Africa for kids

Africa is the closest continent to Europe and yet how little we know about it! In reality, it has not been until these last decades when, little by little, we have been approaching on a large scale to the 55 countries that compose it and learning about their history and customs, but what does the history of the African continent hide and how can we bring Africa closer to children?

A brief history of Africa for children

Africa is the third largest continent on the planet and its name corresponds to the word that the ancient Romans used to refer to all the countries south of the Mediterranean ( Afri ).

Much earlier, 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged from Africa from where it spread throughout the world. In other words, Africa is the cradle of civilization. And we all have something of Africa inside us!

In this approach to the history of Africa for children , we can contextualize through the following historical data:

• Today, all of North Africa are Arab countries because in the 7th century they invaded the north of the continent.
• In contrast, the countries of black Africa were relatively isolated until the first European expeditions in the seventeenth century ,in which Portugal, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Italy divided the countries of the entire continent. Before all this, it was a region of great empires! Aksum, Kanem-Bornu, Senegambia, Sennar, Jolof …
• The partition of Africabetween 1880 and the First World War (1914-1918) by the colonial powers caused economic, social and cultural crises that still persist due to the fact that the borders were divided on a plane from Europe without respecting the tradition of the towns.
• In the 20th century, discrimination in Africa was a reality: itis what is known as apartheid (separation) in the countries of South Africa and Namibia.

What can children in Africa learn? Here are some dataCLICK TO TWEET

Africa on maps

Although we all have a more or less clear image of the African continent, the reality is that beyond the more than fifty countries, the Nile and the two great deserts that most of us have heard of – Sahara and Kalahari -, Children will learn that Africa is a huge expanse (almost sixty times Spain!), with the savannah as the main ecosystem (although not the only one) and 1,500 languages divided into four major linguistic families.

Children who come to Africa, even in pictures, will discover:

• • The 5,892-meter-high Mount Kilimanjaro ,in Tanzania, with its three dormant volcanoes and its summit ice walls.
  • The majestic Nile ,which , beyond crossing Cairo and Alexandria, flows through ten countries throughout Africa. It is born in Burundi, in the region of the great lakes, and reaches the Mediterranean.
  • In the Great Lakes region,Lake Victoria is best known of all for being the second largest freshwater lake in the world.
  • The Sahara Desert, the Kalahari Desert, and the Namibian Desert are three of the nine great deserts covering a large expanse of all of Africa. The Sahara desert is almost as big as all of China or the USand some of its dunes have reached 193 m in height. In the deserts it is very hot and it hardly rains, therefore, only some animals have adapted to this ecosystem: among the mammals are camels and dromedaries.
  • Some humans have lived and live in the desert: they are the Bedouins , aword that in Arabic means desert dwellers and they are nomads, that is, people who do not live in a fixed place, but travel throughout their lives.
  • Meerkats, like Timon from The Lion King,also live in the desert! Although in two others: the Kalahari and the Namib. Therefore, in reality, it would be difficult for him to meet Pumbaa, a warthog, who will prefer arid and humid savannas like those south of the Sahara.

What can children learn about Africa?

Africa is a continent with amazing flora and fauna: the African elephant ( Loxodonta africana ) lives on this continent , the largest animal in the world – weighing between 5.4 and 6 tons -; the giraffe ( Giraffa camelopardalis ), which can reach the height of a six-meter high building; or the hippos (Hippopotamidae), which are considered the most dangerous family of animals in Africa and which, sadly, has been hunted until only found today in some parts of the center and south of the continent when a hundred years ago they extended until they reached the Sahara desert and even rose up the Nile. Also the leopard, which adapts to almost any ecosystem, or the buffalo and its natural enemy, the Lion, which lives in savannas and grasslands and is the best known symbol in all of Africa.

In the plant world, Africa can be for children a huge canvas that opens to their imagination , with plants native to the south of the continent that grow underground, such as the Hydnora africana , legendary trees such as the baobab that appeared in the famous book The little prince , or the African violet, which has been exported to half the world.

Also traditional legends and stories can be a source of inspiration for the learning of human and social values ​​of Africa to boys and girls, for example:

• • • The elephant and the rain
    • Ubuntu
    • Baobab

Children and Africa: discovering challenges and solutions on the African continent

From Ayuda en Acción we do not believe that hiding from children the problems that Africa maintains in multiple areas makes sense. Although, in their early childhood, we may not want to tell our little ones about a civil war like the one in Somalia, or about conflicts like the one in Chad and Sudan or Nigeria, we also don’t have to hide that there are also problems.

Some of the topics that we can comment on are:

• • • 4 out of 10 children who do not go to school live in Africa.
    • Africais home to the ten poorest countries in the world , and hunger and drought are a reality for millions of people.
    • Many African countries maintain a relationship of dependency with the West ,something that has made it difficult to improve life in these areas.
    • Health and medicine is not a reality in many of these countries yet; in Mozambique, for example, more than 60% of the people do not have access to medicines.

If you want to continue learning about Africa for children , we recommend that you seek more information about those topics that have fascinated your loved ones and, together, discover all the wonders that the African continent offers and the challenges that, today, we face together