Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
NAMES: Malawi, Mali, Malaysia, and Maldives
Let's sort the whole thing out. This is a fairly typical problem. Some countries just sound a lot like some
other countries. And it can be very confusing. Here are four good examples. Very different countries in
different places, but it's difficult to keep them straight.
Malawi
It might have been easier to keep things separate if they kept the old name, Nyasaland. But that
was a vestige of British colonial rule, and this republic in East Central Africa, about the size of the state
of Pennsylvania, peacefully won independence in 1964. Two of its neighbors are Mozambique to the east
and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) to the south. Africa's third-largest lake, Malawi (formerly Lake Ny-
asa), covers 20 percent of the country. Although free of the political strife afflicting other African nations,
already impoverished Malawi has suffered from an influx of refugees from the civil war in neighboring
Mozambique.
Mali
Long before a European set foot on the west coast of Africa, Mali was celebrated in myth as a
land of gold. The
Catalan Atlas
drawn in Europe in 1375 spoke of Mali as a place where gold “grew like
carrots.” In fact, there
was
gold in Mali. A small landlocked country in northwestern Africa on the fringe
of the Sahara Desert, Mali was once the home of a substantial empire based in the eight-hundred-year-old
trading center, Timbuktu. Founded around 1100, it quickly became a commercial center for the trans-Sa-
haran trade because of its proximity to both the desert and the Niger River. The basis of the trade was gold
in exchange for salt carried across the Sahara by camel caravan. By the late thirteenth century, it was the
boisterous capital of the Mali Empire and was home of a major mosque and Islamic scholarly center. In
Timbuktu, trade and learning flourished together as they would soon after in European cities. But so did
the Arab-African slave trade, which became one of Timbuktu's most lucrative businesses. In 1468, Mali
and Timbuktu were conquered by the Songhai, an African-Islamic empire that reached its peak in the late
fifteenth century.
By the midseventeenth century, Mali's glories were finished, as successive invasions destroyed the one-
time empire. The French took control in 1896 and Mali remained a colony until 1960 when it joined Seneg-
al to form the Sudanese Republic, later becoming an independent republic. Like many other northwest
African nations, Mali faces acute shortages of food as a result of drought. The most pessimistic estimates
envision a time when Mali will become uninhabitable as the Sahara Desert continues to creep south.
Malaysia
Shift your view over to Asia. In a somewhat curious grouping, Malaysia is an independent
federation of states with one part, West Malaysia, situated on the tip of the Malay Peninsula—just below
Thailand—a finger of land that juts out into the China Sea; and a second part, East Malaysia, sitting four
hundred miles away on the island of Borneo, the world's third-largest island. Rich in petroleum, rubber,
tin, and agricultural products, Malaysia enjoys one of the highest standards of living in Asia.
Those resources have made Malaysia a rich prize in the past. The Portuguese, Dutch, and British all
had a hand in exploiting Malaysia's wealth. Held by the Japanese during World War II, Malaysia became
a British protectorate in the postwar era. After independence from Great Britain, Malaysia was initially
joined to the nearby Singapore Islands. But a civil war establishing Singapore's independence in 1965 split
the countries. The population is divided between the predominant Malays and a large minority of Chinese
origin. Ethnic fighting between the two groups has led to sporadic violence.
While a large part of the island of Borneo is Malaysian territory, not all of it is. Parts of Borneo joined
Singapore when it became independent. And a small speck of the island (2,220 square miles) became
Brunei, an Islamic sultanate. Most Americans had never heard of Brunei until its sultan, wealthy from the
tiny republic's oil reserves, became a contributor to Colonel Oliver North's Contra-aid charity scheme, ex-
posed during the Iran-Contra scandals near the end of Ronald Reagan's second term.
Maldives
A collection of nineteen coral atolls in the Indian Ocean, the Republic of Maldives lies about
four hundred miles southwest of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). For the residents of the nearly twelve hun-
