South Africa

REGION: Southern Africa
CAPITAL CITY: Pretoria (legislative capital: Cape Town)
POPULATION: 47,208,000
LAND AREA: Twice the size of Texas

With Nelson Mandela's 1990 release from prison, the repeal of the last apartheid laws and the unbanning of political parties in South Africa and, finally, the country's first free elections in April 1994 ― South Africans emerged from more than a century of minority oppression and entered the new era of majority rule. Today, South Africa is a middle-income, emerging market with an abundant supply of natural resources; well-developed financial, legal, communications, energy and transport sectors; a stock exchange that ranks among the 10 largest in the world; and a modern infrastructure supporting an efficient distribution of goods to major urban centers throughout the Southern African region. Unemployment, however, remains high. And serious economic problems linger from the apartheid era, especially poverty among historically-disadvantaged black South Africans. As elsewhere in Southern Africa, the Republic of South Africa has been hard-hit by HIV/AIDS. South Africa is at the southern tip of the continent of Africa and includes the Prince Edward Islands.