The king of the small African country bordering South Africa and Mozambique has announced that the country is returning to its pre-colonial name: Swaziland is now eSwatini. Nearly 50 years after the country's independence from Britain, the country is reclaiming its traditional name. geographical.co.uk/geopolitics/geopolitics/item/2708-swaziland-renamed-the-kingdom-of-eswatini

"Pegged as the most ambitious infrastructure megaproject of all time, China's One Belt, One Road initiative (OBOR) will stretch from the very edge of East Asia to East Africa and Central Europe, connecting nearly two thirds of the world's population" via a "continuous network of highways, railways, ocean routes and ports." This map shows the projected routes. www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/one-belt-one-road.html

This geo-graphic shows from which countries the U.K. imports black tea.  It may surprise many to see African, rather than Asian, countries heavily represented on the list. (Some countries, like the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Poland, do not grow the tea but process it for re-export.) www.statista.com/chart/13062/where-does-the-uks-tea-come-from/

"The question that dominates my waking hours now is: When Day Zero arrives, how do we make water accessible and prevent anarchy?" says the mayor of Capetown, South Africa, in a recent National Geographic article on Capetown's water crisis. [As I noted in a different post a few weeks ago, Capetown is expected to have to turn off its public water supplies in two months (more or less, depending on the success of water conservation efforts) because the water level in the city's reservoir is approaching, functionally, zero. The army is on standby to maintain order.] This article from the BBC (UK) looks at 11 other major cities likely to run out of drinking water (Cairo? London? Bangalore? Sao Paulo? Beijing? Istanbul?): www.bbc.com/news/world-42982959

This map reveals one of the lesser-known stories of African politics: movement towards less authoritarian governments over the last 30 years.  ("Anocracy" is a term from political science and human geography that refers to a blend of democracy and authoritarianism.) i.redditmedia.com/kiSNwvnU1px5h9o-A-SgvQYFiueSHbObtlCjfkQQY6o.png?w=1024&s=addac291648a93926051c0a739d6fc59

"As new powers rise and the formerly hegemonic West loses relative power, we are entering the first period in human history in which modern technology will be combined with a chaotic international arena, in which no single actor or group of actors is capable of imposing order."  This article looks at the growing military importance of the tiny African country of Djibouti (formerly French Somaliland) and the possible consequences of having so many rival powers operating military bases in close proximity to one another: "Strategically placed at the entrance to the Red Sea, commanding a large percentage of the trade and energy flows between Europe and Asia, Djibouti is home to more foreign bases than any other country." www.politico.eu/blogs/the-coming-wars/2018/01/the-most-valuable-military-real-estate-in-the-world/

This map introduces Africa by climate, comparing regions of the continent to better-known tourist locales around the world.
i.redditmedia.com/lSVSVplRjq4zeswM0bMuIVJHDZD0Cs7i5KXCsTDugug.jpg?w=721&s=27f7b357c60df366238d600acc9dfbc2

In less than three months, Cape Town, South Africa, may become the first major city to, literally, run out of water. Following three years of unprecedented droughts, Cape Town has announced it may be forced to turn off the city's municipal water system on or about April 22, requiring residents to line up at water distribution points across the city, under armed guard, to collect a maximum daily allotment of 6.6 gallons of water per day. time.com/5103259/cape-town-water-crisis/

This map considers the dominant Y-DNA haplogroup (passed from father to son) across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. brilliantmaps.com/europe-dna-borders/

The 2017 hurricane season is over, but this NASA video shows how this year's storm systems delivered not just wind and rain but also airborne particles, including sea salt and dust from the Sahara. www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1eRp0EGOmE

From The Economist (UK): "In 2016 two-fifths of people in sub-Saharan Africa had mobile phones. Their rapid spread has beaten all sorts of odds. In most African countries, less than half the population has access to electricity. In a third of those countries, less than a quarter does. Yet in much of the continent people with mobile phones outnumber those with electricity, never mind that many have to walk for miles to get a signal or recharge their phones’ batteries. Mobile phones have transformed the lives of hundreds of millions for whom they were the first, and often the only, way to connect with the outside world. They have made it possible for poor countries to leapfrog much more than landline telephony. Mobile-money services, which enable people to send cash straight from their phones, have in effect created personal bank accounts that people can carry in their pockets. By one estimate, the M-Pesa mobile-money system alone lifted about 2% of Kenyan households out of poverty between 2008 and 2014." www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2017/11/daily-chart-5?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/inmuchofsubsaharanafricamobilephonesaremorecommonthanaccesstoelectricitydailychart

