Countries in Africa

There are 54 sovereign countries in Africa recognised as United Nations member states. This page lists 59 entries in total, because it also includes territories such as Western Sahara, Réunion, Mayotte and Saint Helena, which have their own flags and population figures. If someone asks you the number, 54 is the answer they want.

Algeria, at 2,381,741 km². It has held the title since 2011, when Sudan split and lost the south. Roughly four-fifths of Algeria is Sahara, so its population of 46.8 million is concentrated in a narrow northern strip along the Mediterranean.

Nigeria, with 232.7 million residents. That is more than the combined populations of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. It sits in Western Africa and its largest city, Lagos, is one of the fastest-growing urban areas on Earth.

16 of them: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Rwanda, South Sudan, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. That is the highest count of any continent. Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country in the world, and Lesotho is one of only three states on Earth entirely surrounded by a single other country.

By land area the smallest sovereign state is Seychelles at 452 km², an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The smallest entry on this page overall is British Indian Ocean Territory at 60 km², which is a territory rather than a country. By population, Seychelles is again the smallest sovereign African state with roughly 121,000 residents.

10 entries on this page share no land border with anyone, and six of those are sovereign island states: Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Cape Verde, Comoros, and São Tomé and Príncipe. They are geographically African but culturally distinct, with creole languages, South Asian and Southeast Asian ancestry in the population, and economies built on fishing, tourism and shipping rather than agriculture or minerals.

This wheel is loaded only with countries from this region, so every spin lands inside it. The wheel on the main spin page draws twelve at a time from every country and territory on the site. Use the regional wheel when you are studying one part of the world and the global one when you want a genuine surprise.

They come from the same dataset that powers every country guide on this site, built on public country data and the most recent published estimates for population and land area. Population figures in particular are estimates and move constantly, so treat them as accurate to within a percent or two rather than to the last person.

Because they are real places with flags, capitals and residents, and leaving them out would hide some of the most interesting entries on the map. Every guide states plainly whether a place is a sovereign state or a territory, and the sovereign count is given separately in the statistics above so you can use whichever number you need.

Yes, and it is worth citing the date you looked them up, because population estimates change. If your project needs one authoritative source, cross-check the headline numbers against the UN World Population Prospects or the country's own statistics office. The rankings here — largest, smallest, most populous — are stable and safe to quote.