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Why Nobody Wants This Part of Africa

Africa

By Wayne Published 10 months ago 9 min read
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Why Nobody Wants This Part of Africa
Photo by Lina Loos on Unsplash

today there's at least 195 countries that exist in the world and at face value it seems like there isn't anywhere to go besides the world's oceans if you want to get away from all of them but that isn't really true if you zoom in close enough and over to the right areas you'll see that about one percent of Earth's land area remains unclaimed by any country entity or person and theoretically this one percent of Earth's land is a lawless uninhabited and wild Zone outside of the control of humanity for all intents and purposes these lands are basically on the same legal footing as the surface of the Moon and yet their actual places right here the you can go and visit right now however most of all this unclaimed land is located right here in Antarctica it's called Mary Birdland and while it's about the same size as Mongolia basically just a frozen Wasteland right now like the rest of Antarctica and well that's the gist of why nobody has ever bothered enough to claim it Over 99 percent of Earth's unclaimed land is here, which is boring because nobody lives near it and Antarctica wasn't discovered until 200 years ago. The other unclaimed lands are more interesting because despite being a lot smaller, one is located on the continent where humanity began, which is odd because you'd think somebody would have gotten around to it already. It's located right here in Africa and it's called beer toil despite being sandwiched between Egypt in the north with a population of 100 million and Sudan in the south with a population of

neither government claims beer to wheel and neither does any other country person or entity on the planet not a single person lives here and it's about the size of Luxembourg in Europe because nobody lives here there aren't any roads towns or any development whatsoever it's literally just an empty luxembourg-sized plot of land in the middle of the Sahara Desert full of absolutely nothing but sand and rocks since there isn't any government and there aren't any laws it means that you can basically just show up here and then do whatever you want including attempting to create your own country and many have already tried that in 2014 an American Dad from Virginia showed up and claimed to have established the kingdom of North Sudan in beer to wheel with a flag that was designed by his kids a few months later after that that's a couple Russian guys showed up planted a Russian flag and claimed to have established the creatively named Kingdom of Middle Earth and then in 2017 an Indian guy showed up and claimed to have established the kingdom of Dixit after his last name and planted his own flag all three of these guys's claims to Bear to wheel overlap with one another and there's been some great Twitter squabbling between them in the past and I plan on joining them in the future by claiming beer to wheel as the kingdom of real-life lore or the krll for short of course I have never visited beer to wheel but that hasn't stopped dozens of people from claiming it before in the past and it doesn't stop you from claiming it yourself down in the comments either with your own clever name the point being is that anybody can claim beer to wheel for themselves but actually enforcing those claims is rather difficult because a it's an empty plot of desert in the middle of the Sahara and there aren't any roads leading to it from anywhere else so getting there is quite challenging B it's a hostile desert in the middle of the Sahara with no infrastructure or development and therefore living there is almost impossible and C in order to be a recognized country you actually need a permanent population and infrastructure like airports or roads to get that permanent population there which is hard if you don't have any resources maybe after Jeff Bezos conquer space he'll come after beer to wheel and turn it into his own personal Little Kingdom but how is this even possible in the first place why does this relatively large chunk of unclaimed land on Humanity's original starting continent even exist well for that as with all things we can thank the British and go back a couple hundred years to see why in the early 19th century Egypt was theoretically a vassal of the Ottoman Empire but they were pretty much just completely autonomous and doing their own thing like invading and conquering Sudan without necessarily getting any approval from the Ottomans in Constantinople the Egyptians conquered and then ruled sedan themselves for decades and not exactly being fans of this occupation the local Sudanese started a rebellion against them in the 1870s by that point the Suez Canal had already been built in Egypt and that gave the British Empire a huge Transportation shortcut between their possession of India and the British Isles themselves in British interests in Egypt were growing bigger and bigger with every passing day eventually by 1882 the British were worried that Egypt was falling out of their sphere of influence and determined to hold on to the Suez Canal at all costs and by any means the British invaded and transformed Egypt into a virtual British protectorate but by doing this the British had also just thrust themselves into the Rebellion that was going on in Sudan against the long-standing Egyptian rule because the Egyptian Rule now also meant British rule but what was supposed to just be a quick and easy adventure to shut down the rebellion in the Sudan turned into an 18-year-long Quagmire for both the British and the Egyptians Sudan was completely overrun by the rebel forces and remained that way for 18 years until 1898 when it took a combined British and Egyptian Army equipped with modern machine guns and artillery to reconquer it afterwards Egypt remained effectively a British protectorate while Sudan was transformed into something called a condominium basically just a colony but it was jointly ruled by both the Egyptian and the British however it really all just basically meant that Britain now controlled both countries since Egypt co-ruled Sudan but they were also just a protectorate of Britain at the same time and so the British decided that they needed to draw a border to finally settle where Egypt ended and Sudan began the problem with that was like with every other border the British came up with on foreign continents and between foreign peoples was that a they didn't have satellites and B they didn't really understand or care what they were actually doing the year after the British and Egyptians re-conquered Sudan they came up with this political boundary between the two colonies a straight line across the 22nd parallel of latitude however this line sucked because it was arbitrarily drawn by some guy in London thousands of miles away and if cut directly through land that nomadic tribes used on both sides and it was thought that the tribe who used this area was more culturally Egyptian well the tribe who used this area was more culturally Sudanese so in a very rare instance of the British Empire realizing that their initial border didn't exactly make very much sense they came up with a revised zigzaggy administrative boundary

