This Is Africa

What is Africa? Africa is vast savannas and teeming cities, oil wells and village water holes, gated suburbs and crumbling shantytowns, Great Lakes and the world's largest hot desert, visionary leaders and petty corruption, diamond mines and workers living on $2 a day, thriving art and music scenes and war-torn cultures. This Is Africa is a book about a continent of enormous diversity. Africa is big, far bigger than many people may realize. Those who may be accustomed to the Mercator projection commonly shown in maps may think that Africa is about the size of Greenland. The state of California would fit into Africa more than seventy times, and Africa is nearly fourteen times the size of Greenland. The continent is home to just over one billion people: about fifteen percent of the world's population. Africans speak over two thousand languages and dialects, adhere to three different major religious traditions, and live in sixty-four nations and territories. The phrase "This is Africa" can mean different things. We use it in the descriptive sense to mean, literally, this is what Africa is and always has been. Some people mutter "This is Africa" out of frustration with a place where things do not run on time or work as they should. These same people may exclaim "This is Africa" in reaction to the beautiful landscape, the wildlife, and the diversity of cultural expression thriving on the continent. Our goal in this book is to present all sides of Africa today.