Southern Africa

Southern Africa in the UN's reckoning is a tight club of five: South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Eswatini. It is the smallest of the African subregions by population, about 73 million people across 2.7 million square kilometers, and the most economically lopsided, with South Africa accounting for roughly ninety percent of the region's output and nearly ninety percent of its people. Anyone who has used the phrase Southern Africa in conversation probably meant something wider — Zimbabwe, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola — and the Southern African Development Community includes all of them. The UN's five-state version is the narrow, statistical one.

The land is high and dry. Most of it sits on a plateau above 1,000 meters, ringed by an escarpment that drops sharply to narrow coastal plains, and rainfall declines steeply toward the west until it stops altogether in the Namib, the oldest desert on earth. The Kalahari, a sand basin rather than a true desert, fills Botswana and spills into Namibia and South Africa; the Okavango River dies in it, forming an inland delta that draws game from across the region. The Drakensberg escarpment lifts Lesotho into an alpine world where snow falls, and Thabana Ntlenyana, at 3,482 meters, is the highest point in Africa south of Kilimanjaro.

Gold and diamonds pulled the modern region into being, funding Johannesburg out of empty veld and drawing migrant labor from a thousand miles away. Apartheid ended in 1994, but the spatial geography it engineered — townships far from work, land ownership skewed by race — has proved stubborn, and South Africa still posts one of the world's widest income gaps. Botswana, by contrast, turned its diamonds into stable growth and is often cited as the continent's quiet success. Lesotho and Eswatini are enclaves, wholly or almost wholly surrounded by South Africa and economically tethered to it. Drought, an aging electricity grid, and water scarcity are the shared problems now.

• Botswana
  Diamonds, the Kalahari, and the watery miracle of the Okavango country in region
• Eswatini
  Africa's last absolute monarchy in the highveld hills country in region
• Lesotho
  The mountain kingdom in the sky, surrounded by South Africa country in region
• Namibia
  Where the world's oldest desert meets the Atlantic country in region
• South Africa
  The rainbow nation at the continent's southern tip country in region
• Drakensberg
  Southern Africa's great basalt escarpment, the Dragon Mountains defining feature
• Kalahari Desert
  A semi-arid sand basin of southern Africa, more savanna than empty waste defining feature
• Africa
  The world's second-largest continent and humanity's birthplace located in