Article · 53 African outlines
Why Africa's borders are the easiest on earth to draw
Every country you can draw on this site has been measured for how much edge detail its outline actually carries, and the result sorts the continents in a way that is hard to explain by nature. Africa has the smoothest set of borders anywhere in the world — an average of 2.82 against 8.21 for Oceania — with 19 of 53 outlines below 2.0. That is not a coincidence of terrain. It is the visible residue of how the continent's boundaries were made, and it is the reason a beginner who starts in Africa improves faster than one who starts in Europe.
What the measurement is actually counting
The difficulty score on each outline is a measure of edge: how much border a shape carries relative to the area it encloses, taken from the same Natural Earth geometry the game fills and scores. A square with a ruler-straight side adds nothing to that number. A coastline with inlets, a river that wanders, or an archipelago scattered over a thousand kilometres of water adds a great deal.
So the score is a fair proxy for one specific question — how much information does a hand need to reproduce this shape — and Africa answers it unusually low. The median outline on this site sits at 2.79 detail; 19 of the 53 African outlines are below 2.0, and only 3 reach 5. Set that against Oceania, where 10 of 14 outlines are in the high band: island states whose borders are mostly sea.
| Continent | Countries | Mean detail | Under 2.0 | 5+ | Landlocked | Smoothest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 53 | 2.82 | 19 of 53 | 3 of 53 | 16 | Eswatini |
| Europe | 44 | 3.87 | 12 of 44 | 9 of 44 | 14 | Andorra |
| Asia | 45 | 4.24 | 10 of 45 | 12 of 45 | 11 | Singapore |
| South America | 12 | 4.34 | 2 of 12 | 1 of 12 | 2 | Uruguay |
| North America | 22 | 4.50 | 5 of 22 | 8 of 22 | 0 | Barbados |
| Oceania | 14 | 8.21 | 1 of 14 | 10 of 14 | 0 | Nauru |
Lines negotiated in Europe, then drawn on the ground
The reason is procedural. Where a European boundary tends to have grown — a river that was the march line in one century and the frontier in the next, a ridge that split two dioceses — most African boundaries were agreed first and located afterwards. The partition of the continent was negotiated between powers that were not on the ground, in treaties that described boundaries the signatories had never walked.
Given that problem, a parallel or a meridian was the only instrument that worked. You can write "the 22nd parallel of north latitude" in a treaty and have it surveyed later by people with a theodolite and a calendar; you cannot do that with a river nobody has mapped. Hence the shapes that are unmistakably negotiated rather than discovered: the long horizontal edges of the Sahelian states, the rectangular southern block of Libya, Algeria's geometric east, Niger's awkward wedge, the vertical lines that separate the Sahelian states from their coastal neighbours, and the Caprivi Strip in the south, which is a corridor pushed east by a power that wanted access to a river it had not yet secured.
The same process gave the continent its one distinctive middle case: a boundary that follows water but only in the sense that a treaty named it. The Gambia is the clearest of these — a band of country measured a fixed distance on either side of a river, which is why its outline is one of the most detailed in Africa despite being the least natural. A river boundary that is actually a river is smooth on the map; a river boundary that is a two-sided buffer around a river is a ribbon, and ribbons have a great deal of edge for their area.
Independence did not change the lines. In 1964 the Organisation of African Unity resolved at Cairo that the colonial borders would stand, on the reasoning that reopening any of them meant reopening all of them. So the geometry has been frozen for six decades, and the map you learn today is, in outline, the map that was signed in the 1880s and 1890s.
