If you grew up in really most non-African parts of the world, you’ve probably been
at the very least exposed to the mindset that Africa is an entirely homogeneous continent,
assuming there’s much civilization there at all.
Now, I’d imagine you probably know that that’s not remotely true, which is a good
thing because this massive continent is home to a huge variety of different cultures that
I think could use some time in the spotlight.
First of course, let’s get some scale with this thing.
Something we all probably already know but that we don’t think about much is just how
big Africa is.
Africa has a surface area of 30 million square kilometers, making them the second largest
continent on Earth behind of course Asia, and way larger than North America and almost
twice as large as South America.
Normally at this point I suppose I’d compare Africa to countries, but it’s big enough
to fit Europe and Oceania with almost enough room to squeeze in Antarctica.
In fact, Africa is just 8 million km2 short of equaling the Moon, forget Russia and their
whole being-bigger-than-Pluto thing, Africa’s playing the real game here.
collection of cultures, especially with their massive population.
Africa is home to a rapidly increasing population of 1.2 billion, which although smaller than
India and China, is still bigger than all of Luxembourg, Tuvalu, Brunei, Liechtenstein,
and the Americas combined.
Of course, the best way for us to tackle a subject like this would be to first divide
Africa into more bite-sized pieces.
There are numerous ways to divide Africa (including poorly) but for the sake of this video I’m
going to go with the regions assigned by the African Union to better categorize its member
nations: North, East, Central, West, and Southern.
So first we start in North Africa and the countries of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria,
and Morocco, and possibly also Mauritania and Sudan, depending on who you ask (also
no comment on the whole Western Sahara thing).
These nations all occupy various parts of the mighty Sahara Desert, and have strong
Arabic influences, with all of them at least partially speaking Arabic and all but Sudan
having Islam as the official state religion, in contrast to the more Christian and native-focused
regions south of the Sahel (and hence why South Sudan didn’t feel it belonged inside
of Sudan).
These countries have had extensive contact with Europe and Western Asia for thousands
of years, being part of European and Middle Eastern empires before colonialism was in
fashion.
Most of these countries, aside from Egypt and Sudan, are also part of a region known
as the Maghreb, essentially the “western part” of the Arab world, though they also
have long histories with the native Berber (or Amazigh) peoples.
Check out my friend Cogito’s video if you want to learn more about them, they’re actually
very interesting, but they’re far from the only interesting culture in Africa of course.
Next we head to East Africa, most likely where the human race first evolved, and now home
to South Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda,
Burundi, and Madagascar, possibly also including Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe,
again depending on who you ask.
This region notably includes the Horn of Africa and the African Great Lakes, including Lakes
Turkana, Victoria, Tanganyika, and Malawi.
In the north of this region, people generally speak Afro-Asiatic languages like Somali,
Amharic, and Tigrinya, as well as a minority of those who speak their distant linguistic
relative Arabic.
Many in this region also speak various Nilo-Saharan languages, and Madagascar’s Malagasy language
is actually an Austronesian language, more closely related to Malay and Hawaiian.
The south however is much more dominated by Niger-Congo Bantu languages, with by far the
most prevalent (at 80 million speakers) being of course Swahili, spoken as an official language
in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
This area was also dominated by the Swahili city-states, who had lucrative trading relations
all across the Indian Ocean.
Also I’d keep an eye on this region in the coming decades, especially with the East African
Federation now on the rise (check out this Atlas Pro video for more information).
In Central Africa we have Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Chad, Dr. Congo,
the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe, all members
of the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), plus Rwanda and Burundi.
Perhaps not too surprisingly, this region is primarily home to Niger-Congo language
speakers; you know, as in between the Niger and Congo rivers?
Speaking of said rivers, this region is also home to the Congo Basin, itself home to one
of the largest rainforests in the world.
Oh and check out this Chad (it means lake) let‘s establish some sick empires here and
down in Congo.
Onto West Africa and we see a lot of smaller nations, namely Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape
Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger,
Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo, all members of the Economic Community of West
African States (ECOWAS).
This region was home to many large empires, including those of the Songhai, Ghana, Oyo,
and the Mali Empires, at one point ruled by the richest man in the world, Mansa Musa.
With a population of nearly 400 million, this region is crazily diverse in terms of languages
and cultures, and could honestly probably get a video in its own right, with over 500
languages spoken in Nigeria alone.
West Africa is also ecologically diverse, straddling the end of the Sahara Desert to
the north and the beginning of the rainforests to the south, separated by a region known
as the Sahel.
Finally we reach Southern Africa, whose boundaries are somewhat vague, but includes South Africa
(obviously), Lesotho, eSwatini, Botswana, and Namibia, possibly also Angola, Zambia,
Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Malawi.
These nations are part of the South African Development Community (SADC) alongside Dr.
Congo, Tanzania, Comoros, Mauritius, and Seychelles, but we’re not going to include those here.
The first five nations however are in the South African Customs Union (SACU) and they
all have very diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
Bantu languages are again widespread throughout this region, but Khoisan languages are also
widespread the Kalahari Desert, though it should be noted that the “Khoisan” language
family actually refers to multiple different language families.
Nonetheless these groups, including mainly the Khoekhoe and the San, speak languages
such as Zulu, Sandawe, Hadza, and Xhosa, yes, XHosa.
These are in fact the famous clicking languages of Southern Africa, and the only of their
kind in the world.
So this was kind of a brief overview of how diverse Africa really is, so basically I took
7 minutes to say that saying Africa is all the same would be like saying Europe is all
the same, but times 3.
Remember, South Africa alone has 11 official languages, as well as numerous others that
are spoken but not official, and even that only makes up a small fraction of the 2,000
languages spoken across the continent.
Of course there’s really no true way to measure diversity, and the only reason I stick
so closely to linguistics is because I personally honestly find languages easier to keep track
of and neatly categorize for a short educational YouTube video, but keep in mind that, you
know, art and religion are also things.
Also, I intentionally left out European influences in sub-Saharan Africa since I wanted to talk
about the native cultures, but do keep in mind that whichever empire a given country
was once under has likely played a large role in everything from cuisine to governmental
structure to which language you should probably learn if you want to travel there.
Basically, Africa is crazy diverse and lumping it all together as one homogeneous landmass
isn’t really a good way to think about the place.
Thanks as always for watching.
If you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and share it, and do please tell me
if you want to see more of this series in the future.
I’ve already done Russia and India a few months ago, but if this video does well I
might extend this series even further for other countries we don’t assume are very
diverse.
Let me know which countries I should cover, and as always be sure to subscribe to learn
something new every Sunday.