Background information fact; by edgardowelelo@yahoo.com, Master of the Game
Immense Africa, the second largest continent, spans a wide range of natural regions and climatic types. There are subtropical coastal belts as well as mangrove marshes; there are deserts, of which the Sahara is the world’s largest and the Namib perhaps the oldest. Africa has salt pans and arid, steppe like sub deserts: vast savannas of grassy plains, bushvelds, and woodlands: deciduous open forests with dense underbrush, equatorial lowland rainforests with a closed canopy shadowing the soil, and montane rainforests: alkaline lakes, soda lakes, freshwater lakes as large as inland seas, and enormous swamps, nourished by a network of rivers and drained by several mighty rivers, of which the Nile, the Congo, the Niger, and the Zambezi are the longest. The continent has extinct and living volcanoes, high mountain ranges and impressive rock massifs, of which the three (3) highest – Kilimanjaro, Kenya and Ruwenzori – are permanently snow – capped. These mountains climb from the humid tropics through temperate zones past the timber line on up to the icy world of snow and glaciers. The natural regions that have been mentioned are really only broad divisions because each of them in turn is divided into a number of distinct habitats containing characteristic plants and animals. Africa is the richest of all continents in animals. More vertebrate species, with the exceptions of those in the Oceans, live there than anywhere else in the world. The density of large mammals on some of Africa’s savannas is unequaled. Broadly speaking, Africa’s vegetation belts may be divided from north to south into eleven (11) regions: Mediterranean coastal strip with Macchia Vegetation (Chaparral) and temperate forests; deserts; sub desert steppes and bushlands; savanna grasslands; Savanna woodlands; equatorial lowland rain forest, grassy and wooded savannas; temperate and subtropical grassland (high veld); Karoo steppes and sub deserts; coastal strips of “ Mediterranean” vegetation; montane rainforests and associations of higher altitudes. The boundaries between various natural regions are usually not sharp. A mosaic pattern of savannas and woodlands is characteristic over large areas of the Savanna belts both north and south of the equator – a pattern often broken by topographical features such as swamps, lakes and rivers, and high plateaus. (Permanent water is almost everywhere fringed by gallery forests or other kinds of vegetation even when it is situated in the middle of a desert. Madagascar, biogeographically quite distinct from continental Africa, has been separated from the African mainland for at least 20 million years. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Madagascar has ever had a land connection with either Africa or Asia. Whatever its early history, animal life on Madagascar is almost as peculiar as that of Australia, and its flora is unmatched.