The 12 smoothest African outlines
Sorted by measured detail. Almost all of them are large, blocky states in the Sahel and the south-east, or compact enclaves with one or two neighbours — and that is the whole list a beginner should practise first, because a rough quadrilateral here still scores well.
| Country | Detail | Area (km²) | Coast | Neighbours | Rank in Africa |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eswatini | 1.25 | 17,364 | landlocked | 2 | 49th by area |
| Lesotho | 1.27 | 30,355 | landlocked | 1 | 44th by area |
| Zimbabwe | 1.47 | 390,757 | landlocked | 4 | 26th by area |
| Tanzania | 1.58 | 945,087 | coastal | 8 | 13th by area |
| Algeria | 1.70 | 2,381,741 | coastal | 6 | 1st by area |
| Botswana | 1.71 | 582,000 | landlocked | 4 | 22nd by area |
| Uganda | 1.71 | 241,550 | landlocked | 5 | 32nd by area |
| Libya | 1.73 | 1,759,540 | coastal | 6 | 4th by area |
| Somaliland | 1.73 | 168,492 | coastal | 3 | 35th by area |
| Ethiopia | 1.74 | 1,104,300 | landlocked | 6 | 10th by area |
| Ghana | 1.79 | 238,533 | coastal | 3 | 33rd by area |
| Rwanda | 1.79 | 26,338 | landlocked | 4 | 47th by area |
The exceptions are all water
Only 3 African outlines reach the high-detail band, and reading them tells you what the measurement is sensitive to. Cape Verde and Comoros are archipelagos — their borders are ocean, and there is no treaty line anywhere in the shape. The Gambia is the ribbon described above. Everything else in the continent's detailed group is coastal rather than enclosed:Somalia, Togo, Guinea and Senegal carry real shorelines, and the further a state is from the sea the more likely its outline is a negotiated line.
That correlation is the useful generalisation for anyone learning the map: in Africa, coastline is difficulty and straight edge is forgiveness. The continent's largest states — Algeria, DR Congo, Sudan — are among the easier outlines to draw despite holding 6,612,667 km² between them, because three quarters of their frontier is a line someone drew with a ruler.
Straight edges are easy to draw and hard to place
Africa's geometry comes with a catch that the measurement cannot see. 16 of the 53 countries here have no coastline, so there is no shore to anchor them and no shape clue about where they belong: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad and Eswatini and the rest are placed only by which countries they touch. That is a harder skill than drawing the outline, and it is the one the continent actually teaches.
| Country | Area (km²) | Detail | Neighbours | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Algeria | 2,381,741 | 1.70 | 6 | smooth (under 2.0) |
| DR Congo | 2,344,858 | 2.52 | 9 | middle |
| Sudan | 1,886,068 | 1.98 | 7 | smooth (under 2.0) |
| Libya | 1,759,540 | 1.73 | 6 | smooth (under 2.0) |
| Chad | 1,284,000 | 1.89 | 6 | smooth (under 2.0) |
| Niger | 1,267,000 | 1.95 | 7 | smooth (under 2.0) |
What to do with this if you are practising
- 01
Start in the Sahel, not in Europe
The smoothest outlines on the site are concentrated here, so a first attempt is rewarded rather than punished. Learn to close a rough quadrilateral and read a good score off it, then move to a continent that fights back. Norway's fjords and Greece's islands are the same exercise with ten times the information in the edge.
- 02
Practise the 16 landlocked states as a group
Their outlines are trivial; their positions are not. Draw the whole interior in one sitting — Sahel, then the lake states, then the south — and the relationships between them are the thing being memorised, which is the part that transfers to every other continent.
- 03
Use the straight lines as the scaffold
A small number of parallels and meridians carry most of the continent: the top edges of the Sahelian states, the verticals between them, and the 22nd parallel in the north-east. Get those on the page first and every outline you draw afterwards has something true to be measured against.
- 04
Save the coastlines for last
The detailed African outlines are the coastal and island ones — Cape Verde, The Gambia, Comoros — and they are worth doing once you can already place the interior, because a well-placed approximation of a shoreline is more useful in a quiz than a perfect outline in the wrong sea.
Related
Africa's borders — questions
Why are Africa's borders straight lines?
Mostly because they were decided before they were surveyed. Between the 1880s and the 1930s the powers that partitioned the continent negotiated boundaries in Europe, from offices in Paris, London, Lisbon and Berlin, and the practical instrument for a line nobody had walked was a line of latitude or longitude — or an arc drawn a fixed distance from a river a treaty could name. A boundary agreed as "the 22nd parallel" or "ten miles either side of the river" comes out on the ground as a ruler-straight edge or an unnaturally smooth curve, and it keeps that character on every map since. 53 countries later measured on the same outline data give Africa the lowest average border detail of any continent on this site, at 2.82 against 3.87 for Europe and 8.21 for Oceania.
