tropical to subarctic on its highest peaks.

Some areas of East Africa, particularly the island of Zanzibar and the Kenyan island of Lamu, received Arab Muslim and Southwest Asian settlers and merchants throughout the Middle Ages and in antiquity.

The Tuareg and other often-nomadic peoples are the principal inhabitants of the Saharan interior of North Africa.

agriculture arose independently in both the tropical portions of West Africa, where yams and oil palms were domesticated, and in Ethiopia, where coffee and teff became domesticated.

Different Africans profess a wide variety of religious beliefs, and it is difficult to conclude accurate statistics about religious demography in Africa as a whole.

Today, backed by Gulf oil cash, Muslims have increased success in proselytizing, with a growth rate, by some estimates, that is twice as fast as Christianity in Africa.

Many Sub-Saharan Africans were converted to Christianity during the colonial period.

Modern African culture is characterized by conflicted responses to Arab nationalism and European imperialism.

The vast majority of African nations are republics that operate under some form of the presidential system of rule.

According to the United Nations' Human Development Report in 2003, the bottom 25 ranked nations (151st to 175th) were all African nations.

Afrikaans music, also found in South Africa, is idiosyncratic being composed mostly of traditional Boer music, while more recent immigrant communities have introduced the music of their homes to the continent.

South Africa has also become the preferred destination of white Anglo-Zimbabweans and of migrants relocating from all over southern Africa.

The domestication of cattle in Africa preceded agriculture and seems to have existed alongside hunter-gathering cultures.

Africa straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas; it is the only continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones.

Muslims were also among the Asian peoples who later settled in British-ruled Africa.

The Arabs who arrived in the seventh century introduced the Arabic language and Islam to North Africa.

A number of African nations, especially Ethiopia, Kenya, and Morocco, have fielded numerous world-class long-distance runners such as Abebe Bikila and Cosmas Ndeti.

According to the ancient Romans, Africa lay to the west of Egypt, while "Asia" was used to refer to Anatolia and lands to the east.

African Christians appear to be more socially conservative than their co-religionists in much of the industrialized world, which has quite recently led to tension within denominations such as the Anglican and Methodist Churches.

The French settled in large numbers in Algeria, where they became known collectively as pieds-noirs, and on a smaller scale in other areas of North and West Africa as well as in Madagascar.

Many countries in Northern Africa received Soviet military aid, while many in Central and Southern Africa were supported by the United States, France, or both.

The indigenous Sub-Saharan African religions tend to revolve around animism and ancestor worship.

Pygmies are the pre-Bantu indigenous peoples of Central Africa.

South Africa will host the 2010 World Cup tournament, and will be the first African country to do so.

The islands in the Indian Ocean are also populated primarily by people of Asian origin, often mixed with Africans and Europeans.

Large Indian communities are found in South Africa, and smaller ones are present in Kenya, Tanzania, and some other southern and East African countries.

The PAP consists of 265 legislators, five from each constituent state of the African Union.

Other African countries are making comparable progress, such as Ghana, Kenya, Cameroon, and Egypt.

The central area of Africa was still largely unknown to Europeans at this time.

Indigenous musical and dance traditions of Africa are maintained by oral traditions and are distinct from the music and dance styles of North Africa and Southern Africa.

Arab influences are visible in North African music and dance and in Southern Africa western influences are apparent.

During the past century or so, small but economically important colonies of Lebanese and Chinese have also developed in the larger coastal cities of West and East Africa, respectively.

Their descendants, the Afrikaners and the Coloureds, are the largest European-descended groups in Africa today.

Decolonization during the 1960s often resulted in the mass emigration of European-descended settlers out of Africa — especially from Algeria, Angola, Kenya, and Rhodesia.

Some areas, notably Botswana and South Africa, have experienced economic success.

Africa is the most polyglot continent in the world; it is not rare to find individuals there who fluently speak not only several African languages, but one or two European ones as well.

Tunisia was the first country in Africa to gain independence, doing so in 1956.

The 1970s saw an escalation, as newly independent Angola and Mozambique aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, while the West and South Africa sought to contain Soviet influence by funding insurgency movements.

By some estimates, approximately 46.5 percent of all Africans are Christians and another 40.5 percent are Muslims with roughly 11.8 percent following indigenous African religions.

Africa is considered by most paleo-anthropologists to be the oldest inhabited territory on earth, with the human species originating from the continent.

By most estimates, Africa contains well over a thousand languages (some have estimated over two thousand), most of African origin and a few of European origin.

The British settled chiefly in South Africa as well as the colony of Rhodesia, and in the highlands of what is now Kenya.

The camel was first brought to Egypt by the Persians after 525 B.C.E., although large herds did not become common enough in North Africa to establish the trans-Saharan trade until the eighth century C.E.

By 2007, Africa contains 53 independent and sovereign countries, most of which still have borders drawn during the era of European colonialism.

Following colonialism, nearly all African countries adopted official languages that originated outside the continent, although several countries nowadays also use various languages of native origin (such as Swahili) as their official language.

Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia.

The African Union aims to transform the African Economic Community into a state.

Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Malagasy are other examples of originally non-African languages that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres.

Islam entered Africa as Arab Muslims conquered North Africa between 640 and 710, beginning with Egypt.

The oldest existing examples of art from Africa are 75,000-year-old beads made from Nassarius shells that were found in Blombos Cave.

A small number of Africans are Hindu, Baha'i, or have other beliefs.

The Semitic Phoenicians, the European Greeks, Romans, and Vandals settled in North Africa as well.

Afri was the name of several peoples who dwelt in North Africa near the provincial capital, Carthage.

At about 11,668,545 square miles (30,221,532 kmІ), Africa is the largest of the three great southward projections from the main mass of Earth's exposed surface.

Recent developments include the emergence of African hip hop, in particular a form from Senegal blended with traditional mbalax, and Kwaito, a South African variant of house music.

African art and architecture reflect the diversity of African cultures.

Nubians are a Nilo-Saharan-speaking group (though many also speak Arabic) who developed an ancient civilization in northeast Africa.

The first cases of domestication of plants for agricultural purposes occurred in the Sahel region circa 5,000 B.C.E., when sorghum and African rice began to be cultivated.

A major climatic recession occurred, lessening the heavy and persistent rains in Central and Eastern Africa.

Fifty-three African countries have football (soccer) teams in the Confederation of African Football, while Cameroon, Senegal, and Ghana have moved beyond the knockout stage of recent FIFA World Cups.

The emergence of Pan-Africanism since the fall of apartheid has heightened calls for a renewed sense of African identity.

The African Union (AU) is a federation consisting of all of Africa's states except Morocco.

ironworking had been introduced in Northern Africa and quickly spread across the Sahara into the northern parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

African culture is characterized by a vastly diverse patchwork of social values, ranging from extreme patriarchy to extreme matriarchy, sometimes in tribes existing side by side.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, Europeans such as the Portuguese and Dutch began to establish trading posts and forts along the coasts of western and southern Africa.

Bantu-speaking Africans also predominate in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and are found in parts of southern Cameroon and southern Somalia.

South Africa will host the 2010 World Cup tournament, and will be the first African country to do so.