Did a volcano in Sicily bring down a dynasty in Egypt? That's the thesis of new research, based on a comparison of volcanic ash in ice cores and Nile water level records. Major volcanic eruptions are found to disrupt African monsoon patterns, delivering less rain to the Nile and its tributaries. A powerful eruption by Etna in 44 BC likely contributed to the drought, famine, and resulting instability in Egypt over the next several years, making Egypt more vulnerable to Rome's involvement in its internal affairs and leading to the eventual overthrow of its last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra. www.sciencenews.org/article/how-volcanoes-may-have-ended-dynasty-ptolemy-and-cleopatra

Land use is a volatile issue in Kenya (as seen in the country's recent and now invalidated election) and across Africa. The continent's degrading soil conditions and mushrooming populations -- from 230 million in 1950 to 630 million in 1990 to more than 1.2 billion today and possibly 4 billion by the end of the century -- are on a collision course. This map, from The New York Times, shows where the problems are particularly acute. To read the NYT story, see www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/world/africa/africa-climate-change-kenya-land-disputes.html

When Americans think of international refugees, they tend to think of Syrians because that's what's been in the headlines. However, with less fanfare, people fleeing conflicts in Africa have become the majority of the world's refugees. Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, and Chad are among the top 10 countries currently hosting the most foreign refugees. Earlier this month, Uganda accepted its 1 millionth refugee from South Sudan. Care to guess how many refugees the U.S. has admitted from South Sudan in the last year?  I'll post the answer later today.  www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-40959953

~~~
*According to data collected by the State Department's Refugee Processing Center, the U.S. admitted 216 refugees from South Sudan between Aug. 1, 2016 and July 31, 2017.

A months-long civil protest, focused primarily in the mountainous region of northern Morocco known as the Rif, has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. Protesters in Rif are objecting to police brutality, but this is just the latest chapter in Rif's estrangement from the rest of Morocco. Not only is the region mountainous, it is historically Berber, not Arab, and was a Spanish, not French, colony prior to independence in 1956, putting it at a geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and economic disadvantage when the country was re-unified. Even though Rif has a relatively small population, it has produced most of the Moroccan immigrants to Western Europe. This map shows the former colony of Spanish Morocco and the independent city of Tangier with, outlined in red, the once-aspirational Republic of Rif. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Rep%C3%BAblica_del_Rif.svg/2000px-Rep%C3%BAblica_del_Rif.svg.png

Advocates of democracy have been studying "islands of stability" within conflict zones for clues about how to promote elected representational government while respecting local traditions and preserving existing borders. Case in point: Somalia has been a failed state for 25 years, but the semi-autonomous northwestern part of the country known as Somaliland (green on the map below) has a population of 4.5 million people with their own currency, coast guard, courts, and elections. Based on their research in Somaliland, the authors of this article share three observations that may bear relevance for other hot spots from Afghanistan to Syria to Yemen. (1) It can be better to reinforce regional authority instead of trying to support (or create) a strong central state; (2) traditional government by elders can be blended successfully with democracy; and (3) "statehood" can accommodate a range of self-government situations without outright secession. www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/07/18/as-the-u-s-gets-more-involved-in-somalia-beware-these-three-fallacies

The world's population is now more than half urban, but as you might imagine this is not true uniformly. This cartogram shows where the world's rural populations reside: the greater the distortion, the more people living in rural areas; the darker the green, the greater the proportion of the population that is rural. www.viewsoftheworld.net/?p=5398

This unusual map compares the GDP of the Los Angeles metro area to Africa. Each section of Africa on this map has a nominal GDP equivalent to that of Los Angeles County ($700 billion). The map notes population numbers as well.  i.redditmedia.com/Honw58HoDssT5f2HIw7gBL1qVkT3TJTspNJ-knyM5NA.jpg?w=769&s=e386e14e1962b813f502c04b8e48fa4d

The integration of big data in real-time mapping is a new tool in the fight against wildlife poaching.  Here is one example from a recent National Geographic article:

