southern african countries

It is bordered by Egypt to the north, the Red Sea, Eritrea, and Ethiopia to the east, South Sudan to the south, the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west and Libya to the northwest. South Africa. Most of Southern Africa’s early agricultural communities shared a common culture, which spread across the region remarkably quickly from the 2nd century ce. Coverage of the region’s physical and human geography can be found in the article Africa. Its successor in the southwest was Torwa, with its centre at Khami; in the north it was replaced by the Mutapa state. French Colonies : Algeria. Farther north the 14th-century site of Ingombe Ilede (near the Zambezi-Kafue confluence) probably also owed its prosperity in copper and gold—and its social stratification—to the rise of the east coast trade. These countries are Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar, Seychelles, and Mauritius. The relationships established among hunters, herders, and agriculturalists over more than 2,000 years of socioeconomic change ranged from total resistance to total assimilation. The Black peoples of Southern Africa—the overwhelming majority of the region’s population—can be divided into speakers of two language families, Khoisan and Bantu. As in many parts of the world, changes in technology seem to mark a shift to the consumption of smaller game, fish, invertebrates, and plants. The region is rich in valuable minerals deposits. Initially, however, distinctions between early pastoralists, farmers, and hunter-gatherers were not overwhelming, and in many areas the various groups coexisted. Madagascar – An Eastern Africa Country in the UN Scheme or system. Lesotho 4. Individually, South Africa is, unsurprisingly, the strongest economy among all the countries. This delineation views Southern Africa as the region of Africa that is situated to the south of the River Zambezi and Cunene. Patrilineal and polygynous cattle-keeping farmers thus had immense advantages over communities that lacked these new forms of wealth and social organization. Swaziland. Overall, 180,000 people with HIV died of TB-related deaths in 2018. Where possible, they exploited marine resources, planted cereals, and worked iron; cattle and long-distance trade were insignificant. Participants strongly believed that the media should be free from state control and entrusted to professional journalists who, in areas such as Nigeria and southern Africa, have maintained a courageous commitment to press freedom. Some of the major ethnic South Africans include Zulu, Basotho, Venda, Xhosa, … These changes were, however, neither simultaneous nor evenly spread. Engraving of a rhinoceros, an example of San rock painting and engraving in South Africa. UN Women has presence in 13 of these countries: Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, South Africa Multi-Country Office (MCO) and Zimbabwe. Southern Africa, as the name suggests, is the southernmost part of Africa and includes a number of countries aside from the country of South Africa. The Eastern and Southern Africa region (ESAR) comprises of 22 countries. There are 54 countries in Africa today, according to the United Nations. The first evidence of pastoralism in the subcontinent occurs on a scattering of sites in the more arid west; there the bones of sheep and goats, accompanied by stone tools and pottery, date to some 2,000 years ago, about 200 years before iron-using farmers first arrived in the better-watered eastern half of the region. These patterns are also evident in the recent archaeological record, but it is unclear how far they can be safely projected back. Equatorial Guinea. The full list is shown … An interesting case is South Africa. Due to the Bantus, several ethnic groups such as the Zulu, Swazi, Northern Ndebele, the Shona people, Southern Ndebele, and other groups ended up speaking Bantu languages. Madagascar. Home to many cultures, the region was initially occupied by native African tribes like the San, Pygmies, and Khoikhoi. By the second half of the 1st millennium ce, farming communities were living in relatively large, semipermanent villages. Most lived in small-scale societies, based on kinship, in which political authority was exercised by a chief who claimed seniority by virtue of his royal genealogy but who may have risen to power through his access to mineral resources, hunting, or ritual skills. Shifting geographic and political boundaries and changing historiographical perspectives render this impossible. Coastal mountains and escarpments, flanking the high ground, are found in northern Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Wealthy homes were those with large numbers of women, and even before the advent of the Atlantic slave trade it had become customary for men to take slave wives who would work in exchange for protection. Further changes were made after the colonials arrived in Africa. Thus, the Dutch, and many subsequent social scientists, believed they belonged to a single population following different modes of subsistence: hunting, foraging, beachcombing, and herding. There are some two dozen large national parks and game reserves in the area as well as many smaller ones, most located in the open or partially wooded plains. Some of the earliest fossils associated with Homo sapiens, dated from about 120,000 to 80,000 years ago, have been found in South Africa at the Klasies River Mouth Cave in Eastern Cape, while at Border Cave on the South Africa–Swaziland border a date of about 90,000 years ago has been claimed for similar Middle Stone Age (150,000 to 30,000 years ago) skeletal remains. Contemporary Bantu-speaking peoples of Southern Africa are genetically very similar to the Late Stone Age people of Africa; their close relationship also is evidenced by the presence of Khoisan “click” sounds (in Xhosa, Zulu, and Shona) and loanwords in southeastern Bantu and from the iron and stone tools, cattle and wild animal bones, pottery, and ostrich-eggshell beads on early farming sites such as Broederstroom in east-central South Africa and Hola-Hola in Mozambique. Archaeologists argue about how easily groups made the transition from a way of life based on hunting and gathering to one centred on herding or agriculture, but an increasing number of excavations suggest that these boundaries were often permeable. Some of the criteria may divide the continent into four (by doing away with Central Africa) or they may include the Horn of Africa as its own region and end up with six subdivisions. Djibouti. Their evolution into the species Homo habilis and then into the species Homo erectus—which displayed the larger brain, upright posture, teeth, and hands resembling those of modern humans and from whom Homo sapiens almost certainly evolved—is still fiercely debated. Southern African climates are seasonal, ranging from arid to semiarid and from temperate to tropical. