Life in Africa

1. Life in Africa Use your textbook, National Geographic Reading Pamphlet, and your notes to figure out where these 4 people or work in Africa.

2. Which place is it? • Congo Basin Rain Forests • Great Rift Valley • Nile River • Sahara Desert • Serengeti (savanna) • There is 1 location you will not use.

3. Hello, I am a nomadic herder. I live in the ? I am a nomadic herder. I travel from my home, and journey out into a barren land, which is arid or very dry. There is very little water or vegetation. This makes it hard to raise the animals we use to make a living. I must move from place to place in order to find drinking water and grazing land for my animals. I try to move from oasis to oasis. These are places where water can be found. If I do not travel with my herd, the animals will die, and I will lose the only way I have to make a living. There are many salt deposits beneath the sands. This is how I make a living. I travel to the mines in a caravan, which is made up of male family, friends, and our animals. We use camels to carry our supplies throughout the entire trip. They carry the salt from the mines to trading posts or towns. There we can sell or trade the salt for the supplies we need to survive and live. We also use the salt to cook and preserve foods. I do the same job as my ancestors before me; not much has changed. A few use trucks instead of camels, but the life and traditions still remain.

4. Hi, I am geologist. I study the way the earth was formed and how it continues to change. One of the places that I am studying and exploring is in East Africa. This area has formed over millions of years. As the tectonic plates in East Africa move away from one another, it creates a space in between the plates. This space is known as a rift. Constant movement creates cracks or faults in the rock layers throughout the valley. Earthquakes are common. There are even volcanoes. At the sides of the rift are escarpments. These are large and small cliffs that mark the edge of different rock layers, and even the plates themselves. The shifting rock creates a change in the height or elevation of the land. Some areas that are very high are called highlands. These highland areas often have plateaus, which are flat land found in or around the highlands. The plateaus often have enough water and fertile volcanic soil to farm. These lands produce crops such as grains, corn, beans, sorghum, millet, and coffee. Hello, I am a geologist. I study the ?

5. Hello, I am a hunter gatherer. I live in the rainforests of the ? Hello, I live off the land. I use the resources around me on a daily basis to survive. I hunt animals, gather fruits and nuts, fish in rivers, farm small plots of land, and trade with outsiders. The thick dense plant life even offers many types of medicines and remedies to help people. My family, friends, and village use sustainable products so that we do not destroy our surroundings. We have an understanding of how to use our world and not destroy it. Unfortunately, people from the outside world have begun clearing land with machinery for lumber, large farming plantations, roads, and settlements. This is destroying our homes and landscape. The outsiders do not know how to maintain the land and it simply dies out and becomes a wasteland.

6. Hello, I am a farmer. I live along the banks of the ? Hello, I am a farmer. I live in a very dry place. This makes it difficult to grow crops. I must plant very close to a water supply. I work along the banks of a large flowing body of water. The soil here is called silt, which is a fine mineral rich soil perfect for plants. Annual flooding would replace the silt each year, but the building of dams has almost stopped the flooding process. This makes it more difficult to farm too. We must buy chemical fertilizer for the soil versus mother nature doing it for us. This can get expensive. Not all of my neighbors can afford to buy fertilizers. The land can also become too dry. We can not grow enough crops in dry weather, but the reservoir created by the dam does allow us to irrigate the land. So, there is good and bad from the dam. Some that can afford it, have actually transformed the desert into farmland with the irrigation and building up of new soil.