Map of Central and South Africa Countries

Dec 02, 2025 0

Southern Africa, the southernmost region of the African continent, comprises the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Eswatini (Swaziland), Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The island nation of Madagascar is excluded because of its distinct language and cultural heritage.

Map of Africa with Southern Africa Highlighted

Geography and Climate

The interior of Southern Africa consists of a series of undulating plateaus that cover most of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana and extend into central Angola. Contiguous with this are uplands in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Coastal mountains and escarpments, flanking the high ground, are found in northern Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, and along the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. Coastal plains abut the Indian Ocean in Mozambique and the Atlantic in Angola and Namibia.

The Kalahari Desert forms the central depression of the Southern African plateau. Its elevation rises to the Great Escarpment, which flanks the plateau in an almost unbroken line from the Zambezi River to Angola. Southern Zimbabwe and much of South Africa are within a region of scrublands and grasslands known as the veld. To the southeast of the veld is the Drakensberg range, which includes the region’s highest peak-Lesotho’s Mount Ntlenyana, at 11,424 feet (3,482 metres).

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.

Southern African climates are seasonal, ranging from arid to semiarid and from temperate to tropical. The seasonality is an important control on plant growth and a regulator of river flows. Droughts are common in much of the region.

Rivers and Drainage

The region is generally drained eastward toward the Indian Ocean, a pattern exemplified by the largest rivers, the Zambezi and Limpopo. The Zambezi is the longest river in the region, and its catchment includes much of Angola, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The only major river flowing into the Atlantic Ocean is the Orange, which drains parts of South Africa, Lesotho, and Namibia.

Zambezi River

Wildlife and Conservation

The semiarid plains and plateaus that cover much of the region contain animals commonly associated with the East African plains-e.g., antelopes, gazelles, zebras, elephants, and the big cats. However, different animals are found in the coastal woodlands of South Africa and in the desert regions to the north and northwest. Many habitats have been extensively modified by agriculture, thus restricting the ranges of certain species that were formerly more widespread.

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. At the beginning of the 21st century, several transfrontier parks were opening, including Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the first transnational park, and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, among the largest parks in the world.

Africa ReWilded | A Story About 21st Century Wildlife Conservation | by Zeyba Untamed | South Africa

People and History

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. Khoisan speakers, who have inhabited the region for millennia, have now been displaced in many areas by Bantu speakers. People of European ancestry began migrating to the region in the mid-17th century; they now constitute a sizable minority in South Africa and a much smaller population in Zimbabwe.

The history of Southern Africa cannot be written as a single narrative. Shifting geographic and political boundaries and changing historiographical perspectives render this impossible. Research into local history in the late 20th and early 21st century has presented fragmented historical knowledge, and older generalizations have given way to a complex polyphony of voices as new subfields of history-gender and sexuality, health, and the environment, to name but a few-have developed.

People of South Africa

Archaeological and historical inquiry has been extremely uneven in the countries of the Southern African subcontinent, with Namibia the least and South Africa the most intensely studied. Divided societies produce divided histories, and there is hardly an episode in the region’s history that is not now open to debate. This is as true of prehistory as of the more recent past.

The uncertainties of evidence for the long preliterate past-where a bone or potsherd can undermine previous interpretations and where recent research has subverted even terminology-are matched by conflicting representations of the colonial and postcolonial periods. In Southern Africa, history is not a set of neutrally observed and agreed-upon facts: present concerns colour interpretations of even the remote past. For all the contestants in contemporary Southern Africa there has been a conscious struggle to control the past in order to legitimate the present and lay claim to the future. Who is telling what history for which Africa is a question that needs constantly to be addressed.

Read also: Resilience of Women in CAR

Early Humans and Stone Age Society

The controversies in Southern African history begin with the discovery of a fossilized hominin skull in a limestone cave at Taung near the Harts River north of Kimberley in 1924, followed in 1936 by discoveries in similar caves in the Transvaal (now Limpopo and Gauteng provinces) and Northern Cape province, in South Africa. Other significant hominin finds were made in the Sterkfontein Valley (in Gauteng province) beginning in the 1940s.

For some time the significance of these finds and their relationship to the evolution of early humans were unappreciated, perhaps because the finds could not be dated, and stone tools-long regarded as the defining characteristic of early humans-had not been found with them. 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.

The australopithecines who roamed the highland savanna plains of Southern Africa date from about three million to one million years ago. There can be little doubt that for hundreds of thousands of years Southern Africa, like eastern Africa, was in the forefront of human development and technological innovation.

Acheulean industry appeared during the Early Stone Age (c. 2,500,000 to 150,000 years ago) and was characterized by the use of simple stone hand axes, choppers, and cleavers. First evident about 1,500,000 years ago, it seems to have spread from eastern Africa throughout the continent and also to Europe and Asia during the Middle Pleistocene Epoch, reaching Southern Africa about 1,000,000 years ago; Acheulean industry remained dominant for more than 1,000,000 years.

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.

With the emergence of Homo sapiens, experimentation and regional diversification displaced the undifferentiated Acheulean tool kit, and a far more efficient small blade (also called microlithic) technology evolved. Through the controlled use of fire, denser, more mobile populations could move for the first time into heavily wooded areas and caves. Wood, bark, and leather were used for tools and clothing, while vegetable foods were also probably more important than their archaeological survival suggests.

The Khoisan

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.

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. In the colonial period, destitute Khoekhoe often reverted to a hunter-gatherer existence; herders and hunters were also frequently physically indistinguishable and used identical stone tools.

Regional Groupings in Africa

Africa can be divided into several meaningful markets based on geographic, economic, and cultural factors. Here's a brief overview of some of these regions:

North Africa: Includes countries like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
East Africa: Comprises countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Somalia.
West Africa: Includes Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, and others.
Central Africa: Consists of countries like Cameroon, Chad, Central African Republic, and Congo.
Southern Africa: Includes South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, and others.

These regions are often grouped based on commonalities such as language, colonial history, and economic ties.

Key Data for Southern Africa
Country	Area (square miles)	Population (2005 est.)
Angola	481,354	15,941,000
Botswana	224,607	1,764,000
Lesotho	11,718	1,867,000
Malawi	45,747	12,884,000
Mozambique	309,496	19,792,000
Namibia	318,696	2,031,000
South Africa	471,445	44,344,000
Eswatini (Swaziland)	6,704	1,029,000
Zambia	290,586	11,669,000
Zimbabwe	150,872	13,781,000