Africa is the world's second-largest and second most-populous continent, after Asia. At about 30,221,532 km² (11,668,545 sq mi) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area, and 20.4% of the total land area. With more than 900 million people (as of 2005) in 61 territories, it accounts for about 14% of the world's human population. The continent is surrounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the north, the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the northeast, the Indian Ocean to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west. There are 46 countries including Madagascar, and 53 including all the island groups.

Africa, particularly central eastern Africa, is widely regarded within the scientific community to be the origin of humans and the Hominidae tree (great apes), as evidenced by the discovery of the earliest hominids and their possible ancestors, as well as later ones that have been dated to around seven million years ago – including Sahelanthropus tchadensis, Australopithecus africanus, A. afarensis, Homo erectus, H. habilis and H. ergaster – with the earliest Homo sapiens (human) found in Ethiopia being dated to ca. 200,000 years ago.

Africa straddles the equator and encompasses numerous climate areas; it is the only continent to stretch from the northern temperate to southern temperate zones. Because of the lack of natural regular precipitation and irrigation as well as glaciers or mountain aquifer systems, there is no natural moderating effect on the climate except near the coasts.

African culture is characterised by a vastly diverse patchwork of social values, ranging from extreme patriarchy to extreme matriarchy, sometimes in tribes existing side by side.

Modern African culture is characterised by conflicted responses to Arab nationalism and European imperialism. Increasingly, beginning in the late 1990s, Africans are reasserting their identity. In North Africa especially the rejection of the label Arab or European has resulted in an upsurge of demands for special protection of indigenous Amazigh languages and culture in Morocco, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. The re-emergence of Pan-Africanism since the fall of apartheid has heightened calls for a renewed sense of African identity. In South Africa, intellectuals from settler communities of European descent increasingly identify as African for cultural rather than geographical or racial reasons. Famously, some have undergone ritual ceremonies to become members of the Zulu or other community.

Much of the traditional African cultures have become impoverished as a result of years of neglect and suppression by colonial and neo-colonial regimes. There is now a resurgence in the attempts to rediscover and revalourise African traditional cultures, under such movements as the African Renaissance led by Thabo Mbeki, Afrocentrism led by an influential group of scholars including Molefi Asante, as well as the increasing recognition of traditional spiritualism through decriminalization of Vodou and other forms of spirituality. In recent years African traditional culture has become synonymous with rural poverty and subsistence farming.

Urban culture in Africa, now associated with Western values, is a great contrast from traditional African urban culture which was once rich and enviable even by modern Western standards. African cities such as Loango, M'banza Congo, Timbuktu, Thebes, Meroe and others had served as the world's most affluent urban and industrial centers, clean, well-laid out, and full of universities, libraries, and temples.

The main and most enduring cultural fault-line in Africa is the divide between traditional pastoralists and agriculturalists. The divide is not, and never was based on economic competition, but rather on the colonial racial policy that identified pastoralists as constituting a different race from agriculturalists, and enforcing a form of apartheid between the two cultures beginning in the 1880s and lasting until the 1960s. Although European colonial powers were largely industrial, many of the administrators and philosophers, whose writings provided rationale for colonialism, applied quasi-scientific eugenics policies and racist politics on Africans in experiments of misguided social engineering.

Most of the racial recategorisation of Africans to fit European stereotypes was contradictory and incoherent. However, because their legalism and laws that emanated from these policies were backed by police force, the scientific establishment and economic power, Africans reacted by either conforming to the new rules, or rejecting them in favour of Pan-Africanism. All across Africa communities and individuals were measured by colonial eugenics boards and reassigned identities and ethnicities based on pseudoscience. The schools taught that in general Africans who resembled Europeans in some physical or cultural aspect were superior to other Africans and deserved more privileges. This caused animosity, incited by other Europeans – socialists and communists – who identified Africans according to dubious classes also modeled on European concerns.

The easiest way to divide Africans was along economic lines. Pastoralists, agriculturalists, hunter-gatherers and Westernised Africans, all formed distinctly identifiable cultures each of which came to play a different and disfiguring role in Africa's modern politics. The Westernised Africans, specifically Senegalese and Sudanese Nubians from urban centers such as Dakar and Khartoum, were used to serve as the bulk of colonial troops against the rural Africans. Pastoralists were radicalised by the wholesale confiscation of grazing lands in favour of plantations. Agriculturalists came into conflict for land and water with pastoralists after the traditional sharing arrangements had been destroyed by colonial policies.

In addition, a growing body of speculative anthropology and race science made false claims about the superiority and inferiority of Africans with different cultural and economic backgrounds. The vast majority of the scholarship on Africa was extraneous and catered to the demand for exotic and outlandish representations of Africa. The enforcement of the government decrees and policies tended to produce effects that confirmed the prejudices of the European colonialists.

African art and architecture reflect the diversity of African cultures. The oldest existing examples of art from Africa are 75,000 year old beads made from Nassarius shells that were found in Blombos Cave. The Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt was the world's tallest structure for 4,000 years until the completion of Lincoln Cathedral around 1300. The stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe are also noteworthy for their architecture, and the complex of monolithic churches at Lalibela, Ethiopia, of which the Church of St. George is representative, is regarded as another marvel of engineering.