Time in Africa
Africa, the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, spans across six different time zone offsets from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC): UTC−01:00 to UTC+04:00. As Africa straddles the equator and tropics, there is little change in daylight hours throughout the year and as such daylight saving time is currently observed in only one country, Morocco, however it was also previously observed in several other countries.Before the wide adoption of standard time zones, local mean time was widely used in railway time for train timetables and telegraphic time for telegraphy. Local mean time is a solar time that corrects the variations of local apparent time by forming a uniform time scale at a specific longitude; for instance, Liberia observed UTC-0:44:30 instead of an approximate offset such as UTC-01:00. British Rhodesia (at the time administered by the private British South Africa Company) was the first area in Africa to adopt standard time, switching to UTC+02:30 on 1 August 1899 as the previous time standards proved problematic for the railway system. Other countries followed suit, and by 1912, most Portuguese, French and British territories had adopted a standard offset.