How many African borders are straight lines?
There is no agreed count, because "straight" is a judgement rather than a measurement — the figure most often quoted in the literature is around 44%, from mid-twentieth-century studies of colonial geometric boundaries, and it depends entirely on how much bending a line is allowed before it stops counting. What this site can measure is the consequence: 19 of the 53 African outlines carry under 2.0 border detail, and only 3 reach 5. In the same dataset 44 European outlines include 9 at that high band. The continent is not a handful of exceptions with normal borders attached; the smooth outline is the norm.
Which African country is easiest to draw?
Eswatini, at 1.25 measured detail — and the reason is that it is a compact highland enclave with one neighbour. Lesotho is next at 1.27 for the same reason, and after them come Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Algeria, which are large, blocky states whose edges were fixed by treaty rather than by terrain. None of them is easy to place, though: Eswatini and Lesotho are both landlocked, so a correct outline in the wrong part of the continent is still a wrong map.
Which African borders are not straight?
The ones water made. Cape Verde is the most detailed African outline at 12.78, and it is an archipelago; The Gambia at 8.36 is a river valley traced on both banks, which is the one kind of negotiated boundary that produces a fussy edge instead of a straight one. Beyond them come island and coastal states — Comoros — where the outline is coastline rather than treaty. In the interior, the Congo basin's arcs and the Cameroon–Nigeria frontier are the other notable exceptions, both following rivers rather than parallels.
Did the Berlin Conference create all of Africa's borders?
It created the rules rather than the lines. The 1884–85 conference set out how European powers would recognise each other's claims — including the requirement to notify other signatories before a claim counted, and the notion of effective occupation — and the actual boundary-making then ran on for decades, mostly by bilateral treaty and arbitration between 1885 and the 1930s. What the conference did guarantee is that the boundaries were negotiated between powers who were not on the ground, which is the fact that shows up in the geometry.
Why did the new states keep those borders when they became independent?
Because the alternative looked worse. When the Organisation of African Unity met in Cairo in 1964 it resolved that the colonial boundaries should stand as the borders of the new states, in the same spirit in which Latin America had kept its administrative lines after independence: redrawing them meant opening every dispute at once. That decision is why a map of Africa today is a map of a partition negotiated a century earlier, complete with lines that follow no mountain, river or language boundary, and why the outlines you draw here are the ones the game scores you against.
Are straight borders easier to remember than natural ones?
For drawing, yes — and the measurement says so twice over. A straight edge has one degree of freedom to remember instead of a hundred, so a sketch can match it almost exactly; and because straight edges also produce less area error, a rough blocky shape overlaps the real one generously. The catch is placement. A coastline gives you a clue where the country is; 16 of these 53 states have none, and inside a continent of straight lines the only remaining anchor is which neighbour they touch. That is the actual skill Africa teaches, and it transfers to every landlocked country in the world.
Do other continents have straight borders too?
Two, and they are the two that come closest to Africa. The western half of North America's interior was surveyed on a grid, and the 49th parallel is the most famous straight boundary on earth; South America's few straight sections are short. But Asia and Europe are the real contrast: their borders grew out of rivers, ridges, and the slow accretion of states, so their outlines carry far more edge per kilometre of country. In this dataset 12 of 45 Asian outlines and 9 of 44 European ones sit above 5 detail, against 3 of 53 in Africa.
How many countries are there in Africa?
53 on this site. The usual figure is 54 — the 53 shapes here are 52 UN member states plus Somaliland, which this dataset treats as its own territory and most reference maps fold into Somalia, and 2 members have no outline yet (Mauritius and Seychelles). Western Sahara is the other name you will see on lists of the continent: its status is disputed, so whether the count is 54 or 55 depends on who is doing the counting. Every number on this page is measured from the outlines the game actually scores, so the tables and the prose cannot disagree with what you see when you draw.