African people

The population of Africa is incredibly diverse, made up of innumerable tribes and people of many social and ethnic
groups. Some of these groups are made up of just a few thousand people while others consist of millions of people.
Each group usually has its own language and culture. Many African countries have numerous tribes within their
borders. For example there are more than thirty tribes within Uganda. To give you a better idea of the diversity of
the people of Africa below is a list of interesting facts written for kids and adults.

There are an estimated 3,000 tribes/groups in Africa.

There are over 2100 languages spoken in Africa (some estimate over 3000 languages).

Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism are the main religions practiced. However many of the people practice
traditional African religions. Some practice these alongside Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism. Judaism is
also present in many parts of Africa.

Below is a list of some of the major tribes found in Africa along with their approximate population.

Arab - 100 million

Berber - 65 million

Hausa - 30 million

Yoruba - 30 million

Oromo - 30 million

Igbo - 30 million

Fula - 27 million

Akan - 20 million

Amhara - 20 million

Somali - 15-17 million

Hutu - 16 million

Ijaw - 14 million

Mandinka - 13 million

Kongo - 10 million

Shona - 10 million

Zulu - 10 million

Interesting Facts About the People of Africa

The people of Africa have more physical variations than any other continent.

The average life expectancy in Africa ranges from 74 years in Mauritius to approximately 32 years in
Swaziland.

The shortest people in the world, the pygmies, live in Africa. The average man is 1.45 m (4.34 feet) and the
average women is 1.33 m (4 feet).

Some Sudanese tribes are among the tallest people (on average) in the world. In some of the tribes the
average height of a man is six feet and four inches, where as for women it is six feet.

The Surma tribe in southwestern Ethiopia is famous due to their women wearing lip plates.

The Wodaabe people do not name their children until they reach twelve years old.

The population of Africa grew from 221 million in 1950 to 1 billion in 2009.

Nigeria has the highest population of all African countries with 158 million people, Ethiopia is second with
82 million, and Egypt third with 80 million.

Africa's population growth is 2.3 percent a year.

Africa's population is estimated to double from approximately one billion people in 2011 to two billion
people by 2045.

Niger and Liberia's population is expected to double from 2011 to 2031.

Images of African people

AFRICAN MAP

African food
Food in ancient Africa

Before people began farming, African hunters and gatherers ate mainly wild vegetables (roots and
leaves), with some meat and fish and seafood and eggs. They also harvested some wild grain to eat.
They got a lot of their fat from palm oil. By7000 BC, people in North Africa also began herding cattle
imported from Central Asia through West Asia. People milked the cows and made yogurt and cheese.
Around 6000 BC, as the climate changed and the Sahara Desert gradually took over the grasslands, it
got harder to get food and so some African people began to farm some of their food. By 4000 BC,
Ethiopians and Eretrians had domesticated a grain called teff, and in Nubia people had
domesticated millet.

In North

Africa and

Egypt,

people

farmed

millet

too,

but

also,

the wheat and barley,lentils and chickpeas that had already been domesticated in West Asia. So these
people began to eat mainly pita bread and porridge and barley soups, like the people of West Asia.
People in Egypt also made their barley into beer.
WHEAT
Ever since people left Africa for West Asia, about 70,000 BC, they have probably always eaten wheat,
which tastes good and is also a good source of carbohydrates. But for hundreds of thousands of years,
people did not grow wheat. They just picked wheat wild, wherever it happened to grow.
Sometime around 10,000 BC, though, the area around Mesopotamia and Egypt became crowded
enough, and the climate hot enough, that there was no longer enough food to go around just by picking it,
and people had to begin growing it on purpose, weeding out all the plants that people couldn't eat like
pine trees, and planting the ones that people could eat, like wheat.

WHEAT BREAD

MODERN AFRICAN FOOD

Traditionally, the various cuisines of Africa use a combination of locally available fruits, cereal
grains and vegetables, as well as milk and meat products, and do not usually get food imported. In
some parts of the continent, the traditional diet features a lot of milk, curd and whey products.
Depending on the region, there are also sometimes quite significant differences in the eating and
drinking habits and proclivities throughout the continent's vast populations: Central Africa, Eas Africa,
the Horn of Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa and West Africa each have their own distinctive
dishes, preparation techniques, and consumption mores.

steak

HISTORICAN AFRICAN PLACES

Abyssinia - Ethiopia

ABYSSINIA is an extensive country of Eastern Africa, the limits of

which are not well defined, and authorities be regarded as lying between
7 30' and 15 40' N. lat., and 35 and 40 30' E. long., having, N. and
N.W., Nubia; E., the territory of the Danakils; S; the country of the Gallas;
and W., the regions of the Upper Nile [Footnote 61-1]. It has an area of
about 200,000 square miles, and a population of from 3,000,000 to
4,000,000.

