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E is for Eswatini

Fast Facts

  • Named for: King Mswati (formerly Swaziland, also KaNgwane after King Ngwane)
  • Long/Lat: 26.3 S/31.3E, 19 hours/ 10,000 miles East of Castro Valley
  • Population: 1.3 million, 20x Castro Valley, concentrated in cities.
  • Size: 6700 sq mi, 370 CVs
  • Avg temp in April: 74 F/21 C, but 50 F at night. Multiple climates.
  • Median household income: $2,800, very poor
  • Ethnicity: 84% Swazi/10% Zulu
  • Main industries: Sugar, agriculture

Eswatini, formerly called Swaziland, is almost an enclave. An enclave is a territory surrounded entirely by another territory. Lesotho—also in South Africa—and San Marino are enclaves. An exclave, by the way, is a piece of a territory stuck inside someone else’s, like if you built your castle walls all around the barn outside my house. The Nakhchivan region in Azerbaijan is an exclave, but we’ve already passed “A.”

How could an enclave—or even just a small country—exist among all the big ones? We saw this before with Andorra: tension. And there is a lot of tension in Eswatini.

Swazi is the Anglicized version of Eswatini. Most of it lies within South African borders, with multiple terrains.
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D is for Dominica

Dominica circled in red, graphic by Aoeuidhtns.
  • Named for: Sunday, the day Columbus sailed by.
  • Long/Lat: 15.2 N/61.2 W, 4000 miles or 8 hours east of Castro Valley
  • Population: 72,000, 1.1 CVs
  • Size: 290 sq mi, 10 CVs (less dense)
  • Avg temp in April: 87 F/23 C phew!
  • Median household income: ~$4,000
  • Ethnicity: 85% Afro-Dominican, 4% Kalinago/Caribe, <1% European
  • Main industries: Small agriculture, growing financial services (offshore banking/tax havens)

Dominica, fortunately, stopped practicing cannibalism. If they ever did, which is doubtful. Even so, historians as late as the 1960s were still tossing off lines like, “By the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the Caribs had almost ceased eating Christian Europeans, for on one occasion all who had dined on a Spanish friar had fallen deathly ill or died.”

Dominica is the fourth small country in my A-Z series, another island and definitely not the last. It was named by Columbus on his second journey to the New World, the first island he sailed by on Sunday, November 3, 1493. Not a very enterprising name, since Dominica means Sunday. The naming conventions here seem particularly uninspired. Columbus also named islands Ferdinanda, Isabela, Juana (their daughter), and San Salvador (Holy Savior). I suppose we should be lucky he didn’t just number them, or Jamaica would be Dieciocho.

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C is for Comoros

Where are the Comoros? Graphic by spesh531.

Fast Facts

  • Named for: jazīra al qamar Arabic something like جَزِيرَة قَمَر Islands of the Moon)
  • Long/Lat: 11.7 S/43.3 E, 10,400 mi East or 10 hrs from Castro Valley
  • Population: 883,000, about 13 CV’s worth
  • Size: 863 sq mi, 57 Castro Valleys.
  • Avg temp in April: 83 F/29 C
  • Median household income: Low, ~$3,000 annually
  • Official languages: Arabic & French (Ethnicity = Comorian, but heavily influenced by the Bantu, Arabic, and French)
  • Main industries: Spice exports; ylang-ylang an essential perfume oil, 80% of world’s supply comes from Comoros

So far, we’ve explored a few places in the Northern Hemisphere, so this is a good time to go south. How about an island chain, off the coast of Southeast Africa?

Graphic courtesy of solarey.net.

The country of the Comoros includes three islands: Ngazidja (Grande Comore), Mwali (Mohéli), and Ndzwani (Anjouan). A fourth island to the southeast, Mayotte, has noticeably different name: it’s French.

What were the French doing there? And, if you notice the Arabic reference to the name al Qamar or al-Qumr, what were the Arabs doing there?

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