Motherland of African Americans, Africa is the second largest continent. Her 12 million square miles could encircle Europe, China, India, New Zealand, the United States, and Argentina. Her borders are the Atlantic Ocean (west), Mediterranean Sea (north), Red Sea (northeast), Indian Ocean (southeast), and offshore islands. She contains four major lakes, notably 4,600-mile Victoria; thirteen rivers, including the Nile, the world's longest river; a few mountains, including Mt. Kilimanjaro; minerals (copper, diamonds, oil, uranium); plants; and wildlife. There are five climate zones: Mediterranean, northern shore to the Cape of Good Hope; Desert, the Sahara (world's largest), Namid, and Kalahari deserts; Sub-Desert or Sahel, a semiarid region below the Sahara between Cape Verde and the Red Sea; Savanna, flat grasslands from Senegal to Ethiopia (largest zone, it includes a tourist reserve); and Tropical Rain Forest, so-called “jungles” across West-Central Africa and Madagascar. Climate sustains fishing, hunting-and-gathering, farming, and herding livelihoods. Agricultural economies, mining, and service industries emerged ca. 1885–1990. Industrialization, including mass migrations to cities, has expanded since 1945. Casablanca (Morocco), Kinshasa (Zaire), Cairo (Egypt), and Lagos (Nigeria), respectively, report 4 to 21 million inhabitants today. Farming is the main pursuit of rural dwellers.

The current population (1.69 billion) is diverse, especially by race (color) and ethnicity (language, religion). Ethnic groups or tribes share a common ancestry, homeland, and livelihood. Aboriginals or blacks comprise a 70 percent majority. Blacks constitute 800 ethnicities and speak 1,000 languages, most of them unwritten. Arabic, Amharic, Malagasy, and Swahili are spoken and written. Africans also have embraced European and other settler languages. Native linguistic areas are North Africa (Afro-Asiatic), Niger River bend to East Africa (Nilo-Saharan), West Africa (Niger Congo), Central Africa (Kordofonian); South Africa (Khoisian), and Madagascar (Austronesian). Africans honor ancestors, gods, and the land but differ in familial, religious, artistic, and political customs. They currently live in sixty-two nations and territories, composing 24 percent of the geographical regions represented in the United Nations. Theirs is “‘a continent in crisis’” and they use varied strategies to combat disease, hunger, war, and genocide.

Africa is central in human history. Anthropologists have found the oldest human remains (5.8 to 1.7 million years) in East Africa's Great Rift Valley. They believe that humans first lived there before migrating internally and to the Near East, Europe, Asia, and the Western Hemisphere.