Intra- and trans-continental tectonic lineaments and tectonic structures cutting Africa and Gondwana have long been identified by many authors. These structures were initially identified from topography, coast lines and geological data but more recently from remote sensing and geophysical data. Here gravity and aeromagnetic data for Africa and South America have been used to identify, track and model these structures at depth within the crust/upper mantle. The two structures investigated are the West and Central African Rift System (WCARS) and the Kandi Shear Zone (KSZ). WCARSthe nature and spatial extent of the WCARS have been identified using gravity data. In its simplest form, the WCARS consists of a set of strike-slip shear zones linked to extensional rift basins that can be traced as continuous structures from the Atlantic coast of Nigeria to southern Algeria and from the coast of Cameroon to Kenya. The rift system developed as a set of discrete tectonic pulses throughout the Mesozoic at the same time as the Central, South and Equatorial Atlantic Oceans developed into a single unified spreading centre. Each tectonic pulse had a different basin response due to the changing orientation of the plate tectonic controlled displacement field. The African rift basins formed by crustal extension involving brittle failure and ductile flow of the upper and lower crust respectively, resulting in the isostatic subsidence of the surface and rapid infilling of the basins with mainly continental derived sediments. Gravity and seismological studies support this crustal basin model originally proposed by McKenzie. This contribution shows that the evolution of the WCARS is clearly linked to the oceanic plate tectonic processes. New analysis of the fracture zone geometry in the Central Atlantic shows that these rift pulses involving crustal extension, strike-slip faulting, stratigraphic unconformities and short episodes of crustal contraction e.g. Santonian and Maastrichtian events, which can be identified and correlated with changes in the azimuth of the fracture zone geometry. KSZThe second, shorter part of the paper uses predominantly aeromagnetic data to track the KSZ from the Atlantic coast of Benin north into central Algeria before splaying out beneath the Saharan Platform. To the south the KSZ is shown, prior to the formation of the Equatorial Atlantic, to link with the Trans-Brazilian Lineament but its continuation south of Brazil still remain highly speculative.Finally, this review raises new insights and questions that are ideal for future research topics, both in developing the analytic methodologies and their application to other continental scale datasets.