A fun personal fact somewhat related to the below: In elementary school, a singer/songwriter named Bill Harley came to perform for us as part of an all-school assembly. His song Zanzibar, on his album “Cool for School,” has stuck in my head for decades. (You can listen to some of it here, and there’s a much longer version on YouTube in two parts, here plus here.) — Dan

You probably can’t find the African country of Namibia on an unlabeled map. (If you can’t, don’t feel too bad — I couldn’t either.) But if you could find it, you’d probably notice that there’s something weird going on with its borders. Let’s not make a guessing game — here’s a map:

That’s Namibia in red. And if you look closely at the northeast corner of the nation, you’ll note something strange — it looks kind of like an arrow is shooting out of it. But that’s no arrow. It’s a space sta— I mean, it’s a panhandle. Let’s zoom in.

Namibia sits on the Atlantic coast of Africa, and its borders are roughly straight lines, with the southern border formed by the Orange River. But the northeast is, well, weird. There’s a thin panhandle in the northeast known as the Caprivi Strip. It extends about 450 km from what would otherwise be the eastern border of Namibia, extending the length of the nation such that it almost borders Zimbabwe. (The Strip ends about 150 meters — less than 500 feet — from Zimbabwe.) At its widest, the Caprivi Strip is only about 100 km from north to south; at its thinnest, it’s only 20 km wide. It’s not something you’d typically bother to ask for if you were outlining your nation’s borders.

But in the 1890s, Namibia didn’t exist as a nation unto itself. It was a German colony known as German South West Africa. At the time, Germany also had a colony on the other side of Africa bordering the Indian Ocean, known as German East Africa. Germany couldn’t get stuff from Namibia to its East Africa colony over land because there were British colonies in the way. So instead, they had to go the long way around — by sea, down the Atlantic coast, around the Cape of Good Hope, and up the Indian coast. And that was long and expensive. Germany wanted a quicker way to the Indian Ocean, and believed that the Zambezi — the fourth-longest river on the continent — could solve that problem. And the map below suggests they were right.

The idea was simple. If Germany could obtain the land now known as the Caprivi Strip, it could extend German South West Africa’s borders to the Zambezi, then use the river to reach the Indian Ocean. All they had to do was acquire that land from Great Britain, and that turned out to be really easy — they included it in a trade as part of a larger treaty that sent the island of Zanzibar to England.

Everyone seemed happy — until the Germans realized their error.

If you look carefully at that last map, you’ll see that Victoria Falls sits on the Zambezi, just past the border of Namibia. That’s one of the world’s largest waterfalls, and as you can imagine, it’s not conducive to ship traffic. As Condé Nast Traveller notes, “the Zambezi River is difficult to navigate along the Caprivi Strip due to rapids. Then, 40 miles east of Caprivi, it becomes extremely non-navigable due to a 355-foot drop.” The Germans bought themselves a dead end.

The borders, though, didn’t revert after this discovery — territorial agreements typically don’t come with a “backsies” clause. So more than a century later, Namibia extends eastward, even though it looks really weird on the map.

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And thanks! — Dan

Today’s Bonus fact: The Mad Max movie series takes place in a fictional post-apocalyptic world, but, of course, was filmed in the real world. Most of the movies were filmed in Australia, but the 2015 movie Mad Max: Fury Road couldn’t be filmed there because the weather got in the way. The Sydney Morning Herald explained: “unusual rainfall saw the normally barren landscape bloom into life - not a great look for a post-apocalyptic wasteland.” There aren’t a lot of other barren wastelands in the world, but Namibia fit the bill with its vast, sparsely populated desert landscapes. So production moved there. Fury Road is probably the most prominent film to come out of Namibia as a result.

From the Archives: The World’s Shortest War: Guess where it happened?