As Salvatore Natoli (a leader in geography education) once said, "In our society we unconsciously equate size with importance and even power." This is one reason why many people have underestimated the true size of Africa relative to places that they view as more important or more powerful.
Just a reminder
It is incredible big, but unfortunately most of the north area is cover by the big Sahara and most of the are is typically unfertilized.
As we can see, there's a little overlapping here and some empty spots but it's pretty accurate. The United States and China are in the top 5 largest countries of the world list and they still fit in the 2nd largest continent of the world, Africa. I'd like to see the size comparison between Africa and Russia. I did some research on that and it turns out that Russia is a little over half the size of Africa, maybe the size of the combination of the United States and China.