High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The African Great Lakes are a series of lakes and the Rift Valley lakes in and around the geographic Great Rift Valley formed by the action of the tectonic East African Rift on the continent of Africa. They include Lake Victoria, the second largest fresh water lake in the world in terms of surface area, and Lake Tanganyika, the world`s second largest in volume as well as the second deepest. The term Greater Lakes is also used, less commonly, for some of them.