Namibia 🇳🇦

Namibia is an independent state in Southern Africa, and a member of the United Nations. In formal use it is Republic of Namibia. Windhoek is the capital.

By land area it covers 825,615 km², which ranks it 36th of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Pakistan and just ahead of Mozambique. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Mozambique.

Around 3.0 million people live there, placing it 137th of 249 by population — between Armenia above it and Lithuania below. Measured only against its own subregion, it is 2nd of 5 in size and 2nd in population.

Its reference point sits at 22.0° south and 17.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 2,449 km from the equator, in what geographers would call tropical latitudes.

It is one of the countries that the Tropic of Capricorn crosses. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Paraguay, New Caledonia and Réunion.

4 countries share a land border with it: Angola, Botswana, South Africa and Zambia. The largest of them by area is Angola, while the most populous is South Africa. Together those neighbours hold about 125.7 million people.

With both a coast and land borders, it has the trade options a landlocked country does not.

Density comes out at around 3.7 people per square kilometre, which makes it very thinly populated. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

It recognises 9 languages: Afrikaans, English, German, Herero, Khoekhoe, Kwangali, Lozi, Ndonga and Tswana. Herero, Khoekhoe, Kwangali, Lozi and Ndonga are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to Namibia. Afrikaans, the first listed, is shared with 1 other entry worldwide.

Someone from Namibia is a Namibian.

Inside Africa it places 41st of 59 by population, and it accounts for 4.1% of everyone living in Southern Africa.

Namibia does not have the South African rand to itself. It is one of 5 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is ZAR, and the others include listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in ZAR travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. English is listed for 91 entries here, Namibia among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

Zoom in from the world to Southern Africa and Namibia sits 2nd of 5 by population and 2nd by area. Its immediate company in that ordering is South Africa just above and Botswana just below, which is a more honest comparison set than a global league table.

South Africa is the largest of the group by population, and every entry in Southern Africa has its own page here if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time.

• 🇿🇦 South Africa
• 🇧🇼 Botswana
• 🇿🇦 South Africa

Put next to every other entry on this site, Namibia ranks 36th of 249 by area and 137th by population. That works out at 0.55% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 0.037% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Namibia in the size ordering are Pakistan at 881,912 km² and Mozambique at 801,590 km², against Namibia's 825,615 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Namibia averages 4 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it among the emptiest places on the list — 236th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

More than one currency circulates: Namibian dollar (NAD) and South African rand (ZAR). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to Namibia.

Websites there use the .na domain. To phone it from abroad you dial +264. Standard country codes: na and NAM.

Windhoek is the seat of government and the answer most quizzes are looking for.

Namibia is one of the 192 UN member states in this dataset. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.