You probably know that Africa is one of the seven continents. You can even find it on the map above. But do you know how big Africa is? Do you know how many countries are in Africa? To get a better idea, I wanted to share some information.
Most people don’t have a good grasp of the size of the African continent. Africa’s land surface area is 30,301,596 square kilometers (or 11,699,512 square miles). Compared to the USA, whose surface area of 9,826,675 square kilometers (or 3,794,100.4 square miles), Africa is more than 3 times larger. For a great visual, the picture below was taken from a post at InformationIsBeautiful.net.
Depending on whether or not you count the island nations and/or the island protectorates, Western Sahara, and the soon-to-be South Sudan, Africa has between 47 and 57 countries.
Please excuse the old map above, but Zaire is now called Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Africa has a rich history of hundreds of tribes, cultures, and languages. Most of the countries have been colonized at one point or another (Britain, France and Portugal being the most active). Western Sahara is still colonized by Morocco. A few African countries are experiencing internal strife (Sudan, Somalia, DRC). A few have serious problems with corruption (Nigeria, Angola, and probably a few others).
For the curious, you can get all the information you could ever want just by doing a few Google searches.
You’ll be happy to know that Namibia, where the wedding is, has enjoyed its Independence peacefully since 21 March 1990 (with the exception of a secession attempt by a small region in 1999).