How big is Africa?
Much bigger than you thought.
Or at least, it’s much bigger than I thought.
How big? This big:
I don’t know how well you can see what’s inside the map, but it’s the US, most of Europe, China, India, and Japan.
[ADDENDUM: More information on this can be found here.]
Great illustration. Is there a link to a site that would allow it to be enlarged?
And, they are coming our way:
An African Planet?
Won’t be flying though.
The place is a pit in ways you can’t imagine …
We emotionally connect with a space based upon its human dimensions.
Africa is, by such a standard, weird.
The northern desert belt is virtually devoid of human life — especially when compared to its acreage.
BTW, it’s now known that the Sahara was as wet as Iowa a mere 6.500 ybp.That wet era extended back to at least 10,000 ybp. It had lakes that made the Great Lakes look tiny. (!)
Al Gore was born in the wrong millennia!
African cultural history, its legacy, might actually be impressive — if it could’ve survived the termite.
That’s the other factor: Africa does not easily permit structural permanence. Between the rain, the termites, the floods, and the humidity all construction is at war with its nature.
“Heart of Darkness” — and all that.
There was a story about the pro slave factions of the US withdrawing after CW I and colonizing Africa. The Drakka series was pretty terrifying, especially since it hinted at some of the current day Democrat capabilities.
The North of Africa used to have palm trees, until the Islamic Hordes and their goats killed off all the soil and it washed out into the Mediterranean.
Don’t invite Leftists or Islamic JIhadists to your home, they tend to take it over and burn it down.
Here you go, Carl in Atlanta.
http://kai.sub.blue/images/true_size_of_africa_v3-da3dd38e.jpg
It takes about twenty seconds to find using the way new internet utility named
GOOGLE!
Take five minutes off and learn how to use it. You will be amazed what you can find.
Irrefutable evidence of plate tectonics
re the African Planet, I expect the old saw about nature’s being unsympathetic to vacuums is proven right again as Europe provides the evidentiary experience. The obvious question: who, when the white population has dwindled sufficiently, will provide the wealth — made of education, ingenuity, invention, manufacturing, production; construction, and; industriousness, diligence, application, dedication?
“I see dead people” – lots of them.
The “bigness” of Africa is more important when you consider the breeding projections:
According to authoritative figures published by UNICEFin 2014, the number of Africans will grow from 1.033 billion in 2013 to a mammoth 4.2 billion in 2100. In the next 35 years alone, two billion African babies will be born.
An African Planet? | American Renaissance
And Greenland is much smaller than you think. Africa looks smaller and Greenland larger on maps due to their positioning relative to the equator. When you flatten the globe into a rectangle you have to shrink stuff in the middle and expand things at the top and bottom.
carl in atlanta:
I added a link in an addendum.
“I had a farm in Africa.”
But I didn’t have any insurance and so when my idiot workers allowed the coffee plant to burn down due to their negligence, I had to move back to Europe.
Karin
“But I did get to buzz elephants in a biplane with a bad accent and Robert Redford, so it wasn’t a total loss.” — Karin
Yes, Africa is huge. But before you get overly impressed, note that North America is about 81% the area of Africa. And of course Asia is much larger (almost 45% larger).
Here’s a list of the area of the continents as a percent of the world’s total land area (according to Wikipedia):
Asia______: 29.5%
Africa_____: 20.4%
N. America: 16.5%
S. America: 12.0%
Antarctica_: 9.2%
Europe___: 6.8%
Australia__: 5.9%
Rounding to one decimal digit yields a total greater than 100% (100.3%).
The total land area accounts for just 29.1% of the total surface area of earth.
Vanderleun:
The accent was perfect.
Do NOT question the acting ability of our greatest actress. Ever.
Yeah. Africa is big.
But what country has the biggest economy?
What country dominates the world’s culture; popular and otherwise?
Which country invents all the life saving drugs?
Which country wins all the Nobles?
Africa is a failure. And they gave us Barack.
vanderleun:
I thought the biplane had a very good accent.
its also incredibly rich with natural reserves of minerals and so on… but since russia makes its money selling similar stuff, and others play games, the africans cant even make money from their own stuff… not to mention that one of the best economic pieces i ever read was by a kenyan economist named shikawati…
but i covered this all back in 2008
Artfldgr Says:
June 17th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
The Kenyan economics expert James Shikwati, 35, says that aid to Africa does more harm than good. The avid proponent of globalization spoke with SPIEGEL about the disastrous effects of Western development policy in Africa, corrupt rulers, and the tendency to overstate the AIDS problem.
it was in the thread
Hey whitey, don’t be insulted
June 16th, 2008
three more years and it would be ten years waiting… 🙂
African immigrants are zooming right by our native-born African-Americans. Tiger Mom, in her latest book, picked Nigerians as one of the eight most successful ethnic groups in the country. And watch a few college football games and you will see more and more African Africans on the teams. (I would bet the same is true in scientific laboratories, but scientists generally don’t walk around with their names lettered on the back of their white coats.)
So is it that African immigrants believe in family, hard work, and education, which makes them outperform African-Americans, or is it all that mixed-in white DNA that holds African-Americans back?
My family and I lived in Africa from early 1970 to mid 1990, the last four of which were in Kenya, not far from Karin’s farm at the foot of the Ngong Hills. And I flew a lot of small planes in and out of Wilson Aerodrome, out over the Great Rift Valley.
Kenya was for us a magical place, but all of our posts were interesting at the same time they were troubling.
