Geography Test 5

• unique physical features related to break-up of "Gonwanaland"
• Absence of extensive mountain chains, but extensive plateau surface
• Highland Africa is eastern and southern Africa
• Lowland is central and western Africa
• Rift valleys, some filled by water to create lakes
• Lake Victoria- very small lake (puddle)
• Coastal escarpment where continents broke away from Africa

• Increasingly drier north and south of the equator
• Tropical savanna
• Precipitation volume determined by location of the ITCZ (inter tropical conversion zone)
• The rainy season is the high sun season, the ITCZ must be nearby or over head
• Seasons determined by precipitation and not temperatures

• “endemic” diseases are rarely fatal, but physically draining.
• Africa is not innately disease prone, but is a result of poverty.

• SSA has the highest global infection rate.
• Southern Africa is the most infected.
• Demographic impact on population growth rate and life expectancy.
• Government-sponsored behavior program have sometimes be successful Uganda, for example.

• Heterosexual transmission increases pool of the infected.
• Civil conflict increases flow of infected soldiers, prostitutes, and refugees.
• Rural-urban “circular” migration.
• Patriarchal social structure

• Loss of rural labor
• Millions of orphans

• Rise of interior empires in interior West Africa based on trans-Saharan trade (700-1600 A.D.), introduction of Islam.
• Arrival of European traders in 1500 A.D., restricted to coast.
• Slave trade commences in 1600, ends in late 1870s- creates the “Black Atlantic Diaspora”

• 1884 Berlin Conference creates formal boundaries from areas of European coastal influence.
• Height of industrialization in Europe meant that SSA was a critical source of raw materials.
• “Civilizing” Africans was the “white man’s burden”

• Boundaries do not spatially coincide with traditional ethnic regions
• Modern civil wars are a consequence of frustrated state building, examples --- Sudan in both the far south and the west (Darfur)
• Civil Strife is a consequence of frustrated state building, examples --- government devolution is Sumalia.

• North is dry, South has a lot vegetation
• About half is Arab and Muslim.
• The north has been subjecting the south with reference to violent activity.
• Better water in the north.
• More children go to school in the north.
• North Sudan holds onto South Sudan because it has substantial amounts of oil.

• Creation of a dual economy of mines and plantations (core) and traditional agriculture (periphery).
• Labor migration to these “islands of modernization”
• Underdevelopment of traditional food crop sector.
• Gender and Development
• Lowest GDI
• Colonial policies toward land ownership benefited men
• Colonial policies toward wage earning export crops benefited men

• IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies discriminate against women
• Reduced the role of gov. in ppl’s lives
• Severely impacted women and their children
• Smaller scale NGOs make a more positive impact by resisting power of larger scale organizations
• Women spend far too much time gathering wood and water

• Islam- northern regions, the Horn, and the coastal corridors of Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
• Catholicism- Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, and much of central southern africa.
• Protestantism-South Africa.
• Coptic Christian- Ethiopia.

The West African coastal belt stretching from Dakar, Senegal, to Libreville, Gabon; and a north-south belt stretching from the Ethiopian highlands down through Lake Victoria, ending in the Witwatersrand district of South Africa

The Sahel region, the west-central-forest regions of DCR and Gabon, and the arid/semiarid region of southwest Africa.

Most females marry at an early age, belief systems, customs, and traditions, high premium on lineage and spiritual survival. Children are regarded as economic assets.

• Subsistence farmers are denied access to the financial credit and extension services required for them to purchase the more expensive new seeds and fertilizers.
• The limited development of high-yielding strains of the staple tuber crops that constitute the daily diet of African farmers.

The oldest European community in South Africa

Petty- discourage different races to use the same facilities whereas the Grand was to create a world where it wouldn’t matter

It provided homelands that without any significant mineral reserves and without any potential for cultivation failed economically.