Africa: Africa in History

What is Africa? What do we know about it? Most of us will answer something like the following:

Africa is a continent below Europe between the Atlantic Ocean on the west and the Indian Ocean on the east with the Mediterranean Sea to the north. If we look at it on a common Mercator’s map, like we all use at school, we will see that it is about the same size as Greenland and about three quarters of the size of North America. There are about forty-five different nations, some very large, which sometimes have very stright lines for borders. And of course it is inhabited by people with black skins, the Africans.

These people mostly live in primitive huts around cooking fires. It is uncivilised and has no real history - it has always been like this. We would probably also say that it is very poor, that the governments are corrupt and unstable, and that it is a dangerous place to visit. True?

Well, let’s look a bit closer at all these arguments….

Most of this of course is based on prejudice. Africa is of course not “below” Europe - there is no up and down in Geography. It is actually about fifteen times the size of Greenland, and three and a half times the size of the United States. 1    2    3     4