"It’s searingly hot in Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, and the ceiling fan ticks above a wall-mounted touch screen displaying a map with icons of elephants and rhinos scattered throughout the area. Selvam Velmurugan presses a finger on one of the elephant icons, and an information window pops open above it. 'These are live animals roaming the reserve as we speak,' he says. If one of the animals wanders past a border and into a human settlement, he explains, Lewa's managers are sent an alert on their phone so they can react immediately. 'It’s like we have a virtual data fence surrounding the reserve. We’ll know exactly where and when the animal has crossed by taking one look at the screen.' ... In Lewa, the system brings together in a single interactive viewing map GPS readings of animal movements, radio and vehicle trackers to follow anti-poaching teams in real time, camera trap photos, surrounding human settlements where poachers are likely to originate, weather conditions, and more. In this way it gives managers an integrated view of pretty much everything they need to know, minute-by-minute, in what may be a sprawling protected area. ... [T]he tool also has the potential to anticipate poaching incidents before they happen. His team is now feeding data into the system from past poaching incidents in Lewa, such as time of day, day of week, season, vegetation at the time, and rainfall. By crunching all this information, DAS will come up with potential sites where poaching is more likely to take place on any given day."  news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/03/wildlife-watch-data-poaching-wildlife-trafficking

Western Sahara and its Sahrawi people have been in the news lately. But what is Western Sahara anyway? Western Sahara is a region along the Atlantic Ocean claimed by Morocco and bordered by Morocco, Algeria, and Mauritania. It had been a Spanish colony (and may be shown as "Spanish Sahara" on older maps). However, when other European countries were under pressure to give up their colonies after WWII, Spain, governed by its long-time military dictator, Francisco Franco, did not. It was not until the month Franco died, in November 1975, that Spain finally agreed to relinquish its control of Western Sahara. Morocco and Mauritania immediately claimed portions of Western Sahara for themselves, over the objections of the native Sahrawi people. Morocco eventually won out, and tens of thousands of Sahrawi continue to live in refugee camps in Algeria, which has been a key sponsor of the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi resistance movement fighting for Western Sahara's independence. Western Sahara is the most populous territory on the United Nation's list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. c8.alamy.com/comp/GA4ER8/western-sahara-political-map-with-capital-laayoune-national-borders-GA4ER8.jpg

These two maps, from Oxford University's Malaria Atlas Project, show the impact of focused efforts on eradicating the dominant form of malaria in Africa, Plasmodium falciparum. The red areas show high incidence of infection; the blue areas show low incidence of infection. From 2000 to 2015, P. falciparum infections fell by 40%, which translates into roughly 663 million fewer clinical cases of malaria. www.map.ox.ac.uk/

To better appreciate how lightly populated much of North Africa is, this map shows the Nile River valley and the major population centers on Morocco's Atlantic coast together account for half the region's population.  http://68.media.tumblr.com/a48a10c48b4a58f65a70c73b31a4098e/tumblr_o1ab967Mob1ucqp0so1_500.png

The Congo River forms most of the border between the Republic of Congo (on the north/west side of the river) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (on the south/east side of the river). Last month geographers announced they have mapped a section of the countries' shared Congo River basin that contains the largest tropical peatland ever discovered, an area larger than England or New York State. Peat is one of nature's primary forms of carbon sequestration: scientists estimate that although the newly mapped peatland accounts for only 4% of the Congo River basin, it contains as much carbon below ground as the trees and plants of the other 96% above ground. Put another way, the Congo peatland contains enough carbon that, should it be released by fires or drainage for agricultural use, it would equal two decades' worth of U.S. carbon emissions.  now.howstuffworks.com/2017/01/23/largest-tropical-peatland-congo

This interactive video maps the cross-Atlantic slave trade from 1545 to 1860. Many Americans don't appreciate that only 3-4% of Africans sold into slavery were destined for the U.S.: the vast majority were sent to Brazil and the Caribbean, where the indigenous population had been wiped out. Each black dot crossing the water is a slaving ship; you can pause the video and click on any dot to learn about the ship's origin, destination, flag country, number of enslaved Africans aboard, and its history in the slave trade. 
www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html

What do you do when an elected leader loses an election and still won't leave? That's been the question in the tiny African country of Gambia for the past six weeks.  Yahya Jammeh, a former military officer who became president of Gambia in 1994,  lost to Adama Barrow in the December 1 election. But then, citing election "irregularities," Jammeh refused to step down. Gambia's neighbors in West Africa took the unprecedented step of deciding to take a stand for democracy. West Africa's economic cooperation body, ECOWAS, oversaw the inauguration of Mr. Barrow, at the Gambian embassy in Senegal, and over the weekend succeeded in brokering the peaceful departure of Mr. Jammeh. (Gambia is the slender country surrounded by Senegal on this map of ECOWAS members: www.capacityplus.org/technical-brief-2/sites/technical-brief-2/files/fig1-tb2-larger.jpg)