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. The main exports include diamonds, platinum, gold, and uranium. Most of the time, in the nation of South Africa, a different geographic definition is used to represent the region of Southern Africa. These contacts diminished with the rise of Islam, and the east coast became part of the Indian Ocean trading network. While such countries produce less food than is required for sustaining the country, they are able to supplement their reserves through imports because of favorable political situations, economic growth, and competent leadership. The consumption of foods that have high calories and generally unhealthy is also a sign of food insecurity in the urban areas. Linguistic evidence suggests that the languages of the later Khoekhoe (the so-called Khoisan languages) originated in one of the hunter-gatherer languages of northern Botswana. Since that time, similar but datable discoveries in eastern Africa as well as discoveries in the Makapansgat Valley in South Africa have made it possible to place the South African remains in sequence and identify them as australopithecines, upright-walking creatures who are the earliest human ancestors. Here is an alphabetical list of all countries in South Africa: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, and South Africa. The landscape of the region is a bit varied with some areas being forested while others are deserts or simple grasslands. Evidence from Botswana and Namibia suggests that many contemporary hunter-gatherers recently have been dispossessed and that their present way of life, far from being the result of thousands of years of stagnation and isolation, has resulted from their integration into the modern world economy; this hardly provides an adequate model for reconstructions of earlier societies. Reconstructed replica of the Taung skull, a 2.4-million-year-old. In the early centuries ce the northeastern African coast was well known to the traders of the Greco-Roman world. Obviously, the situation is not the same in all the countries. Although many scholars attempt to deduce the nature of Late Stone Age societies by examining contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, this method is fraught with difficulties. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. The large number of distinctive Late Stone Age (30,000 to 2,000 years ago) industries that emerged reflect increasing specialization as hunter-gatherers exploited different environments, often moving seasonally between them, and developed different subsistence strategies. The 10 Southern African countries. Southern Africa: Countries - Map Quiz Game: South Africa is one of only two perforated countries in the world. Similar pottery has been found stretching from northeastern Tanzania and coastal Kenya through southern Zimbabwe into eastern South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. It seems likely, however, that a movement of immigrants into Southern Africa occurred in two streams and was part of a wider expansion of populations speaking Bantu languages that ultimately derived from the Niger-Congo languages of western Africa some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. The landlocked countries of Southern Africa include Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, and Malawi. For discussion of the physical and human geography of individual countries in the region and of their postcolonial history, see Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Yet the reasons for adaptation are equally unclear and the model equally controversial. Some communities settled near exceptionally good salt, metal, or clay deposits or became known for their specialist craftsmen. In Namibia the coastal margin includes the extremely dry Namib desert, which, in the south, merges eastward into the great sandy expanse of the Kalahari. South Africa Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) However, the following 5 countries, which are in East Africa, according to the UN definition, are included in the Southern quiz … Many habitats have been extensively modified by agriculture, thus restricting the ranges of certain species that were formerly more widespread. UN Women also has a Somalia Program has recently established … In Southern Africa, history is not a set of neutrally observed and agreed-upon facts: present concerns colour interpretations of even the remote past. Their homes, diet, and ostentatious burials are in stark contrast to those of the common folk, whose dwellings cluster at the foot of the sites where they probably laboured. In the UN scheme, there are only five countries in the region namely Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland. The South African Government has also arranged with donor countries to engage directly with NGOs on relevant projects. By the time coastal peoples were first encountered by literate European observers in the 15th century, many were the recognizable forebears of Southern Africa’s contemporary population. South Africa will open up travel to all countries in an effort to boost the tourism and hospitality sectors, despite having the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases on the continent. Destination South Africa, the southernmost African country is bordered by Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe and it surrounds the small Kingdom of Lesotho. By Ferdinand Bada on August 23 2018 in World Facts. When Europeans first rounded the Cape of Good Hope, they encountered herding people, whom they called Hottentots (a name now considered pejorative) but who called themselves Khoekhoe, meaning “men of men.” At that time they inhabited the fertile southwestern Cape region as well as its more arid hinterland to the northwest, where rainfall did not permit crop cultivation, but they may once have grazed their stock on the more luxuriant central grasslands of Southern Africa. An overview of the landscape of Southern Africa. Professor of the History of Southern Africa, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London; Director, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1983–93. Expectedly, the region has places that are mountainous, coastal regions, and low-lying regions. A recent study that was done in eleven cities in the region showed that only 17% of the households were deemed to be secure in matters relating to food security. During this time early humans also developed those social, cognitive, and linguistic traits that distinguish Homo sapiens. The Limpopo and Save rivers were early arteries of the trade from the southernmost Arab trading posts, with African intermediaries initially bringing ivory and perhaps animal skins, and later copper and gold, to the coast. The South Africa MCO covers the Southern Africa Customs Union countries ie Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. Cattle were also an ideal medium for exchange, and the increase in herding necessitated increased specialization and the extension of trading networks. “Western-stream” Bantu speakers were initially more familiar with fishing, oil palms, and the cultivation of vegetables than with cereals or cattle. In the Quirimbas Archipelago, which is a 250km stretch of coral islands, mangrove-covered Ibo Island has colonial-era … Southern Africa, southernmost region of the African continent, comprising the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In the 8th century the presence of Persian potsherds at Chibuene on the coast of Mozambique and snapped cane glass beads at various locations—Kruger National Park, Schroda on the Limpopo, Botswana, the Zimbabwe plateau, and the Mngeni River near Durban—all attest to the influence of this long-distance trade in the region and its early integration into the Indian Ocean networks. In part the controversy may reflect regional differences. Where cattle were meagre, societies were matrilineal and usually matrilocal; men still depended on women for agricultural labour and for bringing young men and children into the household. Droughts are common in much of the region. 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