Like most of us, I have conflicting images of this dark continent that gave birth to humanity five million years ago, and that spawned our own species, Homo sapiens , about 140,000 years ago. Though our ancestors came from Africa originally, the motherland appeared so remote and mysterious to Europeans in recent centuries that it had to be discovered and explored all over again, its rivers traced to their sources, its peoples described and subdued. The writer Joseph Conrad summed up his view of Africa in his title, Heart of Darkness . Yet today Africa has very little to show for these apparent advantages. The people are mostly impoverished, the governments mostly corrupt and undemocratic.
Civil wars are commonplace.
A striking physical image of Africa is manifest in pictures of the Earth taken from space. The continent is easily visible due to absence of cloud cover over the Sahara in the north, the world s largest desert, and the Namib in the south, the world s oldest desert. Africa lies prominently astride the equator, surrounded by the Atlantic and Indian oceans on its flanks and the Mediterranean and Red seas on its expansive crown. Geologically, Africa is the keystone continent. It occupied the central position in the supercontinent of Gondwana, from which formed the southern continents.