👥 African Population Quiz

The top of the list

Nigeria is first by a very wide margin — close to twice the population of Ethiopia, the next country on the list. After that the order surprises people, because the three that follow are Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and then Egypt. Egypt is the one most often guessed too high: it is the most familiar of the four and the smallest of them.

Tanzania, South Africa, Kenya, Sudan, Algeria and Uganda fill out the top ten. Note what is missing: Morocco, the country many people would put in that list, sits just outside it.

The bottom is almost entirely islands

Every one of the five smallest countries in Africa is an island nation: Seychelles, São Tomé and Príncipe, Cabo Verde, the Comoros and Mauritius, with Djibouti the first mainland country above them. If a question offers you an island, it is almost always the smaller answer.

Rules of thumb that work here

• Landlocked does not mean small. Ethiopia has no coastline and is Africa’s second most populous country. Niger, Mali and Chad are enormous in area, landlocked, and hold far fewer people than their size suggests, because most of that area is desert.
• Area and population come apart in the Sahara. Algeria is the largest African country by land area and is ninth by population. Libya is the fourth largest and is not close to the top twenty. In North Africa, people live along the coast and the Nile; the map is mostly empty.
• The familiar country is rarely the most populous. Egypt, Morocco, Kenya and South Africa are the African countries people outside Africa know best, and none of them is in the top three. Familiarity is the main source of wrong answers in this category.