Africa (province) - Tunisia

Roman-era Tunisia describes first the Roman Africa Province. Rome took control of Carthage

after the Third Punic War(149-146). There was a period of Berber kings allied with Rome. Lands
surrounding Carthage were annexed and reorganized, and the city of Carthage rebuilt, becoming
the third city of the Empire. A long period of prosperity ensued; a cosmopolitan culture evolved.
Trade quickened, the fields yielded their fruits. Settlers from across the Empire migrated here,
forming a Latin-speaking ethnic mix. The Carthagian society made up of native Phoenician-speaking
Libyans (Berbers) and Phoenicians, as well as Berber-speaking Libyans, was becoming gradually
romanized, some native Libyans like Apuleius and Septimus Severus became great figures of the
Roman empire. Christianity became gradually spread among the North Africans, offering to the
Roman Catholicism three of its Popes, like Augustine of Hippo. During the eclipse of the Roman
Empire, several prominent Libyans revolted. A generation later the Vandals, a Germanic tribe,
arrived in Tunisia with the help of the Maurii (Libyans of western north Africa) and reigned over the
Roman province for nearly a century. Several Libyan (Berbers) revolts occurred during the reign of
the Vandals in the former Roman Africa, some detached themselves and established self-rule at the
periphery. The Byzantine Empire eventually recaptured the area from the Vandals into its dominion
in 534, which endured until the Islamic conquest, completed in 705. Then came the final undoing of
ancient Carthage.[

Barbary Coast - Algeria

The Barbary Coast, or Berber Coast, was the term used by Europeans from the 16th until the

19th century to refer to much of the collective land of the Berber people. Today, the term Greater
Maghreb or simply "Maghreb" corresponds roughly to "Barbary". The term "Barbary Coast"
emphasizes the Berber coastal regions and cities throughout the middle and western coastal regions
of North Africa what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. The English term "Barbary" (and
its European varieties: Barbaria, Berbrie, etc.) referred mainly to the entire Berber lands including

non-coastal regions, deep into the continent, as seen in European geographical and political maps
published during the 1720th centuries.[1]

The name is derived from the Berber people of north Africa. In the West, the name
commonly evoked the Barbary pirates and Barbary Slave Traders based on that coast, who
attacked ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic and captured
and traded slaves or goods from Europe, America and sub-Saharan Africa which finally
provoked the Barbary Wars.[2] The slaves and goods were being traded and sold throughout
the Ottoman Empire or to the Europeans themselves.

Bechuanaland - Botswana

Belgian Congo - Democratic Republic of the Congo

Carthage - Tunisia

Central African Empire - Central African Republic

Congo Free State - Democratic Republic of the Congo

Dahomey - Benin

Equatoria - Sudan and Uganda

Fernando P - Bioko

French Congo - Gabon and Republic of the Congo

French Equatorial Africa - Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon, Republic of the Congo

French Sudan - Mali

French West Africa - Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Cte d'Ivoire, Niger, Burkina Faso,
and Benin

German East Africa - Tanzania and Zanzibar

German South West Africa - Namibia

The Gold Coast - Ghana

Guinea

Grain Coast or Pepper Coast - Liberia

Malagasy Republic - Madagascar

Monomotapa -

Middle Congo - Republic of the Congo

Nubia - Sudan and Egypt

Numidia - Algeria, Libya and Tunisia

Nyasaland - Malawi

Western Pentapolis - Libya

Portuguese Guinea - Guinea-Bissau

Rhodesia

Northern Rhodesia - Zambia

Southern Rhodesia - Zimbabwe

(Southern Rhodesia was commonly referred to simply as Rhodesia from 1964 to 1980)

Rwanda-Urundi - Rwanda and Burundi

The Slave Coast - Benin

Somaliland - Somalia

South-West Africa - Namibia

Spanish Sahara - Western Sahara

French Upper Volta - Republic of Upper Volta - Burkina Faso

Zaire - Republic of the Congo - Democratic Republic of the Congo

African language

There are 1,250 to 2,100[1] and by some counts over 3,000 languages spoken natively in Africa,[2] in
several majorlanguage families:

Afroasiatic languages are spread throughout the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of
Africa, and parts of the Sahel

Nilo-Saharan languages are centered on Sudan and Chad (disputed validity)

NigerCongo (Bantu and non-Bantu) covers West, Central, Southeast and Southern Africa

Khoe languages are concentrated in the deserts of Namibia and Botswana

Austronesian languages are spoken in Madagascar.

Indo-European languages are spoken on the southern tip of the continent (Afrikaans), as
well as in the enclaves ofCeuta and Melilla (Spanish) in the north.

There are several other small families and language isolates, as well as languages that have yet to
be classified. In addition, Africa has a wide variety of sign languages, many of which are language
isolates.
About a hundred of the languages of Africa are widely used for inter-ethnic
communication. Arabic, Somali, Berber,Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Manding, Fulani and Yorub
a are spoken by tens of millions of people. If clusters of up to a hundred similar languages are
counted together, twelve are spoken by 75 percent, and fifteen by 85 percent, of Africans as a first or
additional language.[3]
The high linguistic diversity of many African countries (Nigeria alone has over 500 languages, [4] one
of the greatest concentrations of linguistic diversity in the world) has made language policy a vital
issue in the post-colonial era. In recent years, African countries have become increasingly aware of
the value of their linguistic inheritance. Language policies being developed nowadays are mostly
aimed at multilingualism. For example, all African languages are considered official languages of the
African Union (AU). 2006 was declared by the African Union as the "Year of African Languages".
[5]

However, although many mid-sized languages are used on the radio, in newspapers, and in

primary-school education, and some of the larger ones are considered national languages, only a
few are official at the national level.