.africa

Generic top-level domain

RDAP + WHOISsold by 2 registrarsPlaces

Register: $25.49first year
Renew: $32.69a year
Transfer: $25.49to move it
Registrars: 2quoting it
Lookup: RDAP + WHOISanswers for it
DNSSEC: Signed1 DS record in the root
Level: Secondmybrand.africa

Check a name

One command, straight against the registry — no account, no page to load.

Name

Fills the command and the registrar links below in with your own name. The page is static — nothing is looked up here, and nothing you type leaves the browser.

ds mybrand --tld africa

Add --where for the registrars and the registry's rules, --registry for the server that answered, or --all-info for everything at once.

What it costs

Every published quote in the bundled table, cheapest registration first. The figure ds prints beside .africa is the mean of the registration column — $25.49, which undercuts 69% of the 881 priced TLDs.

Registrar	Register	Renew	Transfer
namecheap.comcheapest	$12.98	$15.88	$12.98
101domain.com	$37.99	$49.49	$37.99
Mean — what `ds` prints	$25.49	$32.69	$25.49

List prices in US dollars, bundled with the binary and last regenerated 2026-09-09. Promotions, ICANN fees, taxes and premium names all move the real number, and a registry may decline to sell you the name at all. See Prices.

Where to register

2 registrars in the bundled table publish a registration price for .africa, which is evidence they sell it — nobody prices what they cannot sell. Cheapest first, exactly as ds mybrand --tld africa --where prints them.

Put a name in the box above and each link becomes that registrar's search for mybrand.africa, where it publishes one. This list is what the price table knows, not the whole market — see Where to register.

Who can register

No eligibility rule is on file for .africa, which is not the same as a promise that it is open: the list is hand-maintained and covers the restricted TLDs a registrar is likely to offer you. Check the registry's own page before counting on a name. 81 TLDs do carry a rule — see Who can register.

How `ds` answers for it

RDAP first, WHOIS second — the same order for every TLD. .africa has both, so RDAP answers and WHOIS is the fallback if it does not.

RDAP: https://rdap.nic.africa/rdapFrom IANA's bootstrap, refreshed when this page was built. The lookup is https://rdap.nic.africa/rdap/domain/mybrand.africa — a 404 means the name is free.
WHOIS: whois.nic.africaQueried on port 43, from the bundled whois.json. The name is called free when the reply contains no information was found matching that query — text matching, which is why RDAP is preferred where it exists.

ds mybrand --tld africa --registry prints whichever of these answered. If a bundled WHOIS host has gone stale, IANA is asked who serves .africa today. See Accuracy notes.

The registry

From IANA's delegation record for .africa. .africa is a generic TLD.

Run by: ZA Central Registry NPC trading as Registry.AfricaBased in South Africa. Delegated 2017-02-11, record last updated 2025-08-05.
Registry site: nic.africaWhere the registry documents .africa — its rules, its accredited registrars, and any launch phases. Not a shop: registries sell wholesale to registrars, not to you.
Published services: rdap.nic.africa · whois.nic.africaWhat the registry itself tells IANA it runs. They agree with what ds asks.
Name servers: coza1.dnsnode.netns.coza.net.zans4.dns.net.zaThe 3 authoritative servers for the .africa zone — what the root delegates to. Nothing ds queries directly; they are what makes a registered name resolve.

What it is

Derived from the root zone and ICANN's registry list — each one is a fact with a source.

generic IANA Root Zone Database types it "generic"
new-gtld ICANN delegated it on or after 2013-10-23, when the 2013 round opened — see delegated

What it is for

Our reading, not a fact — nothing in the root zone says what a TLD means. Hand-maintained in tld-categories.json.

Places Cities, regions, and parts of the world.

In the root zone

The delegation itself, read out of the root zone — serial 2026090900, on 2026-09-09. The registry section above is IANA's record of what .africa was delegated to; this is what the root actually answers with when a resolver asks it where .africa lives.

Delegated to: ns.coza.net.za206.223.136.2002001:43f8:30::200
ns4.dns.net.za77.72.229.2512a01:3f0:0:314::53
coza1.dnsnode.net194.146.106.742001:67c:1010:18::53
The 3 name servers the root hands out for .africa, with the glue addresses that come with them — every one of them answers over IPv6. None of this is what ds queries: these servers know which names exist, not who registered them.
DNSSEC: Signed — 1 DS record in the root
key 51115RSA/SHA-256 · SHA-25653248D4D36757A31135688EFA42C2C307591A7989523E6CD9CC2441414349481
Each one is a fingerprint of .africa's own signing key, published by the root and signed with the root's key — which is how a resolver that trusts only one key can prove an answer under .africa came from its registry and was not tampered with in transit. It says nothing about who owns a name or whether one is free.

Ask the root yourself — no registry involved, and the same records this section was built from: dig +norec @a.root-servers.net africa. NS and dig +norec @a.root-servers.net africa. DS.