Africa is the second-largest and second-most-populous continent in the world. Continental Africa is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Red Sea in the Indian Ocean to the east, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The Continental mainland and adjacent Islands measure in at roughly 30.3 million square kilometers that make up around six percent of Earth's total surface area and 20 percent of Earth's total land area. Since the era of colonialism, many African states have struggled with instability corruption authoritarianism violence, and war. The vast majority of African countries are at least nominally presidential republics but very few have actually managed to sustain stable democracies for very long. Despite all these things, Africa is full of many surprises and great things. We'll discuss some of the amazing and interesting facts about Africa which you didn't know before. So let's begin.
1. Africa is home to the world's largest land animal the African elephant which is known to inhabit 37 African countries.
2. Africa is also home to the world's tallest animal the giraffe which lives in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
3. The world's fastest land animal the cheetah also lives in Africa.
4. Africa is also home to the world's largest reptile the Nile crocodile which lives in the Nile.
5. Africa is filled with the biggest, fastest, and scariest animals on earth.
6. The gorilla which can be found in jungles across the African continent is the world's largest primate.
7. Africa also has over a quarter of the world's bird species.
8. The deadliest animal in Africa is the hippopotamus which kills more people in Africa than crocodiles and lions combined.
9. Tigers are only found in Asia, not in Africa.
10. Lake Malawi contains more species of fish than any other freshwater system on earth.
11. There are more French speakers in Africa than in France.
12. The southern African nation of Angola has more Portuguese speakers than Portugal.
13. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the country with the most official languages is Zimbabwe with an incredible total of 16.
14. Southeastern Africa is the only place on earth with languages that feature click consonants, most famously languages like Xhosa.
15. A number of African words have also strode their way into the English language, just like banjo, Cola, coffee, jazz, and zombie.
16. The very first president of Zimbabwe was called Canaan banana.
17. Despite being the second-largest continent, Africa actually has the shortest coastline due to its distinct lack of peninsulas and rough edges around its continental mainland.
18. Africa also includes a Madagascar and a number of other smaller island groups known as archipelagos.
19. Africa also features a number of territories belonging to the countries from other continents.
20. The Parliament of Rwanda is the only governing body on the planet in which women outnumber men with almost two female MPs for every male one.
21. Nigeria is home to a huge film industry that often ranked as the second largest in the world by the sheer volume of films made.
22. The Republic of Sudan actually has over 200 pyramids far more than Egypt has, though they are quite a bit smaller.
23. The oldest surviving pair of socks were found in Egypt which dates back to the 4th century.
24. Africa is widely accepted to be the point of origin for Homo sapiens. The first Homo sapiens emerge in central Eastern Africa somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.
25. In 1974 scientists discovered roughly 40% of the skeleton of a female hominid in Ethiopia who would have lived roughly 3.2 million years ago.
26. The only two areas of Africa that were not violently oppressed by the aristocratic European were Liberia and Ethiopia then known to Europeans as Abyssinia.
27. Today Africa contains 54 fully recognized sovereign states more than any other continent.
28. South Africa was the only country in history to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in the name of world peace.
29. The nation of Zambia in southern Africa had a space program at the height of the space race several decades ago, started by schoolteacher Edward Festus Mukuka Nkoloso in 1964.
30. The 7th of October 2014 was a very important day for the nation of Somalia as it was the date upon which the east African nation first welcomed its very first ATM.
31. In South Africa, it's perfectly legal to attach flamethrowers to your car as a preventative measure against carjacking.
32. The most populous country in Africa is Nigeria with over 193 million inhabitants.
33. Prior to the violent ousting of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011 the flag of Libya was just green.
34. The flag of the Ivory Coast is often confused with the flag of the Republic of Ireland owing to the fact that it's essentially exactly the same but with the green and gold columns reversed.
35. A single Kenyan tribe called the Kalenjin is known for producing most of the world's fastest long-distance runners.
36. Benin, a tiny country in West Africa records more birth of twins than any other nation at 27.9 twins per 1000 births, almost double the global average.
37. The largest country in Africa is the Arab state of Algeria which covers a large area of North Africa measuring it at around 2,381,741 square kilometers.
38. The continent of Africa is home to a total of roughly 1.2 billion people accounting for about 16% of the world's human population.
39. Between 1950 to 2009 the number of people in Africa grew from 221 million to over 1 billion people meaning the population quadrupled in less than 60 years.
40. Africa has the youngest average population of all the world continents with over 50 percent of Africans under the age of 25 in 2012 the median age was 19.7 compared to the worldwide median age of 30.4.
41. Africa is also the most centrally located continent in the world as it has land both along the equator at zero degrees latitude and the prime meridian at eight degrees longitude.
42. There are numerous theories regarding the origin of the word Africa, but the most widely accepted interpretation is that Africa derived from 'Afri' a Latin term referring to a native Libyan tribe that was generally applied to all people living in land south of the Mediterranean.
43. In the early Mesozoic era roughly 250 million years ago Africa was fused together with other continents as part of a huge supercontinent called Pangea, over millions of years this Pangaea broke apart into smaller chunks.
