Random Country in Africa

How this list was compiled: The 54 countries are the African entries in the United Nations M49 standard (https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/overview/) that are UN member states, and the five regions are M49's own: Northern, Western, Eastern, Middle and Southern Africa. M49 also lists six areas in Africa that are not countries (Western Sahara, Réunion, Mayotte, Saint Helena, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the French Southern Territories); they are never drawn, and the four with a settled population are kept under optInItems. Populations are the World Bank's 2025 mid-year totals (indicator SP.POP.TOTL, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL, last updated 2026-07-13, used under CC BY 4.0) and are rounded on the cards. Capitals were checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_capitals, which is where the January 2026 move of Equatorial Guinea's capital from Malabo to Ciudad de la Paz comes from (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciudad_de_la_Paz). Official languages were checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages_by_country_and_territory and each country's own article: Mali (2023), Burkina Faso (2023) and Niger (2025) no longer list French as official, Eritrea names no official language and Mauritius names none in law, though its government works in English and French, so Mauritius sits under both language chips. Landlocked countries are the 16 African members of the UN list of landlocked developing countries, flagged in M49. The territories left out of the draw were checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_list_of_non-self-governing_territories, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayotte, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9union and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena, and the African Union's 55 members, the Sahrawi Republic among them, against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union. The counts in the page copy (6, 16, 18, 9 and 5 countries per region, 16 landlocked, 19 with French and 23 with English official, five under both, the largest and smallest populations) are computed from this dataset. Outlines are drawn from Natural Earth (https://www.naturalearthdata.com/, public domain), each scaled to fill its own box, so they are not to a common scale. Natural Earth draws borders as they are controlled on the ground, so two outlines were redrawn to the borders the UN recognises by joining or leaving out Natural Earth's own pieces: Morocco stops at its southern border and leaves out Western Sahara, which M49 lists as a separate area, and Somalia includes the north-western arm that Natural Earth draws apart as Somaliland. Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe and Seychelles have no outline because at this size the islands are only dots. Ivory Coast is Côte d'Ivoire in UN usage, and Tanzania, Gambia and the two Congos carry their short English names here. All checked 2026-09-18. Licence: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for the population figures (World Bank Open Data). The country list and region names follow the UN M49 standard: the names and codes are facts, the UN's own pages are copyright United Nations (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/copyright, checked 2026-09-18) and none of their text is copied here. Natural Earth map data is public domain. Selection, wording and outline drawings are own work