East Africa - Indian Ocean

Well, if I wanted geography blogging to be a regular Monday event, I fell behind. I did not get in a mediation yesterday either. And it is getting late tonight. But I'm trying. I had formatted the graphics with the maps when I realized I had omitted the flags, and since I not only love flags but they help me recognize and remember nations, I went back and added them in. Time-consuming process.


Tonight we go to East Africa. More specifically, with the exception of Ethiopia we will be looking at coastal and island nations, reserving the inland countries of East Africa for another day.
From the close-up above you can visualize our path this evening. I will start with Eritrea and then head south along the coast to Mozambique, then head out to sea and circle about so that our path will be roughly counter-clockwise. Mayotte is a French island complex that will not be covered separately.

No commentary about the countries this round. Just give yourself a chance to ponder their outlines. You may click on any map to see more detail. Most maps are taken from the United States State Department website.









Well, a little commentary here. Réunion is French, so the official flag is the tricolor of France. Various local flags have been proposed in the past couple of decades and I show three main contenders here. If you go to the Wikipedia site for Réunion, you will see yet another flag (for the region) but that design has a copyright on it and I decided to leave it alone. Réunion is the outermost locale of the European Union and, being East of Europe, it was there that the euro was first used for currency.



I chose this region because it has been in the news. In today's World Watch (below) we had headlines involving Kenya (on its own) and Tanzania and the Comoros. Glancing at it again, I was intrigued and so just looked at the French article.

Mohamed Bacar organized local elections on the Island of Anjouan and defied both the government of the Comoros and the African Union. This is why Tanzanian troops joined the African Union ("UA" in French) forces heading to Anjouan to deal with this rebellion.

Now you know, and so do I. And we all know where the Comoros are and how close they are to Tanzania.
--the BB