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Eastern Africa
Rift valleys, great lakes, and half a billion people
Eastern Africa is the largest and most populous of the UN's African subregions, a sprawl of some twenty countries and territories running from Eritrea on the Red Sea down to Zimbabwe, and out into the Indian Ocean to take in Madagascar, Mauritius, the Comoros, the Seychelles, Réunion, and Mayotte. About 500 million people live here, roughly a quarter of them in Ethiopia alone. It is a category that stretches: it puts Somali camel herders, Malagasy rice farmers, Zambian copper miners, and Rwandan tea growers in the same box, and the only thing they reliably share is a longitude.
The Great Rift Valley cuts the region open from north to south, a tectonic tear that has produced the deep lakes — Tanganyika, Malawi, Turkana — along its floor and the volcanoes that stand on its shoulders, including Kilimanjaro, at 5,895 meters the highest point in Africa. Between the rift's two arms lies Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake and a source of the Nile. Ethiopia's highlands rise into cool, cultivated plateau; Somalia's lowlands run to dust. Madagascar, adrift from the mainland for 88 million years, evolved a flora and fauna found nowhere else. Altitude, not latitude, sets the climate: Nairobi and Addis Ababa sit near the equator and are never hot.
This is where humans began — the Rift Valley's sediments have yielded the oldest hominin fossils found anywhere — and where the modern world keeps rediscovering the region as a growth story. Kenya's mobile-money system reshaped African banking; Ethiopia has been among the fastest-growing economies on the planet even while fighting a civil war in Tigray. Colonial powers left a patchwork of English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili, and the East African Community now knits together Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Somalia, and the DR Congo — which the UN files under Middle Africa. The Horn states are often broken out as their own region, and Zambia and Zimbabwe are just as plausibly Southern African.