South Africa 🇿🇦

South Africa is a country in Southern Africa, one of the 5 entries this site files under that subregion. Its full official name is Republic of South Africa. It has 3 capitals rather than one: Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town.

The land area is 1,221,037 km², which ranks it 26th of the 250 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mali and just ahead of Colombia. Put next to a country most people can picture, it is almost exactly the same size as Mali.

It is home to roughly 64.0 million people, placing it 24th of 250 by population — between France above it and Italy below. Within Southern Africa alone it is the 1st largest of 5 and the 1st most populous.

Spread across 1,221,037 km², that works out at about 52 people per square kilometre, which makes it less crowded than the typical entry on this list. Half the entries in this dataset fall below roughly 90 per square kilometre.

It recognises 11 languages: Afrikaans, English, Northern Sotho, Southern Ndebele, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tsonga, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and Zulu. Northern Sotho, Southern Ndebele, Southern Sotho and Zulu are listed for no other entry in this dataset, which makes them effectively unique to South Africa. Afrikaans, the first listed, is shared with 1 other entry worldwide.

People from South Africa are called South Africans.

Against Africa as a whole it is the 6th most populous of 59 entries, and it accounts for 88% of everyone living in Southern Africa.

Within Southern Africa, South Africa is the most populous of the 5 entries this site lists, and the largest by area as well. Namibia is next in line by population.

Every entry in Southern Africa has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Namibia is the place to carry on.

• 🇳🇦 Namibia
• 🇿🇦 South Africa

Plotted on a globe it falls at 29.0° south, 24.0° east, which puts it in the southern hemisphere, roughly 3,228 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

Follow that same latitude east or west and you reach Australia, Chile and Norfolk Island — places that share its distance from the equator but little else.

Its land neighbours number 6: Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Eswatini and Zimbabwe. The largest of them by area is Namibia, while the most populous is Mozambique. Together those neighbours hold about 60.4 million people.

Unlike its landlocked neighbours it reaches the sea directly, while also sharing land frontiers.

Put next to every other entry on this site, South Africa ranks 26th of 250 by area and 24th by population. That works out at 0.81% of the combined land area of all 250 entries and 0.79% 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 South Africa in the size ordering are Mali at 1,240,192 km² and Colombia at 1,141,748 km², against South Africa's 1,221,037 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. South Africa averages 52 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it thinly settled by global standards — 165th of the 248 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.

South Africa 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, South Africa 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.

It uses the South African rand (R, ZAR). No other entry in this dataset uses it, so the currency is specific to South Africa.

Note that South Africa splits capital functions across Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, so "the capital" depends on which branch of government you mean.

The top-level domain is .za. The international dialling code is +27. Its ISO codes are za and ZAF, which is what most databases and flag files use.

It holds a seat at the United Nations, one of 193 entries here that do. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 250 rather than the familiar 195.