A Profile of African Countries
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 218 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (17 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160166
ISBN-13: 9789987160167
Africa: Background
AS the world's second largest continent, Africa constitutes more than 12 percent of the world's land area. It is more than 11.6 million square miles, including offshore islands, and is mostly tropical in climate.
It is generally accepted by most scientists that Africa is the cradle of mankind. It is also the homeland of black people. A vast landmass, it straddles the equator and extends almost 5,000 miles from north to south and from east to west. Only at the Suez does it touch another landmass, Asia, of which the Middle East is an integral part.
Africa has sometimes been described as a peninsula of Europe. But that is out of racist and imperialist arrogance by Europeans who conquered Africa. For example, the French claimed that Algeria was a province of France, and Portugal claimed that her African colonies were an integral part of Portugal. It wasn't true. Africa belongs to Africans regardless of race or national origin. It is not part of any other continent and does not belong to outsiders.
It is undoubtedly a huge continent. The westernmost point is in Senegal, and the tip of the Horn of Africa, in Somalia, is the easternmost point; a vast expanse of territory of 4,600 miles, almost equal to the distance from the the tip of North Africa in Tunisia to the tip of southern Africa in South Africa.
It is also a continent known for majestic features including the world-famous snow-capped Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania which is more than 19,000 feet high; River Nile, the world's longest; and the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi, some of the world's major rivers.
Some of the world's largest lakes are also found in Africa: Lake Victoria, the world's second largest freshwater lake after Lake Superior; Lake Tanganyika which is the world's second deepest lake after Lake Baikal in Russia; and Lake Nyasa which is also sometimes known as Lake Malawi, but not to Tanzanians who claim half the lake. To us in Tanzania, it is still Lake Nyasa.
More than 1,000 languages, not dialects, are spoken by hundreds of millions of the indigenous peoples of the continent, besides Arabic and other languages introduced by Europeans and Asians. Islam, Christianity and traditional religions - dismissed by Europeans as animism or paganism - are the main faiths on this highly diverse and complex continent. And although there has been a trend towards rapid urbanization through the decades especially since independence in the sixties, the vast majority of the people in Africa, no fewer than 85 percent, still live in rural areas, in villages or individual households miles apart depending on the density of population in different parts of the continent.
In terms of economic development, the continent is roughly divided into three regions: southern Africa, especially South Africa and what once was a thriving Zimbabwe; North Africa; and the rest in between. South Africa and North Africa are more developed than the rest of the continent. And in general, most Africans depend on subsistence farming.
Despite the high level of poverty, Africa has enormous economic potential especially in terms of agriculture and minerals. The mineral sector is the most developed, except in a few places such as South Africa where mechanized farming contributes substantial amounts towards national wealth.
In fact, in terms of minerals, Africa is a treasure trove, with some of the world's largest deposits of diamonds, gold, chrome, uranium, copper, iron, cobalt and many other minerals, in addition to large amounts of petroleum in many countries on the continent: Angola, Nigeria, Libya, Algeria, Congo Republic, Gabon, and others.
Industrialization is still in its infancy across Africa, except in South Africa and parts of North Africa, for a number of reasons: lack of capital, unskilled labour, limited markets for local consumption of manufactured goods, poor infrastructure, and bias in the international system whose terms of trade favour the industrialized world, among other factors.
The history of the modern nations of Africa begins with the partition of Africa by the imperial powers at the Berlin Conference in 1885. As the European colonial rulers gained control over Africa, they gradually built the countries we have in Africa today, patterned after the mother countries in Europe in terms of administration, education, and even culture, although the culture in almost all the countries on the continent remained essentially African.
But there was an attempt, even if a failed one, to produce carbon copies of Europeans among the natives. More often than not, they turned out to be a poor imitation of their European masters. However, there were some who tried to be more British than the British themselves, and more French than the French. They had been thoroughly brainwashed, and whitewashed, by their white masters from Europe who saw nothing good about Africa, except our gold and diamonds, and other resources and cheap labour extracted from the "natives," by force, in many cases.
Africa's climate is generally hot and rainy and supports dense forests, for example in the Congo basin, and elsewhere across the continent. Another distinctive feature is the savanna and two great deserts, the Sahara and the Kalahari. There is also the Namibia desert. Yet they all support life, dispelling rumours and myths of inhospitable deserts on this ancient continent. The extreme northern and southern parts of Africa have Mediterranean-type of climates with mild wet winters and warm dry summers.
Climatic conditions play a critical role in population distribution across the continent. Although Africa is a huge continent, there is no question that it is thinly populated. The highest densities of population, per square mile, are found in the Great Lakes region especially in Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda; in the Niger Delta and other parts of Nigeria which as a country is the most populous on the continent with about 150 million people although in terms of area it is smaller than Tanzania, for example, which has about 37 million people.
