Africa

4 Pages 997 Words

Africa in General and Madagascar Africa, until the middle to late nineteenth century was known as The Dark Continent. The reason for this reputation was that at the time no outsider was able to go in land of the big continent and see the diversity and the complexity of it. The first impression the European got was what they saw that the coastal areas of Africa and took this impression back to their countries and labeled the continent as being dark, not only because the encounter they had with dark skinned people also because of their ignorance.
Africa can be looked at in several different ways, such as climate, ethnicity, history, languages, vegetation, natural resources, physical feature, and religions. First, Africa has five main climate regions: tropical rain forests, mediterranean, savanna, steppe, and desert. It also has small regions of highland, marine, and subtropical. Second, the vegetation varies depending on the climate area. In desert regions it is mostly barren but does have small amount of vegetation, which has adapted to a limited supply of water. Tropical rain forest usually has three layers of trees, all of which are broadleaf evergreens. They also have a variety of small ferns, vines, and shrubs. In the mediterranean environment there are evergreen trees mixed with coniferous and broadleaf trees. Oaks, pines, and small shrubs also are common. There are two types of savanna, woodland that has tall tress and perennial grasses and grassland, which consists of low growing deciduous, evergreen, and shrubbery. Grassland savannas also have many species of bare thorn shrubbery and the grasses are almost barren. Depending on the area, Africa's cash crop consists of coffee, gum, rubber, tobacco, cocoa, grapes, ground nuts, sugar, citrus, cotton, oil palm, and tea. Then we can say that the climatic region determines what vegetation, cash crop or natural can survive where. Generally speaking however Africa's natural resources a...