My brother is extremely well travelled (though he has never been any further into North America than Mexico). This whole thread has had me giggling because in every list there is somewhere he has lived or been: Indonesia, check, Tanzania, check, Papua New Guinea, check. The one he failed was **Ken001’**s and the first country on that list, Somaliland has strong connections to the city in which I live.
As far as I can tell, none of them are officially countries and they’re all tiny. Probably not quite what the OP was looking for.
Niger gets my vote. I bet most people don’t even realise it’s a country.
I would have said mongolia, but at least if you asked what’s the first thing you think if when you think of mongolia, they’d be able to answer something along the lines of yaks and genghis khan. With niger, even google asks if you meant nigeria.
Totally agree–in fact I’d nominate the DRC as one of the least obscure countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Especially for those of us of an age to remember the Rumble in the Jungle, the batshit-insane Mobutu Sese Seko, and the horrific civil war which deposed him.
For obscure, you want the other Congo–the Republic of the Congo, aka Congo-Brazzaville. But it only has 4 million people, so it doesn’t really qualify as “large and obscure”.
Aha, but did you know their Francophone status is not due to being a former French colony, but a Belgian one? (I guess no Flemish-speaking Walloons made the effort of colonizing the Congolese.)
I did a report on what was then called Zaire when I was in 7th grade, at which time its capital was Kinshasa, and its prinicpal export was copper. “Zaire” was the African name chosen to replace the colonial name of “The Belgian Congo”, and also the name of the currency used to replace the Belgian Franc. Without which assignment I probably would never have learned that Belgium had had a stakehold in the 19th Century era of European imperialism.
Ironically what I could not have told you is that they were now the Democratic Republic of The Congo. I missed that memo.
Wait, what? There are TWO Congos? I think I retroactively got my 7th grade report marked down.
I know it’s not the biggest, but for a moderately sized country I feel like Azerbaijan is unusually obscure for its geographic location. It’s sitting there smack dab next to Iran, we get a lot of oil from it. It’s a majority Muslim country, who appear to have a working government with religious freedoms and everything. (Albeit they recently-ish repealed presidential term limits which set some people on edge). And yet… you never hear about it. Hell, I only know stuff about it because I met someone from there and looked stuff up about it because I realized I knew nothing about it except… it’s next to Armenia, Iran, and Georgia and is on the Caspian sea. If it was in the middle of nowhere I’d be less surprised, it’s the fact that it’s right next to Iran that makes me question it.
I can tell you that Belarus is semi-famous for being the last remaining dictatorship in Europe, and for being contaminated with radiation from Chernobyl.
On the other hand, I couldn’t tell you a thing about Angola.
You might have a point about Madagascar. I just read in another thread that the place is an ecological disaster. Aside from the kids’ movie and some basic geoscience stuff, that was the first I’d heard of it. I’ll read your Ranavalona article when I get a chance.
My vote goes to Kazakhstan, though. It’s the ninth-largest country in the world (bigger than Madagascar, Congo, or Mongolia) and Sasha Baron Cohen was able to get away with saying practically anything about it (including fabricating a new religion based on hawk worship) without fear of reprisal. For its size, that’s amazingly obscure.
No, it was Niger with the (lack of) yellowcake. Or, as Bush called it, in a speech in which his writers must have been desperate to prevent what would have been a tragic mispronunciation, “Africa”.