Other areas with high population densities include the Ethiopian highlands and the Nile Valley. African cities also have large populations.
The conquest of Africa by European powers irrevocably changed the course of African history. Africa's domination by Europe began in the 15th century when the Portuguese explored the coasts of Africa for the first time and established settlements which eventually led to colonization. Then came the Dutch, the English, the French and other European maritime powers who established coastal trading stations in different parts of Africa which eventually led to the penetration and conquest of the hinterland in the following years.
Exploration of Africa in the 18th and 19th centuries led to the "discovery" of vast amounts of the continents natural resources, prompting the European powers to engage in what came to be known as the Scramble for Africa. This was the era of European imperialism and the whole continent fell under European control between 1880 and 1912.
The only exceptions were Liberia, founded by freed American slaves in 1822 who declared it a republic in 1847; and Ethiopia which was never colonized, despite the Italian invasion in the mid-thirties and brief occupation of this ancient kingdom by Mussolini from 1936 to 1941.
The colonial boundaries drawn by Europeans during the partition of Africa did not reflect the realities of the different ethnic identities across the continent. They cut across different groups, and lumped together in one country tribes which had never lived together. Some of these tribes were enemies and would never have chosen to live together in the same country and under the same government.
The French acquired vast expanses of territory in the western and central parts of the continent which came to be known as French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa. They also took control of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in North Africa. Other French possessions were the French Cameroons; French Togoland in West Africa which, together with British Togoland, united to form what is now known as the independent Republic of Togo; French Somaliland, Madagascar, and the islands of the Comoros and Reunion on the Indian Ocean.
The British had most of their colonies in East and southern Africa: Sudan, which was jointly ruled by Britain and Egypt; British Somaliland, Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika (a German colony which the British took over after Germany lost World War I); Zanzibar, Nyasaland (now Malawi), Northern Rhodesia (renamed Zambia after independence), Southern Rhodesia (now known as Zimbabwe), Bechuanaland (which is Botswana today), Basutoland (renamed Lesotho), and Swaziland. And after the British won the South African War, also known as the Boer War, from 1899 to 1902, South Africa became a dominion within the British Empire.
In West Africa, the British acquired the Gold Coast (Ghana today), Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and Nigeria. Ghana and Nigeria became the most important British possessions in West Africa in terms of natural resources and manpower.
The Portuguese had Angola in southwestern Africa, Mozambique in East Africa, Guinea-Bissau in West Africa, Sao Tome & Principe and Cape Verde on the Atlantic.
Belgium acquired the Congo, which came to be known as the Belgian Congo. And after World War, the Belgians also acquired Ruanda-Urundi (now the countries of Rwanda and Burundi) which, together with Tanganyika, formed the Germany colony known as German East Africa until the Germans lost it during the First World War. In addition to losing German East Africa during World War I, the Germans also lost Togoland, the Cameroons, and German South-West Africa which is Namibia today.
Italy's possessions were Libya, Eritrea, and Italian Somaliland; Mussolini's dream of acquiring Ethiopia having been shattered after the Allied forces, led by Britain, drove his troops out of the country in the early forties.
Spain had the smallest possessions on the continent: Spanish Guinea, which became Equatorial Guinea after independence in 1968; Spanish Sahara (now Western Sahara which was annexed by Morocco in 1976, triggering a nationalist uprising among the people of the territory who wanted independence); the protectorate of Spanish Morocco which was returned to Morocco in 1958 after Morocco won independence in 1956; and Ifni, an enclave in northwest Africa, returned to Morocco in 1969.
The fifties and sixties saw the beginning of the end of colonial rule across Africa almost 100 years after the continent fell under European control. The decolonization of Africa was one of the most important events in the continent's history, as was its conquest by the imperial powers, and it is a process that continued into the 1990s when Namibia in 1990, and South Africa in 1994, finally became free.
Although South Africa was not a colony in the classic sense, it was one in terms of domination and oppression of the black majority by the white minority who virtually constituted a colonial power no different from the rest of the white minority regimes across the continent during the colonial era.
Next, we are going to look at the countries in alphabetical order. It is a profile of each, intended as an introduction to the countries in one of the world's most diverse and fascinating continents that is also considered to be the cradle of mankind. Africa also is, potentially, the world's richest continent. Paradoxically, the richest continent is also the poorest.
A Profile of African Countries
Author: Godfrey Mwakikagile
Paperback: 218 pages
Publisher: New Africa Press (17 November 2009)
ISBN-10: 9987160166
ISBN-13: 9789987160167