South Africa’s economy is ranked second-largest on the continent, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), behind Nigeria:
It is certainly the powerhouse in the south in terms of its economy (three times the size of Angola’s), military, and population (53 million).
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Because it is located so far south, and the coastal plain quickly rises into highland, South Africa is one of the very few African countries that do not suffer from the curse of malaria, as mosquitoes find it difficult to breed there. This allowed the European colonialists to push into its interior much farther and faster than in the malaria-riddled tropics, settle, and begin small-scale industrial activity that grew into what is now southern Africa’s biggest economy.
For most of southern Africa, doing business with the outside world means doing business with Pretoria, Bloemfontein, and Cape Town. South Africa has used its natural wealth and location to tie its neighbors into its transport system, meaning there is a two-way rail and road conveyor belt stretching from the ports in East London, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban; stretching north through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania; reaching even into Katanga Province of the DRC and eastward into Mozambique. The new Chinese-built railway from Katanga to the Angolan coast has been laid to challenge this dominance and might take some traffic from the DRC, but South Africa looks destined to maintain its advantages.
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In the days of the British Empire, controlling South Africa meant controlling the Cape of Good Hope and thus the sea-lanes between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Modern navies can venture much farther out from the southern African coastline if they wish to pass by, but the cape is still a commanding piece of real estate on the world map and South Africa is a commanding presence in the whole of the bottom third of the continent.
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Nevertheless, every year more roads and railroads are being built connecting this incredibly diverse space. The vast distances of the oceans and deserts separating Africa from everywhere have been overcome by air travel, and industrial muscle has created harbors in places nature had not intended them to be.
In every decade since the 1960s, optimists have written about how Africa is on the brink of prevailing over the hand that history and nature have dealt it. Perhaps this time it is true. It needs to be. By some estimates, Sub-Saharan Africa currently holds 1.1 billion people—by 2050 that may just more than double, to 2.4 billion.
Prisoners of Geography: Africa. I wish that Tim Marshall hadn’t written this exceedingly superficial piece. It calls his credibility into question. South Africa is not a commanding presence at the southern tip of Africa as it no longer has a navy or air force. Regarding the outside world doing business with Bloemfontein, I spent a week there one night. There is no sign of Marxism-Leninism ceasing to be the political direction taken by the entire Subsahara.