South African borders
The borders of South Africa are about 9,000 kilometers long, 5,000 kilometers of which are land borders .
geography
The country has five neighboring states: Namibia with around 970 km, Botswana with around 1,840 km, Zimbabwe with around 250 km, Mozambique with around 490 km, interrupted by the border with Swaziland with around 430 km, and the completely enclosed Lesotho with around 1,100 km . Roughly as long as the land-external borders is the international maritime border of the territorial waters with a coastline of about 2,800 km to the high seas of the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean .
The land border follows partly natural orographic shapes, in particular the Orange River in the northwest to Namibia, the dry rivers Molopo and Nossob in the north to Botswana, and the upper Limpopo in the northeast to Botswana and Zimbabwe, as well as some rivers and watersheds in the Drakensberg to Lesotho, partly it is determined arbitrarily, in particular the straight line of the 20th degree of longitude between Oranje and Nossob in Namibia, in the Gaborone region with Botswana and in the east with Mozambique.
history
The borders of the former Dutch and then British colony were largely created in the age of colonialism in the European race for Africa . In the northeast they follow the borders of the former Boer republics to the Portuguese colony Mozambique . Namibia is the former German South West Africa of the German Empire , whose borders were contractually fixed in 1890. The northern border is an old territorial border of the Batswana , which became a British protectorate in 1885 as Bechuanaland , Lesotho was the Basotho territory , which became the colony of Basutoland in 1868 , and the Swazi empire became a protectorate in 1907.
Today's borders only became binding under international law during the period of independence in the second half of the 20th century, and sometimes only with the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1990.
A special feature of the border is that international nature reserves were created, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier National Park ( Gemsbok and Kalahari Gemsbok National Parks ) in 1999 and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park ( Kruger , Gonarezhou and Limpopo National Parks ) in 2001, with a total of over 400 km of national borders.
Border traffic
The border crossings are listed in the articles for the individual borders (following the border from the north in a clockwise direction):
such as:
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Information on limit lengths differ with the accuracy of the maps and the recording scale ( coast length problem ); exact limit lengths are only available through modern satellite and GIS-based remeasurements. Rounded information follows South Africa in The World Factbook online (updated content).
Map with all coordinates: