Africa:Africa:Landforms and ResourcesLandforms and Resources

Africa… it looks like this:

Back when Pangaea broke up, Africa didn’t move much.

It’s sometimes known as the Plateau Continent because a good chunk of it is a plateau with an average elevation of 1,000 feet.

Basins and Rivers

• There are several river basins.

• The rainwater from these areas drain into the rivers.

• They are also depressions in the land that can be 5,000 feet deep.

• The Nile River is the longest river in the world at 4,160 miles. The Mississippi is just 2,357 miles long.

• It’s also an extremely important river as the vast majority of Egypt’s population lives along it.

• It provides water for consumption and for irrigation.

• In ancient times, its regular and predictable flooding helped make the land around it very fertile and provided the basis for the ancient Egyptian civilization.

• Most of Africa’s rivers aren’t very useful for transportation.

• The escarpment for the plateau is often close to the shore. Where there’s an escarpment, or merely a change in the geology, you get a cataract: waterfalls or narrow or rocky rapids areas. It’s hard to pilot a ship up a waterfall.

• The Congo, for example, has 32 cataracts.

• In fact, the largest waterfall in the world, Victoria Falls, is located here.

• The falls are nearly a mile wide and 420 ft high (compare that to Niagara Falls’ measly 0.7 mile wide and 167 ft height).

• To the local indigenous people, it was known as “The Smoke that Thunders.”

• The other problem is that they have twisty paths.

• The Nile is probably the one exception to these problems.

• It’s relatively straight and its first cataract isn’t until around some 650 miles upriver near Aswan.

• That navigability is another one of the things that helped with ancient Egyptian civilization. In fact, in ancient times, the kingdoms abruptly stopped at the first and later second cataract.

Rift valleys and lakes

• Rift valleys result from plate tectonics. As the plates pull away (diverge), they leave cracks.

• In a lot of places, it leaves a nice lush valley.

• In other spots, large lakes have formed.

• Lake Tanganyika is 4,800 feet deep at the deepest, making it second deepest in the world (next to Siberia’s Lake Baikal and its 5,700 ft depth).

Mountains

• African mountains are mainly volcanic.

• The most prominent mountain is Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Resources

• Africa abounds in natural resources, especially minerals and oil, but the countries there have had trouble making good use of them.

• One problem is that they lack the industrial and manufacturing capacity to turn the resources into goods, so most are just exported.

• This is in part due to European colonialism, which was more interested in the resources than in developing the place.

• The other problem is that many of the countries are politically unstable.

• Both corrupt governments and corrupt rebels will sell the resources for quick money which is then used for personal luxury or for fighting wars.

• Diamonds, for example, are a concern.

• Those in Angola and in other countries mine and sell diamonds to fund revolutionary or counter-revolutionary fighting.

• Such diamonds are called conflict diamonds or blood diamonds.

• While there’s a certification process in effect to keep them from being sold, it’s easily circumvented. Diamonds are too valuable a commodity that’s in too much demand to be kept out of the world market.

• Interestingly, all that may change with the recent introduction of manmade diamonds that are perfect and indistinguishable from the real thing.

• Previously, small or impure diamonds could be made.

• One company, though, Apollo Diamond, figured out how to make pure diamonds.

• When the gems really start coming on the market, they’ll disrupt the traditional diamond trade since they cost a fraction of ground diamonds.

• A flawless, colorless diamond may cost $25,000 to $50,000 per carat. Apollo can make one for $5 a carat.

• Another company, Gemesis, specializes in making yellow diamonds, which are normally $10,000 to $15,000. It costs Gemesis under $100 to make them.

• There are also methods to inject color into the manmade diamonds that, if natural, would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• The whole thing has the global diamond cartel DeBeers quaking.