The World Book entry on "Africa" is about 30 pages - the longest one to date, if one is reading from the beginning of the As (as I am).
Before it, the longest entry I'd seen was "Advertising," at nine pages, and "John Adams" and "John Quincy Adams," at 5-6 pages each.
Given my rather dull experience with the Adams presidents and Advertising, I expected Africa would be a bit of a slog. It was not.
Some things I learned from reading the World Book entry on Africa:
-
Africa south of the Sahara has the most genetically diverse human population in the world.
-
Africa also has enormously diverse ecosystems, wildlife, and human cultures and history. So much so that the "Africa" entry doesn't even try to summarize. Instead, it points the reader to the entries for individual nations.
These two points struck me because my entire K-12 education treated "Africa" like it was a single monolithic country with a single monolithic population. Even when I had to memorize all the countries of Africa on a map for freshman-level world geography in college, it was basically just putting names to shapes.
That we take the literal place humans started being human, which is still the most diverse continent in the world, and boil it down to one word or idea is boggling to me.
Also:
-
South Africa has a bird called the "jackass penguin," about which I could make ever so many jokes.
-
Aardwolves. AARDWOLVES. I will never get over aardwolves.