Reading history: Maps, map makers and map-making

Map of Africa, Frederick De Wit, 1675 screenshot from Harvard Africamap

         Scholars have pointed to the importance of historical maps as sources for the history of early Africa, as well as for charting the West’s evolving knowledge and engagement with the continent. An unknown number of maps of Africa, both printed and in manuscript form, was produced by Europeans, particularly after the 15th century when the Portuguese first began exploring and trading along the coast, initiating centuries of ever expanding commercial contact between merchants in both continents. (Baesjou, 1988)
         Yet the breadth of these maps, held in archives mostly in Europe and North America, has scarcely been tapped by historians and historians of art for the insights into the changing presence and influence of local polities over time, locations of trading centers, and shifts in political structure. (Baesjou, 1988). Before the profusion of European maps of Africa in the 15th century—Italian and Portuguese mapmakers were dominant in this early period—the western image of Africa had followed that created by Claudius Ptolemy, an astronomer and geographer who lived in Egypt in the second century. (Stone, 1995) 
     Portuguese and Italian-made maps of the 15th century, refashioned this old model with data and observations from sailors who visited the African coast. But as the expansion of European trading companies grew in the 17th century, Dutch mapmakers became prominent as Holland, at war with Portugal since 1602, was home to two of Europe’s largest overseas traders, the Dutch East India and West India companies. It is in this context that this map I posted by the Dutch mapmaker Frederick was published in 1675. [Screenshot shown above].
        Continental interiors depicted on these maps are scarcely defined, as they were little understood by sailors who remained aboard ship or traders who rarely ventured beyond the coast. The De Wit map, for example, shows a profusion of well-defined openings of rivers along the coast running south from the mouth of the “Senega” river. The scale of these openings is large in relation to that of the interior. The Senega is depicted as running inland to connect to the Niger river in a straight line across the breadth of West Africa, emptying finally to a lake (Borno Lacus) in the far east.
       A profusion of place names stretches across the interior regions depicted on this map, along with drawings of animals, and the steeple-shaped symbol that may indicate the presumed location of mosques. There is no visual representation of people or of cities. In light of Baesjou’s emphasis on the continued importance of the classical maps, it is interesting to note here the use and placement of regional names such as Nigritarum, Lybia and Guinea.
       By contrast, the Delisle map of 1722, shows many more place names and mosque locations than De Wit as well as indicates mountain ranges. It shows the Senegal river as separate from the Niger, although both still run in a straight line across West Africa. 

Map of Africa, by Guillaume Delisle, 1722. Screenshot from Harvard Africamap

       There is no indication on this map of the Mali Empire (unlike on the De Wit map 50 years earlier), but it shows a large area covered by the Pays des Mandingues (Manding country) and the kingdom of Tombout or Timbuktu. Both De Wit and Delisle show the Cape Verde islands as very large in relation to the continent, an indication of more activity there in this period than in inland areas.
       Beyond entreaties for scholars to more rigorously use and interrogate historical maps as primary sources, Thomas Bassett has argued for the utility, particularly for those interested in the precolonial period, of analyzing mapmaking by Africans and influences of geographical understanding exchanged between Africans and Europeans at this early period. Bassett defines maps as “social constructions whose meaning lies as much in their making as in the interpretation of constituent elements.” (Bassett, 1998) He explores various types of African mapmaking (cosmographic, mnemonic, etc.) in various media--such as those maps indicating a divine spatial order replicated in the layout of a village or city--and thinks about them as rhetorical devices used to reflect or imagine a given social order. 
         In one example, Bassett discusses a map-making practice among the Bozo, a fishing people of the upper Niger river, recorded by the French ethnographer Marcel Griaule. Each year, children learned to draw maps of local surface and underground water sources as a means to control this vital resource. These maps were drawn on the ground and taught in a such a way as to instill in children an awareness of Bozo ancestors and of their management of water resources (Bassett, 1998)
         As imaginative representations, European made maps of the period indicate how variously “Africa” was being imagined by them in ways distinct from the Africans living there. It would be interesting to read forms of maps created in the Manding region, should any produced in the 17th or 18th centuries be extant, in relation to European maps of the region. What might a comparative study of these competing “sign systems” as Bassett refers to them reveal about historical change at this time?

Works cited:
Rene Baesjou. “The Historical Evidence in Old Maps and Charts of Africa with Special Reference to West Africa” History in Africa, vol. 15, (1988), p.1-83
Jeffery C. Stone. A Short History of the Cartography of Africa, Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995
Thomas Bassett, “Indigenous Mapmaking in Intertropical Africa,” published in The History of Cartography, Cartography in the Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1998