Culture of Africa

The Culture of Africa encompasses and includes all cultures which were ever in the continent of Africa.

The main split is between North Africa (plus the Horn of Africa), which is part of the Islamic world, and Sub-Saharan Africa, which is in turn divided into a great number of ethnic and tribal cultures. The main ethno-linguistic divisions are Afro-Asiatic (North Africa, Chad, Horn of Africa), Niger-Congo (mostly Bantu) in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, Nilo-Saharan in parts of the Sahara and the Sahel and parts of Eastern Africa, and Khoisan (indigenous minorities of Southern Africa).

The notion of a "Pan-African" culture was discussed in seriousness in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of the Négritude movement, but has fallen out of fashion in African studies. The wide distribution of Bantu peoples across Sub-Saharan Africa, encompassing parts of Western Africa, Eastern Africa, Central Africa as well as Southern Africa is a result of the Bantu expansions of the 1st millennium AD. The wide use of Swahili as a lingua franca further establishes the Bantu peoples as a nearly "Pan-African" cultural influence.

People

Main articles: African people and demographics of Africa

The vast majority of Africa's inhabitants are of indigenous origin.

Africa is home to innumerable tribes, ethnic and social groups, some representing very large populations consisting of millions of people, others are smaller groups of a few thousand. Some countries have over 20 different ethnic groups. Africans have a wide variety of people,such as different color sizes and shapes, they all also have a very wide variety in their beliefs. Many African people are in different "groups". They are separated by their beliefs and religions and after they choose their "group", they cannot change groups.

Folklore and traditional religion

Further information: African traditional religions and Religion in Africa

Like all human cultures, African folklore and folktales represent a variety of social facets of African culture[1]. Like almost all civilizations and cultures, flood myths have been circulating in different parts of Africa. For example, according to a Pygmy myth, Chameleon hearing a strange noise in a tree cut open its trunk and water came out in a great flood that spread all over the earth. The first human couple emerged with the water. Similarly, a mythological story from Côte d'Ivoire states that a charitable man gave away everything he had. The God Ouende rewarded him with riches, advised him to leave the area, and sent six months of rains to destroy his selfish neighbors.

Languages

Main article: African languages

The continent of Africa speaks hundreds of languages and if dialects spoken by various ethnic groups are also included, the number is much higher. All these languages and dialects do not have same importance: some are spoken by only few hundred persons, others are spoken by millions. Among the most prominent languages spoken are Arabic, Swahili and Hausa. Very few countries of Africa use any single language and for this reason several official languages coexist, African and European. Some Africans may also speak different languages such as Malagasy, English, French, Spanish, Bambara, Sotho, and many more.

The language of Africa present a unity of character as well as diversity, as is manifest in all the dimensions of Africa. Four prominent language families of Africa are:

• Afro-Asiatic
• Nilo-Saharan
• Niger-Kordofanian
• Khoisan

An early center of literature was the "African Ink Road".

Map showing the distribution of African language families and some major African languages. Afro-Asiatic extends from the North Africa through the Horn of Africa to Southwest Asia. Niger-Congo is divided to show the size of the Bantu sub-family.

By most estimates, Africa contains well over a thousand languages. There are four major language families native to Africa.

• The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout the Horn of Africa, North Africa, Southwest Asia, and parts of the Sahel.
• The Nilo-Saharan language family consists of more than a hundred languages spoken by 30 million people. Nilo-Saharan languages are mainly spoken in Chad, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, and northern Tanzania.
• The Niger-Congo language family covers much of Sub-Saharan Africa and is probably the largest language family in the world in terms of different languages. A substantial number of them are the Bantu languages spoken in much of sub-Saharan Africa.
• The Khoisan languages number about 50 and are spoken in Southern Africa by approximately 120 000 people. Many of the Khoisan languages are endangered. The Khoi and San peoples are considered the original inhabitants of this part of Africa.

With a few notable exceptions in East Africa, nearly all African countries have adopted official languages that originated outside the continent and spread through colonialism or human migration. For example, in numerous countries English and French are used for communication in the public sphere such as government, commerce, education and the media. Arabic, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Malagasy are other examples of originally non-African languages that are used by millions of Africans today, both in the public and private spheres.