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F is for Fiji

Courtesy Countryreports.co, Fiji is east of Australia. (Islands are not as close together as they may seem.)

Fast Facts

  • Named for: Fiji is the Anglicized pronunciation of the Tongan pronunciation of the indigenous’ name Viti.
  • Long/Lat:  18.1S/178.3 E (almost in the West), 5500 mi, 10 hours west
  • Population: 926,000 (14 Castro Valley’s worth)
  • Size: 7000 sq mi of land (411 CVs) but 75,000 sq mi total territory, 332 islands
  • Avg temp in April: 89 F/31 C, tropics!
  • Median household income: $6000 annually
  • Ethnicity: 57% indigenous Fijians, 38% Indo-Fijians
  • Main industries: Tourism, sugar cane, gold

Fiji is not a particularly small island, compared with others that we’ll see later, however, it is the smallest country beginning with F. It’s actually two big islands, plus 330 other small islands, some with and some without people. Plus, technically, a lot of water in between.

Beaches and mountains on the two largest islands, Viti Levu and Vanau Levu.

We might, perhaps, be tiring of the pronunciation issue. Fiji is called that because that’s what Captain Cook heard the Tongans call it, i.e., the name is not what the people who live there call it. But since their language isn’t ours anyway, they may not care how we butcher their name. They know who they are. Also, it always pleases me to remember that the arrogant colonizer Cook ended up clubbed to death because he opened fire on indigenous Hawai’ians who thought he had given them his boats. He said, “No, I take them back, you savages,” and they said, “Yeah, well you shot one of us, but while you’re reloading your fire stick, we avenge all our island brothers.” *whomp*

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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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