Which country has three capital cities?

South Africa, deliberately - Pretoria is the executive capital, Cape Town the legislative, and Bloemfontein the judicial. It was the compromise that made the Union of South Africa possible in 1910, splitting the functions between the former Boer republics and the Cape Colony so no one place won.

The arrangement is expensive and largely unloved. Parliament sits in Cape Town while the government works in Pretoria 1,400 kilometres away, so ministers and civil servants shuttle between them for months each year at considerable public cost, and proposals to consolidate surface periodically and go nowhere - because moving parliament would mean one region losing something concrete.

The country also has eleven official languages, later twelve with the addition of sign language, which comes from the same instinct. Post-apartheid South Africa was built on constitutional arrangements that deliberately avoid a single winner: multiple capitals, multiple languages, a bill of rights among the most expansive anywhere, and a truth commission rather than trials. Whether that produced reconciliation or impunity is argued about in South Africa more sharply than outside it.