I was in Dahomey when a planeload of white mercenaries arrived to overthrow the government and left six hours later in failure. I was in Bangui when “Emperor” Bokassa returned to what he hoped would be popular acclaim but turned out to be a jail cell.
I discussed Ujamaa (Tanzanian socialism) with President Nyerere in the first of his collectivized villages (now a failure). I had breakfast with President Mobutu on the presidential yacht (!) Kamanyola floating on the Zaire River, and tea with Alan Paton. And so on.
I don’t consider Africa a sinkhole, but I recognize problems with large population flows to the cities, with horrible pandemics, with foreign assistance programs that prosper the donors more than the recipients, and with natural disasters that are biblical in scope.
I don’t blame colonialism for the problems, but freely admit that the colonial powers did not prepare their charges for independence. And didn’t have a good plan for the exploitation of valuable natural resources, either by the colonial powers themselves or by the politicians who assumed power after their departure.
We contemplated retiring in the Kenya Highlands. Given what has transpired in the USA in the past decade, I still wonder if we would not have been better off there right now. Beautiful place.
Nigeria leads the Universe in fraud and corruption. Nigeria’s number one export is crime.
Thanks for the link, Neo. You too vandy, (despite the snark).
That graphic reminds me of this classic SCTV sketch.
Being proud of your origins is one thing, trying to drag everyone down to make your origins look good, is unsightly however.
Awesome. Truly a useful educational tool for many folks.
Way back when . . . well before the internet, I lived in East Asia.
When I returned to the US, in order to give folks an idea of the relative size of Japan to the US, I would explain that Hokkaido (the northern main Island of Japan) would be up in Maine while Kyushu (the southern main island) would be near Georgia, and that the islands that make up Okinawa would be down by Florida. Most folks were convinced that I was wrong. It couldn’t be that big.
The same with India, I would explain that while it wasn’t as “wide” as the US, it was as “tall.” Again, most folks were convinced that I was mistaken.
Even I, with my love of history and geography, was surprise when several years ago I happened across a map of Alaska superimposed on the 48 lower states and saw that it stretched from California to Florida. It showed just how far flung the Aleutian Islands truly were.
Despite the fact that the internet has a lot of “junk” on it; such maps and other tools have got to be useful for educators. If nothing else they are fascinating to look at.
Go look at pics of the moon compared to the US. The diameter of the moon is roughly the width of the continental U.S. …Of course the moon is a sphere and unfolded it would be far more land than the U.S….The Dwarf planet Ceres is diameter is comparable to the width of Texas….but unfold it and its a lot more.
F:
You met Paton? One of my favorite books, Cry the Beloved Country.
Knowing Africa as you do, I wonder what you think of this post of mine.
Knowing Africa as you do, I wonder what you think of this post of mine.
Good post. The place is the pits in ways you can’t imagine. It might look honkidori for a while and then all hell breaks loose out of nowhere and you lose everything. It happened to my parents. Hurried departure for the airport in the dark of night to get the first flight out back to Europe, one piece of luggage in hand. Mali, 1960.
As to the Infographic map shown in this post, here
a bunch of them.
I find #12. Visualizing Global Population Density specially fascinating.
How big bad can it get in Africa?
Here, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa.
A book I guaranty you won’t be able to finish. It is bad and nobody knows.
Nothing new about all that:
King Leopold’s Ghost.
All around pathology at the utmost …
Some like to go there to dance away….
I blame the voters ….
Enjoyed re-reading the old post on Africa and the many interesting comments. Like a banquet of opinion and insight. One of the many reasons I read your blog.
F:
I like to read books by “people who were there.”
As I get older, I find that I’m increasingly asking people: “why don’t you write a book?”
Now I’ve done it to you. In this at least, I’ve become shameless.
All good and interesting comments, but back to the graphic comparing the relative size of some countries and Africa. First, though interesting, it isn’t really useful comparing the relative size of a continent with individual countries. Second, the whole thing begs the question of why the worlds largest and second largest countries (in land area), Russia and Canada, were not included in the comparison. And last, I noticed that both China and India were broken up into parts one and two in order to make them fit better, yet the US was not. Where is Alaska?
Neo:
I had not seen your post on Africa. It is quite good, and many of the comments are spot on — interspersed with some that are most decidedly not.
I will add something about AIDS, since one poster devoted a long comment to it. HIV, coupled with social practices that in some groups (the Luo of Kenya, from whom Obama is 1/2 descended) encourages a man to marry his brother’s widow, has devastated much of Africa. Particularly troubling, as your commenter noted, is the way in which it selectively “hollows out” a village, taking the best educated and most mobile, who probably picked up the infection while traveling outside the village and brought it home. The social consequences are staggering and far-reaching. Uganda has made strides with educational programs, but they’re a long way from success.
One other thought: we need to make DDT available in Africa. It would significantly reduce malaria, and Rachel Carson bears responsibility for a whole lot of death on that score.
Cornflour: I’m about 95 pages into my book on Africa, written mostly for my daughters who were there with us because I have no illusions many others would read much of it. I must admit I got away from it for the past year; perhaps I can get back to it.
Neo: Alan Paton was a delightful man when I had tea with him and his wife at his house in 1981. The house was like a hobbit house with a beautiful garden attached. Regrettably, it had been years since I read Cry so we ended up talking more about contemporary politics and the need to end apartheid. I think he would share his wife’s disappointment in how things turned out. F
F:
Thanks.
AIDS is a scourge in Africa, as is malaria, and I agree about DDT (see this).
It’s really tempting to suspect that Democrat or Leftist NGOs in the world profited from the banning of DDT somehow.