The countries in Africa, ranked by real numbers

There are 53 countries here, and other sources say 54 or 55

The usual answer to “how many countries are in Africa” is 54; the African Union’s is 55, because the union counts Western Sahara as a member. This page lists 53 for a mechanical reason: it is built from the shapes the game can score, so a row exists only where we hold an outline and a data record. Northern Africa therefore has 6 entries rather than the five or six an atlas shows, and two Indian Ocean island states are missing as well. Say the number, then say what it counts — every total below is a total of these 53 rows, which is why our continental area comes in under the figure on a reference map that includes territories we do not have.

All 53 countries: area, population, capital, world rank

Sorted by land area, largest first. Together these 53 countries cover 30,215,078 km², and every name links to the outline you can draw and be scored on.

6 African countries sit in the world’s twenty largest

No other continent in this dataset comes close to that concentration, and it is a direct product of the partition: the Sahara was carved into a handful of enormous rectangles rather than usable units. Below that block Africa’s size profile drops off a cliff — the other 47 countries here all sit outside the world’s top 20.

The continent in four bands, with numbers

Desert and Sahel. Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Mali total 11,851,691 km², roughly 39% of everything listed on this page, and they are the most forgiving outlines in the game: Algeria measures 1.70 on the border-detail scale, which is what a shape built from latitude and longitude looks like. The Sahel states add 7,177,649 km² of similarly rectangular land, and their difficulty is placement rather than drawing — nobody butchers Niger’s silhouette, but plenty of people put it on the wrong side of Mali.

The Horn. Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya hold 2,631,616 km² and the continent’s most distinctive coastline: the Red Sea’s south-western wall, the notch of the Gulf of Aden, and a tapered tip almost everybody draws too blunt. It is also the only band where a recognition dispute changes the row count — Somaliland’s presence in this data is what separates our 53 from the lists that stop at 52.

Lakes and south. DR Congo, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique cover 5,204,181 km² of broken river-and-rift edges, the opposite of the desert. DR Congo touches 9 countries, the most of any entry here, with Tanzania and Zambia both on 8. In this belt a shape only makes sense relative to its neighbours, which is exactly what the drawing score tests: the outline is the easy half, the position is not.

The smallest African outlines, as the game holds them

The 6 smallest shapes on this page, silhouettes revealed. Cape Verde is barely bigger than São Tomé and Príncipe, yet it arrives as 8 separate islands with a detail score of 12.78 — the highest of any African country, and far above Algeria’s 1.70. Tiny does not mean easy; it usually means fragmented, and at this scale a piece can end up as a handful of points rather than a drawing.

How we measure these figures

Area comes from ISO country metadata wherever a record exists. Exactly one row here has no ISO record: Somaliland, whose 168,492 km² was measured from its Natural Earth 50m admin-0 outline with a spherical polygon formula and flagged as measured in the data. Capitals, landlocked status and neighbour lists come from the same ISO join. The outlines themselves are Natural Earth 50m shapes simplified to a point budget, so the detail and piece figures describe the shape you actually draw rather than a country’s true coastline. Population is the estimate shipped in the game file: consistent across this site, and not a current projection.

Other ranked lists built from the same pipeline: largest countries by area, smallest countries in the world, every capital city, and the difficulty rankings for easy borders and hard borders. All 190 countries are indexed on the country index.

Countries in Africa — questions