Geography African Bodies of Water

Africa's second-longest river, it flows in a counterclockwise arc some 2,900 miles to the Atlantic Ocean. The ______ _______ principal sources are the Lualaba, which rises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga province, and Zambia's Chambeshi River. Boyoma Falls (formerly Stanley Falls), a section of seven cataracts near Kisangani, marks the beginning of the _______ ______ proper. Forming the Malebo Pool near the world capitals of Kinshasa and Brazzaville, the _____ ______ flows past Angola's Cabinda exclave as it enters the ocean. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness depicts the often cruel conditions the ______ basin endured as a Belgian colony.

Congo River

Formerly Africa's fourth-largest lake, its surface area has been reduced by over 90% since the 1960s due to droughts and diversion of water from such sources as the Chari River. The lake is at the intersection of Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria, but most of the remaining water is in Chad and Cameroon. Lake Chad is very shallow and has no outlet, so seasonal rainfall causes large fluctuations in its area.

Lake Chad

Africa's third-largest lake by area and the southernmost of the Great Rift Valley lakes, it is wedged between the nations of Malawi, Tanzania, and Mozambique. Fed by the Ruhuhu River, its lone outlet is the Shire River, a tributary of the Zambezi. _____ _______ contains hundreds of species of endemic fish, especially cichlids.

Lake Malawi

Africa's second-largest lake by area, it is also the second-deepest in the world, surpassed only by Lake Baikal. Due its extreme depth (over 4,700 feet), contains seven times as much water as Lake Victoria. A source of the Lualaba River, it is shared by Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia. On its Tanzanian shore is the town of Ujiji, at which Henry Morton Stanley "found" Dr. David Livingstone in 1871.

Lake Tanganyika

Africa's largest and the world's second-largest freshwater lake by area, lies along the Equator and is shared among Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania. Located on a plateau between two rift valleys, its lone outlet is the ______ Nile, a precursor of the White Nile. Named by the British explorer John Hanning Speke after Queen Victoria, the introduction of the predatory Nile perch in the 1950s has caused environmental degradation, sending many native cichlid species into extinction.

Lake Victoria

The largest man-made lake (by area) in the world, _____ ______ was created by the construction of Ghana's Akosombo Dam across the _____ _____ in the 1960s. The lake covers the area where the Black Volta and White Volta rivers formerly converged. The Akosombo Dam can provide over a gigawatt of power, enough to supply nearby aluminum smelters utilizing the energy-intensive Hall-Héroult process and the needs of the rest of the country.

Lake Volta

Rising as the Crocodile (or Krokodil) River in South Africa's Witwatersrand region, it forms the Transvaal's border with Botswana and Zimbabwe, then crosses through Mozambique. Deforestation in Mozambique contributed to massive flooding of the _________ in 2000. Perhaps the most famous description of the _________ comes from Rudyard Kipling, who in "The Elephant's Child" referred to it as "the great grey-green, greasy __________ River, all set about with fever-trees."

Limpopo River

Africa's third-longest, it flows in a great clockwise arc through Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Nigeria before entering the Gulf of Guinea. The medieval Mali and Songhai Empires were centered on the ______, whose course was mapped by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park in the 1790s. In Nigeria, it receives the Benue River, its main tributary. The massive Niger Delta, known for its fisheries, wildlife, and petroleum, is an area of increasing social unrest.

Niger River

________ ________Usually cited as the longest river in the world, the Nile flows about 4,132 miles in a generally south-to-north direction from its headwaters in Burundi to Egypt's Mediterranean Sea coast, where it forms a prototypical delta. Over 80% of the ______ flow comes from the shorter Blue _____ headstream, which arises from Ethiopia's Lake Tana and meets the longer White ______ — whose headwaters include Lake Victoria — at Khartoum. At the first of the _____ six cataracts is the Aswan High Dam, which forms Lake Nasser and greatly reduces the annual floods.

Nile River

The ___________ flows for about 1,000 miles from central Angola, through Namibia's Caprivi Strip, and into the Kalahari Desert of Botswana. There, rather than flowing into the sea, it terminates in a massive inland swamp known as the Okavango Delta, an area that — especially during the wet season — teems with wildlife in an otherwise inhospitable region.

Okavango River

Weaving across southern Africa, the _______ rises in eastern Angola, passes through Zambia, flows along the borders of Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, crosses through Mozambique, and enters the Indian Ocean's Mozambique Channel near Chinde. Namibia's Caprivi Strip was created to allow access to the _______. The Cabora Bassa and Kariba Dams form large lakes of the same name. The most spectacular feature of the ________ is Victoria Falls, or Mosi-oa-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders"), which is over a mile wide and is the largest waterfall by flow rate in Africa.

Zambezi River