90 Amazing Facts about Africa

In 2012, the residents of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe were tasked with flushing their toilets at the same time in order to prevent blockages in the sewer system. The synchronized flush takes place twice a week in order to keep the sewers clear.

77. Theodore Roosevelt killed over 11,400 animals on his expedition to Africa, it took over 8 years for the Smithsonian to catalog all of them.

78. In the 20s and 30s, many Europeans supported using massive dams to drain the Mediterranean for farmland and to connect Europe and Africa in a new continent called "Atlantropa."

79. There is a place in Africa named Afar Triangle where giant gaping cracks will randomly and suddenly form that shoot out blasts of superheated air at 750°F.

80. Some of the Khoi-San people of southern Africa hunt antelope by chasing them on foot until they get heatstroke. The antelope overheat before the humans do.

In 1998, during a soccer match in the Congo, a lightning bolt struck the pitch and killed all 11 members of one team. The other team was left unscathed.

82. The Western black rhino is officially extinct.

83. Of the 34 countries with the highest birth rates in the world, 32 are in Africa

84. The deepest mine in the world, Mponeng in S. Africa, has rock faces 140-degrees due to proximity to Earth's core and is inhabited by "ghost minders" -pale criminals armed with AKs and beer bottle grenades who reside in the shafts for months at a time to steal gold.

85. Deep in Africa, there are accounts of people seeing dinosaur-like creatures that resembles a Brachiosaurus or Apatosaurus. The locals call it Mokèlé-mbèmbé and there have been several documented expeditions to find it from as early as 1776 to as late as 2012.

The entire continent of Africa has a smaller GDP than France

87. The "pencil test" was used during Apartheid in South Africa to decide if a child got to grow up white or "colored" (biracial). If your hair wasn't curly enough to hold a pencil, you "passed" as white.

88. An African slave named Onesimus taught colonists in Boston how to inoculate themselves against smallpox; the treatment had been common in China and Africa for centuries!

89. James Watson, one of the scientists who discovered the helical structure of DNA, believes that stupidity is a disease and stupid people should be "cured", people from Africa are inherently less intelligent, and that he would never hire a fat person.

90. George Clooney has helped fund a satellite that documents and records war atrocities in Africa that would otherwise be ignored.