Draw Africa’s countries from memory

One of these 53 outlines, picked at random. Sketch it, submit, and the score names the edge you actually remembered — then draw another Africa border, or skip until you get one you think you know.

How Africa adds up

These 53 outlines hold 30,215,078 km² of land and roughly 1.31 bn people between them. Algeria alone is 2,381,741 km² of it — about 8% of the whole continent — while São Tomé and Príncipe contributes 964 km², so the largest and smallest shapes on this sheet differ by roughly 2,471 to one. That spread is what makes a continent hard to practise evenly: the scoring compares filled area, so a country that occupies a tenth of the map cannot be sketched as carelessly as one that occupies a half.

35 of the 53 sit north of the equator, 17 south of it and 9 within five degrees of the line. 16 have no coastline at all, and between them they account for 28% of the land. DR Congo carries the most of that burden: it touches 9 other countries in this dataset, so its shape drags half the neighbourhood with it. The groups below are the subregions our outline data carries, which is also how the country pages describe themselves.

The five hardest borders in Africa

1. 01Cape Verdedetail 12.78
2. 02The Gambiadetail 8.36
3. 03Comorosdetail 7.06
4. 04Mozambiquedetail 4.48
5. 05Malawidetail 3.93

The list above is only the top five. Widening it to eight shows what actually drives the number: the detail score compares how much border a country carries with the land it encloses, then adds a penalty for every separate piece its outline falls into. Cape Verde leads at 12.78 across 8 pieces, and at the other end Eswatini sits on 1.25 — the easiest shape in Africa to get roughly right.

All Africa countries

Every country in Africa: area, population and capital

Sorted largest first, the same order the map reads. Each name opens that country's own drawing guide, where the same outline is the shape you sketch and get scored against — with the strategy notes, the sector readout and the border list that explain why it lands where it does on the difficulty scale.

How to practise Africa from memory

Two routes work better than drawing countries one by one. The first is the blank map of africa: label the whole sheet, then mark what you could not place. That tells you which shapes are missing from your mental map rather than which ones you happened to click. The second is running the same continent in endless mode, which serves random well-known outlines back to back and keeps a running average, so a bad patch shows up as a trend instead of a single discouraging score.

If Africa is not where you want to start, compare it against the ranked lists: the easiest borders anywhere and the hardest are both measured from this same geometry. The five-step method covers proportion and anchor points, which is what most of these shapes actually test, and the reference tables for area and capitals give you the size ordering that makes a continent fall into place.

Other continents

• Asia
• Europe
• North America
• Oceania
• South America

Other blank maps

• World
• Europe
• Asia
• North America
• South America
• United States

Africa — questions