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13% of the world's population, about 797 million people live in the 53
countries that make up Africa. Across Africa's wide expanse live a
remarkably diverse people by just about any measure. They speak around
two thousand different languages, practice hundreds of distinct
religions and live in a variety of locales and engage in many different
economic activities. There are small villages and sprawling cities with
skyscrapers, modern economies, and a mix of international cultural
influences. Generally communitarian values predominate, and the African
extended family is the most visible expression of this community
orientation. Africa's birth and death rates are the highest in the
world. Infant and child deaths, from an array of infectious and
parasitic diseases were for long the main contributors, but in the
recent past, HIV/AIDS has taken a serious toll on Africa's population.
More than 70 percent of the victims of HIV/AIDS worldwide have been
Africans. In some countries especially in Southern Africa, life
expectancy has actually declined. Africans are still predominantly rural
people with approximately 37 percent of the people living in urban
areas, but Africa is also the most rapidly urbanizing continent. Some of
the cities are growing at rates of 8 to 10 percent per year.
Common trends running through African religions are belief in a creator,
the importance of ancestors, continuity of existence between the present
life and the next and the pervasiveness of religion in everyday life.
Spirituality is not a separate realm from daily existence and thus is
present in sacred places, art, music, dance, storytelling, and
ceremonies such as name giving, initiation, and marriage. Islam, Judaism
and Christianity have all become part of the religious beliefs of Africa
with such leading Catholic framers as St. Augustine emanating from
Africa. Combinations of Christian doctrine and rituals with indigenous
African ones are common in what is now known as syncretistic.
Writing traditions are a part of its history, but most African art forms
are orally composed and transmitted. Artistic creativity in musical
rhythms, use of multicolors, diversity of textures, exaggeration of
human forms, idiomatic expression, and performing arts are all a part of
Africa that has been carried to other cultures.
Despite its endemic poverty, Africa has some of the greatest mineral
resources in the world. Ironically, Africa has not benefited that much
from its resources. The Democratic Republic of Congo for example is
probably the most well endowed country on earth yet it is at the bottom
of the UN human development index. Africa's relations with the outside
world have been consistently defined by the extraction of its resources
for the benefit of other lands, and that has been a large part of its
pain and sorrow. By the mid-20th century, through European colonization
one-way trade systems in which Africa's wealth of raw materials were
exported to enrich foreign coffers, with little regard for development
within Africa had been firmly established. To understand Africa, one has
to know something of its history. It had a glorious past, but in the
last 500 years, Africa has known great sorrow and pain, and it faces
many challenges today.
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