The plateau slopes steeply towards a narrow coastal plain. No other continent has such a small proportion of its land below 150 m.
The southern and Eastern parts of the plateau are generally higher than the remaining areas. Three elevated regions are the Ethiopian Highlands, the East African Plateau and the High Veld.
The volcanic massifs of Ethiopia and of East Africa are connecting the rift valley, extending about 4000 kms, between 30E and 40' E. In Ethiopia it is marked by a series of lakes like Lake Abaya, Lake Rudolf etc. A large part of the plateau consists of a number of large basins, separated by divides like Lake Chad, Zaire etc. The rim of the plateau is higher than much of the interior and the river Zaire crosses this in a series of cataracts and waterfalls like Livingstone falls. These divides are residual hills. In the northwest and the southwest are two areas of fold mountains. These are the Atlas Mountains and the Cape ranges. The most Important African rivers are the Nile, the Senegal, Gambia, Volta, Niger (West Africa) the Zaire, Orange (South Atlantic), the Limpopo and Zambezi (Indian Ocean). The African coast is inhospitable as it is either sandy or deltaic or backed by lagoons and swamps with limited, protected headlands. Therefore, the ports are limited and expensive to maintain.
The Nile, the longest river in Africa, after emerging from Lake Victoria, flows for some 4,000 miles before it reaches the Mediterranean. The Congo, 3,000 miles long, drains an area of about 1,500,000 square miles. As much of its basin lies in the equatorial wet belt its volume at certain seasons is much greater than that of the Nile. The Niger (2,300 miles), and the westward flowing Senegal and Gambia, all rise in the Futa Jallon Highlands, The river Zambezi, whose source is not very far from the headwaters of the Congo, has a course of 1,800 miles before entering the Indian Ocean. In South Africa both the Limpopo, flowing into the Indian Ocean, and the Orange, which falls into the Atlantic, are useless for navigation.
About one-third of Africa is an Inland Drainage Region. Lake Chad, into which flows the intermittent Shari, is the centre of a large area of inland drainage lying southeast of the Sahara; lake Ngami of similar region in South-west Africa; lake Rudolf also has no outlet to the ocean.
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