What makes East Africa a region

Where the line against the Horn falls

The United Nations Statistics Division files Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia in the same Eastern Africa block as Kenya, Zambia and the Indian Ocean islands. This catalogue keeps those four in a group of their own, the Horn of Africa, and files the rest here. The M49 standard it borrows from states that its groupings are a statistical convenience carrying no political meaning, and the division made here is a filing decision on the same terms. Two territories in the UN block are absent from the roster altogether, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the French Southern Territories, so neither has a record to file.

The two bodies that use the name

The East African Community has eight partner states. Six of them sit here: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. The DR Congo, which joined in 2022, is filed under Central Africa, and Somalia, a full member since March 2024, is filed under the Horn. The Southern African Development Community reaches further north than its name suggests, counting Comoros, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe among its members. Tanzania holds a seat in both. Whether a country here reads as eastern or southern therefore depends on which body is asked, and the page records the overlap instead of resolving it.

The countries that are not sovereign

Two of them are governed from Paris. Réunion has been a French overseas department since 1946 and Mayotte since March 2011, after a referendum in March 2009 in which about 95% of votes favoured the change. Both use the euro rather than a currency of their own, and neither holds a seat in the African Union or the United Nations. Mayotte is claimed as well as administered. When the Comoros archipelago voted on independence in 1974, France counted the ballots island by island and Mayotte returned a majority for remaining French; the Comoros holds that the vote was taken by one territory and that Mayotte left with it. General Assembly resolutions have supported the Comorian reading, and France treats the question as closed by its own referendums and constitution. Both positions are recorded here, and neither is settled here.

What the members carry

Every sovereign state issues a currency of its own, so nothing here corresponds to the shared franc of West and Central Africa. Official languages run in overlapping sets rather than one: English across most of the mainland, French through the islands and the Great Lakes, Swahili in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, Portuguese in Mozambique, and Arabic in the Comoros. Mozambique and Rwanda both joined the Commonwealth without a British colonial past, in 1995 and 2009. Clock time runs from two hours ahead of UTC in the west to four hours ahead in the islands.