In 1902, that was separate from the political border drawn up three years earlier, which gave this familiar beer to wheel area to Egypt and this bigger area called the haleb triangle to Sudan. For decades, this didn't matter because Egypt and Sudan were both effectively ruled by the British, but by 1956, the global attitude toward colonialism had greatly shifted. Option A gave them halaib and Sudan beard to wheel, while option B gave them beer and Sudan beard. Hawaii chose Sudan's opposite. option A was the 1899 line, which gave them beer to wheel and gave Egypt halahib, while option B was the 1902 line, which gave them halaip and gave Egypt beer to wheel. In effect, Sudan and Egypt were forced into a unique legal situation where they had to choose between either halaib or beer to wheel, but not both. Looking at the map, it's obvious why they wanted halaib. Sudan and Egypt jointly managed Hale Eve like a condo. This status quo never really became a big issue until 1992, when the worst possible thing for the region's geopolitics happened: oil was discovered in the territorial waters in the Red Sea directly next to Halaib. Whoever controlled Halaib would also control these potential oil reserves, and neither Sudan nor Egypt were in the mood to share. Sudan tried to get ahead of Egypt by granting exploration rights to a Canadian petroleum company. Egypt declared that illegal and then used the 1899 border to occupy Halaiib. Sudan retaliated by alleged attempting to assassinate Egypt's then president in 1996 while he was visiting Ethiopia, and Egypt retaliated by expelling all Sudanese police and officials from Halaib in 2000. With tensions at an all-time high, Sudan withdrew all of their officials from the area, and it's been de facto controlled by Egypt ever since, even though Sudan continues to claim it and shows it marked as part of Sud. Egypt has since tried to strengthen their claim on the land by investing more than 60 million dollars into infrastructure development projects and just a couple years ago in 2019 they also attempted to sell oil and gas exploration rights in the waters of halaeb in the Red Sea to which Sudan made a bunch of legal threats about so yeah that's why beer to wheel exists as a lawless no man's Zone in between them if either Sudan or Egypt moved in to occupy beer to wheel it would immediately mean 4 forfeiting their claim to the much more valuable Hala Eve triangle and neither side has ever been willing to make that sacrifice for more than 65 years now and in no other country could really bother claiming it either because well like I said earlier it's a tiny undeveloped unpopulated and landlocked plot of empty desert full of nothing but sand and rocks in the middle of two other countries but if you're still determined to travel to beer to wheel anyway and claim your own country here you're going to need a few things like roads and airports for transportation along with farms and restaurants to feed your population in order to attract that population with your restaurants you need to actually be able to create some delicious food so people will actually want to come and in order to do that you need to actually have some good cooking equipment and the best place to get some of that is over at Maiden look I really used to hate cooking because prepping and cleaning my tools was tedious and annoying while the food I made wasn't really as good as what I could just get at a restaurant but eventually I got more serious about my cooking and I invested in a collection of professional quality cookware from maiden like this stainless steel frying pan and it's completely made all the difference when I put it on my stovetop it retains a superbly even heat distribution that translates into beautifully even golden Browning on all of my Meats the handle is perfectly designed to stay cool even when on a stove top so I can easily pick it up when I need to and place it in the oven and it's incredibly easy and fast to clean it all up when I'm done this one pan has over 10 000 5 Star reviews by other people on their website so I really seriously can't recommend it enough but besides this pan made in has tons of other kitchenware and cookware for everything you need ranging from knives pots bakeware plates and more and they're all sourced from the finest materials from world renowned Craftsmen and all without any markup so rather than buying a cheap 20 pan from Walmart that you're gonna end up having to replace every year you should invest in one instead that's made for life and backed by a lifetime guarantee and it'll also just make your cooking so much more enjoyable fast and good If you're serious about investing in your own kitchen, now is the best time because made in is offering 15 off your first order when you click the button on screen now and use the code rll at checkout, which is the best discount they're offering anywhere. subscribe for more information

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About the Creator

Wayne

Am wayne, a writer from kenya specified in research and article writing. I love doing research on natural things, football updates and updating what going on in the world

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