If you see African map you will recognize that how much Africa is a vast flat terrain: only ten percent of its land area lies at less than 500 feet higher than sea level, compared to 54 % for Europe and 25% for America. The African continent has been raised and lowered at different times in physical history but merely in the great north and south has there been any building up of huge folded mountains. Somewhat the main form of land movement has been the faulting that formed the Red Sea and the Great Rift Valley that is overflowing with Africa’s immense lakes.

For the reason that Africa is a huge and very old flat terrain, it is also a land of swells and basins: the rivers and basins of Niger the Nile, the Volta, the Zambezi and the Congo unfilled into the sea, but those nearby Lake Chad and the wastes of the Kalahari have no such outlets. The whole basin-dented flat terrain falls off, in vertical escarpments, to the slim coastal central that environs the whole continent.

Atlas Mountains of Morocco, air of Niger, Ethiopian high lands, Mitumba Mountains of Congo and Drakenberg mountains are important high altitude areas in Africa. Sahara Desert is great arid and sandy area of this continent and has economic, cultural and political effect on this continent.