44. Africa also contained several de facto independent states that are either partially or entirely unrecognized this includes Somalia land a region in Somalia that has declared independence from Somalia and the Sahara we Arab Democratic Republic a thin strip of land in the disputed region of Western Sahara
45. The largest country in Africa used to be Sudan until the country's lower sub-Saharan population split from the rest of the country to form South Sudan via referendum in 2011 taking around a third of Sudan's land with it now Sudan sometimes called North Sudan is only the third-largest country behind Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
46. The Seychelles are sovereign states made up of over 100 islands scattered in the Indian Ocean or thematic Gasca is the smallest African country the sum total of the country's islands measures up at around 1455 square kilometers which is just under 0.02 percent as large as Algeria.
47. The Gambia is the smallest mainland African country which is surrounded entirely by Senegal apart from an 80-kilometer long west coastline it follows a Gambia River roughly 320 kilometers inland before Senegal takes over.
48. The small nation of Lesotho which happens to be an enclave that is surrounded entirely by South Africa is the only country on the planet that sits completely above 1,000 meters in elevation giving it the nickname the sky Kingdom
49. At 587,041 square kilometers, Madagascar is by far the largest island in Africa and is also the fourth largest island in the world. It is home to over 26 million people not only that Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot as over 90% of its wildlife is found nowhere else on earth.
50. Bir Tawil is an area of land covering roughly 2000 square kilometers between Egypt and Sudan that is unclaimed by either nation constituting the only place of unclaimed land in the world outside of Antarctica.
51. Africa is also the world's hottest continent, a locality in Ethiopia called Dallol holds the record for the world's highest average temperature for an inhabited location when an average annual temperature of 34.6 degrees Celsius was recorded between 1960 and 1966.
52. Africa also contains the world's largest hot desert known as the Sahara, which covers an area of roughly 9,200,000 square kilometers which is roughly the same size as huge countries like the United States or China
53. The Nile River is considered to be the longest river in the world, the Nile is thought to be approximately 6,853 kilometers and runs through 11 African countries before emptying into the Mediterranean at the Nile Delta in Egypt.
54. Victoria Falls on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe is the largest waterfall in the world based on its combined width of around 1708 meters and a height of 108 meters, creating the largest sheet of falling water on earth.
55. The largest lake in Africa is Lake Victoria with a surface area of approximately 68800 square kilometers. Lake Victoria is also the world's largest tropical lake and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world.
56. The highest mountain in Africa is Mount Kilimanjaro a dormant volcano in the eastern African nation of Tanzania with an elevation of 5895 meters tall.
57. Several countries in the east of Africa namely Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi are planning to merge into a new country known as the East African Federation, if this plan successful it would create the 11th most populated nation on earth.
58. The most popular sport in Africa is football, which is brought to the continent by British colonists. The most successful African national team is probably Cameroon, who were the first African country to reach the World Cup quarter-finals in 1990.
59. The largest religion in Africa is Islam which is followed by the vast majority of the Arab people living in the north followed up by Christianity in second place.
60. There are at least 2100 languages spoken by the people of Africa with some estimates reach closer to 3,000 languages.
61. Arabic is the most widely used language in Africa spoken by between 140 and 170 million people primarily in the Saharan countries of North Africa, other common languages include Swahili, French English, Hausa, Berber, Portuguese and Spanish.
62. The official title of Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin was, ''His Excellency, President for life, Field marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of all the beasts of the earth and the fishes of the seas and conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in general and Uganda in particular''.
63. Garca Machel is the only woman to have been the first lady of two separate countries as the widow of both former president of South Africa and Mozambique.
64. The Serengeti a geographical area and ecosystem located almost entirely in Tanzania host the world's largest wildlife migration on earth known as The great migration.
65. Nearly half of all the gold ever mined has come from one place an area in South Africa known as Witwatersrand.
66. In 1972 a pocket of uranium in the Western African nation of Gabon was discovered to have undergone self-sustaining nuclear fission for hundreds of thousands of years making it the only known naturally-occurring nuclear reactor.
67. The oldest mathematical object ever to be discovered is the Lebombo bone which was found in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland. It's a short section of a baboon leg bone with a number of regular notches cut into it and is thought to date back to approximately 35,000 BC.
68. The San people of southern Africa today are known to use the same general set of tools that have been found in caves dating all the way back to 44,000 years ago.
69. The West African city of Timbuktu in Mali is occasionally referred to as the parrot in the medieval world owing to its ancient intellectual culture in recent years thousands of medieval manuscripts have been unearthed there, including poetry by women innovative scientific discussions and legal reflections.
70. Despite the fact that Nigeria is a republic, but there are over 150 regional Nigerian Kings who derive their stages from the independent states and communities that existed before the country existed in its current form.
71. In 2009 when Zimbabwe was experiencing extreme rates of hyperinflation the nation issued a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar banknotes roughly equivalent to 30 American dollars at the time. It also meant that pretty much everyone in the country was both poor and a billionaire at the same time.
72. The internationally famous football striker Didier Drogba is so beloved in his native country of the Ivory Coast, he was able to instigate two ceasefires during the nation's bloody civil war that left hundreds dead. After Drogba had led the Ivory Coast to qualify for the 2006 World Cup, he went on national television and begged for the combatants to lay down their arms which within a week they did he has since continued in his efforts to bring peace to his country.
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