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Many Americans think that Africa is one country. We do not do a great job teaching geography in this country. I know this because when I taught International Relations and Comparative Politics I always had to pull down the map and point out to my students that those individual countries are really sovereign territories and that there is no country of Africa but there is a continent of Africa with independent countries. I promise you that this conversation took up a good portion of a class with about 25% of the class telling me I was wrong and that their text book was wrong.
I drank a good amount at the begining of the semester.
I do think that part of the confusion is that in the US we call the states, well, states. So when you introduce a Kenya as a State, they think state = Kansas so Kenya is the same as Kansas meaning that there is an entire country of Africa. My problem is that we would have this conversation about Africa after we defined a state, country, nation and so they should not have that confusion.
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