POPULATION OF AFRICA.

Quantity and Density of Population. Within Africa live over 250,000,000 people. Though thrice as large as Europe, its population is almost two and a half times smaller than that of Europe. The average density of population in Africa is 8 persons to the square kilometre, which is much less than in either Europe or Asia.
The population of Africa is unevenly distributed. Most densely populated are the watered lands of the Nile Valley, where agriculture has been in practice from ancient times. Here the number of persons to the square kilometre is over 500. Outside a few such densely peo­pled places, Africa consists mainly of areas that are either very thinly peopled or entirely uninhabited.
The Peoples of Africa. The population of Africa consists of vari­ous peoples and tribes.
The Arabs and Berbers, members of the White (Europeoid) Race, are found in North Africa and in the Sahara. They speak the Arabic language.
The rest of the continent is inhabited mainly by members of the Black (Negroid) Race, with dark skins. They are divided into many different peoples and tribes. The Sudanese Peoples who live north of the Equator and the Bantu Peoples inhabiting Central and South Africa speak different languages. Small tribes of dwarfish Pygmies are found in the forests of the Congo basin. The males are about 144, the females about 137 centimetres high. They are lighter in colour than the Sudanese. They exist by hunting and collecting wild edible plants. Small numbers of Bushmen and Hottentots are still found
in the deserts and semideserts of South Africa. They have brown skins and speak their own speci­fic languages. These two tribes have been almost entirely wiped out by European invaders.
There are not many Europe­ans in Africa (under 8,000,000), mostly tradesmen, officials and soldiers who come here to get rich and then usually return to their own countries. Europeans live permanently in the northern and southern subtropical regions of Africa and, to a lesser extent, on the plateaus of East Afri­ca, in places where it is not so hot. In the extreme north, along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, live Frenchmen and Ita­lians, in the south — English­men and Boers (settlers of Dutch descent).
There were a number of ci­vilized states in ancient Africa with specific cultures of their own. Such were Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana and others. Many plants wide­ly cultivated in other parts of the world today are natives of Africa (the coffee-tree, for example). The prolonged rule of European colonizers, the exportation of thousands of black Africans to America as slaves and the greedy plunder of the natural resources of the continent caused its economical and cultural backwardness.
The native inhabitants of the colonies are ruthlessly exploited. The best lands are taken over by the European capitalists. In some colonies the natives are herded into special reservations which they cannot leave without permission. They are heavily taxed, and in order to pay their debts, are forced to hire themselves to the Europeans. Though slavery is forbidden, the Africans in many of the colonies are actually slaves today. They are forced to work on plantations and in mines belonging to European capitalists. Those who seek to avoid work are heavily punished. As a result of such brutal oppression, half of the population of former Belgian Congo died out in a period from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th centuries.
The Africans live in wretched huts and suffer from hunger and disease. Poverty and illiteracy — such is the heritage of prolonged colonial rule.

Africa was long a 'colonial continent'. Under the impact of the national liberation movement, however, the colonial system is in

a state of collapse today. The number of independent states in Africa is increasing steadily. Most of the peoples of Africa have won their independence. By 1964 the number of independent states in Africa reached thirty-five. The time is close when all Africa will be free!
Questions and Assignments.

• How much smaller is Africa than Asia in quantity and density of population?
• In which natural zones do the Arabs and Berbers live? In which the Sudanese and Bantu Peoples? Mainly in which parts of
  Africa  are  there  Europeans?