Southern Africa

Four currencies, three of them fixed to the fourth. The South African rand is legal tender in Lesotho and Namibia, whose own loti and Namibian dollar are exchanged one for one with it, and Eswatini's lilangeni holds the same parity under the Multilateral Monetary Agreement of 1992. Botswana is the exception: it replaced the rand with the pula in 1976 and manages it against a basket of currencies rather than a single peg.

Because the union came first. The 1910 agreement covered the Union of South Africa and the three High Commission territories that became Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini, and Namibia joined after independence in 1990. The grouping the UN publishes and the membership the treaty carries have converged on the same names, which is unusual enough among the catalogue's regions to be worth stating.

It depends which definition is in front of the reader. The UN M49 grouping this catalogue follows does not include them, and files all three elsewhere in Africa. The Southern African Development Community does include them, along with Angola, Malawi, Madagascar, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Both usages are current, and this catalogue records the disagreement without settling it.

Botswana, Lesotho and Eswatini, which leaves South Africa and Namibia as the coastal members. Lesotho is the tighter case of the three: South Africa is its only neighbour and encloses it completely, so every road out of the country crosses a single frontier.