Africa and its people BEFORE READING Work in small groups and discuss the following points. a. What do you know about African art? b. Have you ever seen an exhibition? c. What was it like? d. Where there paintings, sculptures or both? module 6 Unit Africa is not a country Africa is not a country, it is a continent, in fact it is the second largest continent, after Asia, covering about 20% of the total land surface of the world. The continent is bounded on the north by the Mediterranean Sea, on the east by the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, by the confluence of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans off the Cape of Good Hope, in the south, and on the West by the Atlantic Ocean. In the north Africa was joined to the Sinai Peninsula until the construction of the Suez Canal. The continent is cut almost equally in two by the equator, so that it extends from latitude 35° S to about 37° N and stretches above the tropic of Cancer and below the tropic of Capricorn. Africa s climate is greatly affected by its position astride the equator. Temperatures are high for most of the year, but they are modified by the mountains and by the influence of the Major city: Il Cairo (13,000,000 population) Highest mountain: Kilimangiaro, 5895 m Longest river: Nile, 6671 km Largest lake: Victoria 68,100 km2 Largest island: Madagascar 586,500 km2 www.globalgeografia.com ocean currents on the coasts. There are many different climatic regions: the hot desert, semiarid, tropical, equatorial (tropical wet), Mediterranean, humid subtropical marine, wet upland and mountain regions. Seven hundred different languages are spoken within the African continent. The sizes of the African nations also vary. The largest country is Sudan. It is 2,505,813 square kilometres and the smallest nation is Seychelles, a small group of islands on the east coast (455 square kilometres). The African populations are very different from each other. Zaire has the largest population, 42.55 million people, and the Seychelles islands have the smallest population, only 70,000 people. Films and television don t show Africa as a land full of people, they often show it as a place of deserts, savannas, and animals, but in fact the African continent is home to 13% of the world s population. Africa was colonised by European countries between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and the internal boundaries reflect these colonies.