Random African Country Generator

Draws a country at random from Africa — 54 sovereign states, more than any other continent, across a landmass that would swallow China, India, the United States and most of Europe at once.

One countryListWheel

RegionAll regionsAll of AfricaCentral AfricaEast AfricaNorth AfricaSouthern AfricaWest AfricaAll of AsiaCentral AsiaEast AsiaMiddle EastSouth AsiaSoutheast AsiaWestern AsiaAll of EuropeEastern EuropeNorthern EuropeSouthern EuropeWestern AsiaWestern EuropeAll of North AmericaCaribbeanCentral AmericaNorthern AmericaAll of OceaniaAustralasiaMelanesiaMicronesiaPolynesiaAll of South America

How many

13510

Include territories No repeats

Generate

54 countries in this selection

Seychelles

East Africa, Africa

Capital

Victoria

Population

130,000

Area

455 km²

Ranked 179th of 195 countries by population and 181st by area.

Learn more about Seychelles

Fifty-four countries, and most lists stop at ten

Africa is the continent where a random draw does the most work. Ask most people to name African countries and you get Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and then a pause. The other forty-eight are where the interesting material is: São Tomé and Príncipe, a two-island state smaller than Greater London; Lesotho, entirely surrounded by one other country; Djibouti, with a population under a million sitting on one of the busiest shipping lanes on Earth.

The five Africas

• North Africa — 6 states along the Mediterranean and the Sahara.
• West Africa — 16 states, the densest cluster on the continent.
• East Africa — 18 states, including the Indian Ocean island nations.
• Central Africa — 9 states around the Congo basin.
• Southern Africa — 5 states at the continent’s tip.

Scale worth knowing

Nigeria alone has more people than any European country. Algeria is the largest country in Africa by area and the tenth largest in the world. Seychelles, with around 130,000 people, is the smallest sovereign state on the continent by population — smaller than a mid-sized town. Africa’s median country has about 17 million people, roughly the size of the Netherlands.

For teaching

A draw per pupil, with each reporting back on capital, languages, currency and one landmark, covers a continent in a single lesson in a way a textbook chapter does not. Switch to List mode and generate ten at once to hand out.