AFRICA has its fair share of quirks and surprises.

That is not what makes it different from other places - it is

partly what makes it similar to other continents. From the highest twin birth rates, to the power to control the
worlds most advanced technologies here we give you a run down of 15 of Africas most surprising facts:
Ethiopia is landlocked, but the state-owned shipping company has 17 ships. It close ally and neighbour Kenya
is a coastal country, with a national shipping company, but not a single ship.
Five African countries were represented in the just-ended Brazil World Cup, fielding 115 players all together.
That is less than 50% of the 234 African league players in Europe.
Even though donations of used clothing from the West are intended to help, they are responsible for roughly
40% of the decline in apparel production in an average African country.
There are only seven countries in Africa whose flag doesnt have red or black; Rwanda, Somalia, Mauritania,
Niger, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Cote dIvoire.
Cleopatra lived closer to the Arab Spring revolutions than she did to the building of the Great Pyramid. She
missed the completion of the pyramids by 2,491 years, and the Arab Spring by 2,040 years.

Elizabeth was crowned the Queen of Great Britain in 1953. The population of Africa in that year
was approximately 230million. In the time she has been queen, she has seen it grow to 1 billion.
Swazilands King Sobhuza II had 70 wives when he died. His son Mswati III, took over and in the last 28 years
he has been king has accumulated 15 wives. At this rate, if he lives to be his fathers age of 83 when he died,
and continues marrying at his current rate, he wont even get to half his fathers number with just 33 wives. The
more important thing though is that Mswati has more siblings than any other royal or monarch in the world - 96
of them.
They are vegetarian and spend most of their time in the water, but on a continent which hosts lions, leopards
and elephants, it can be a puzzling fact that the hippopotamus is responsible for the most human deaths, killing
approximately 3,000 people a year. Lions only manage 70 - just 2.3% of the hippos toll.
There is 1 car per 1,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile in California there are 840 cars per 1,000
people. The population of sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. minus the Arab countries in the north) is just over 900m.
Californias is 38.3m.
Africa produces 71% of the worlds tantalum without this the worlds production of mobile phones and
laptops would come to a standstill.
In Nigeria, over a million people are currently employed by Nollywood Nigerias film industry that is very
popular in most of Africa. This makes Nollywood the countrys second largest formal employer after
agriculture.
The African country with the least amount of paved road is Sao Tome and Principe it has only 320km. It has
an excuse, It consists of two archipelagos around the two main islands, and its total land size is 964sq kms. It
has a population of nearly 190,000.
In a ranking of the worlds 15 biggest landowners, three of the top 15 are Africans. King Mswati of Swaziland
came in 12th with 6,704 square miles of land in Swaziland there are no title deeds or land titles in the country.
King Lestie III of Lesotho came in 10th with all 11,718 square miles of Lesotho, and King Mohammed VI of
Morocco came in 4th with 175.6m acres of Morocco.
The West African country of Benin has the highest national average of twinning, with a whopping 27.9 twins
per 1,000 births. The world average for twin births is 13.6 twins per 1,000 births
Lake Malawi is home to more species of fish than any other lake. Around 15% of the global total freshwater
species are found there.