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Africa has always had a place within the history of European cartography. Lying on roughly the same longitude as Europe and separated only by the Mediterranean, Africa has been temptingly close for explorers who desired to carve away at the vast stretches of terra incognita that covered the ancient and early modern world. Yet, as early modern European explorers fanned outward across the surface of the globe, Africa remained stubbornly resistant to exploration and mapping. Even as the coast of the continent eventually became fairly well known through the writings and maps of ocean voyagers, the African interior, whether because of a forbidding topography, inhospitable climate, or resistant native tribes, remained largely inaccessible to exploration and survey.

This lack of empirical knowledge about Africa did not stop cartographers from inscribing speculation, myth, and legend onto the map. Up to the early eighteenth century, maps of the continent are filled with topographical features, place names, and visual icons, even if the empirical accuracy of these data was often beside the point. Yet, as the European Enlightenment brought forth a newfound concern with the observation and classification of empirical fact and its distinction from myth or fable, African maps were held to a new epistemological standard. As the oft-quoted quatrain from Jonathan Swift suggests, “old” maps of Africa were revealed to be more fiction than fact, entertaining as curiosities but bearing no accurate relationship to an existing topography:

So Geographers in Afric-maps,
With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps;
And o’er unhabitable Downs
Place Elephants for want of Towns.¹

The Map of Africa may have been “full,” but as Swift’s satire indicates, this plentitude sprang from the fecundity of the cartographer’s imagination rather than from the verifiable results of systematic exploration and survey.

Not coincidentally, the “blankness” of African maps was one of the primary means of justifying British exploration and conquest of the African interior. In the minds of many who supported colonization of the continent, the emptiness of the maps was translated into a metaphor of darkness that symbolically tied together Enlightenment notions of primitivism and barbarism with Victorian racial stereotypes. Cartography was both an index of this darkness and a means by which to overcome it. The symbolic association of cartographic blankness with epistemological darkness helped to license the British imperial mission of illuminating the African interior with the light of knowledge and civilization. Mid-nineteenth-century maps of Africa showed a considerable emptiness in the continental interior, an absence that posed a challenge to both the broad Enlightenment ideal of encyclopedic knowledge about the world and the specific imperative of cartography to map the terrestrial world with ever-increasing detail and accuracy. To cartographers, Africa became an intriguing place precisely because so little could be said of it with certainty. Maps of the continent, with their vast stretches of blankness, were an invitation to exploration, survey, and further mapping. Joseph Conrad writes of the romance associated with the blank spaces of African maps as he recalls the thrill of gazing on mid nineteenth-century maps as a young boy:

Regions unknown! My imagination could depict to itself there worthy, adventurous and devoted men, nibbling at the edges, attacking from the north and south and east and west, conquering a bit of truth here and a bit of truth there, and sometimes swallowed up by the mystery their hearts were so persistently set on unveiling.³

Conrad’s quote echoes two common assumptions that governed post-Enlightenment geography. First, the “conquering” of truth suggests that the exploration and mapping of the world’s surfaces is a progressive endeavor, leading to a more and more precise knowledge that could be reflected by a filling-in of the blank spaces on the map. Second, the metaphor of “unveiling” implies that Africa is a positivist object of knowledge with an essential, unchanging truth that exists prior to the explorer’s observation and survey. Both assumptions — that geographical knowledge marches progessively toward an ideal truth and that the truth it reveals is a singular and objective one — seem to find their proof in the nineteenth-century exploration of Africa. Where maps of the 1850s showed vast stretches of blank space, the explorations of Burton, Speke, Livingstone, and Stanley etched a comparatively filled-in map by the 1880s. As Conrad’s quote suggests, maps of Africa seem to reflect its “discovery” by explorers and surveyors.

Yet, this tells only part of the cartographic story. In one sense, topographical maps of Africa were in fact progressively filled in as the field observations of explorers were ratified by geographical institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society and subsequently recorded on “official” maps of the continent. In another sense, however, the cartography of Africa began to reflect different, even contradictory, truths. As Africa became a prize in the imperial competition between European nation-states, the Enlightenment ideals of recording an accurate topography were subordinated to imperial mapping projects that aimed to consolidate administrative and cultural control over diverse colonial territories. In the images that follow, the “thematic” quality of each map suggests a level of meaning beyond the simple revelation of truth. Thematic mapping expresses specific agendas, rhetorics, and subtexts that often belie the cartographic imperative to present an objective and self-evident truth. In the case of Africa, thematic mapping reveals as much about the interests of colonial cartography as it does about the nature of the space being mapped. These images show that, in the age of British imperialism, Africa emerges not so much as an objective space “unveiled” through heroic exploration as a kind of screen onto which different political, cultural, and historical visions are projected. In this way, thematic maps of Africa give us valuable insights into many of the goals-and contradictions-that attended the British imperial quest to explore, map, and govern much of "darkest Africa."

Winwood Reade, a Victorian explorer, writer, and intellectual, undertook several expeditions to the Niger Basin in West Africa in the 1860s. One of his accounts of these travels, An African Sketch-Book (1873), contains the above “Map of African Literature.” Intended as an index for students who wished to study “African literature” — that is, writings by predominately European explorers — the map combines image and text in a fascinating way.

Over a general small-scale map of the continent featuring little more than major topographical features and regional names, Reade inscribes the names of African explorers over the regions they explored. The type-size and length of the names varies based on the amount and significance of the territory explored by individual explorers. Celebrated Victorian explorers such as Livingstone, Burton, and Speke loom large in the southern interior, while earlier travelers such as Mungo Park, Caillie, Barth, and Denham mark a progressive exploration of the Niger Basin. Reade even writes himself into the scene, modestly placing his name over the interior off the Sierra Leone coast south of the Niger.

Though intended as more of a conceptual than geographical map, Reade’s document presents an Africa that is not so much revealed through an “unveiling” as it is written into existence by its many explorers. In addition to his explicit goal of enshrining and celebrating those “worthy, adventurous, and devoted men” similarly extolled by Conrad, Reade also reminds us that the practice of exploration, discovery, and mapping is inevitably an act of textual construction rather than a simple revelation of geographical truth.

The explorations of those celebrated by Conrad and Reade quickly gave way to a competition for the possession of African territory among European imperial powers. In 1884, several of the European powers met in Berlin to partition the continent into colonial “spheres of influence.” Africa was no longer a terra incognita filled with opportunities for individual adventure and glory. After the division of the continent, its geography was turned into a colored patchwork of imperial competition in which the possessions of each imperial power were symbolized by a particular color — in this case, green for Germany, orange for France, yellow for Belgium, and most famously, pink for Great Britain. Over the course of the twentieth century, the “political” map would become the most common way of representing global space, with each nation rendered as a separate, detachable piece of a global jigsaw puzzle. Yet, as this early map of post-Berlin Africa shows, the patchwork or jigsaw map is itself a thematic map, using the colored dyes to emphasize national space and territorial boundaries over other geographical features. By presenting national territories as strictly demarcated by color, this type of political map suggests that nations — their spaces, their cultures, and their people — are fundamentally different from each other. In the following passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, as the adventurer Marlow looks at a map similar to the one above (though with a different color scheme), he makes the equation between the colors of the map and the character of the nations represented:

There was a vast amount of red— good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer.⁴

As use of colored dyes to represent national and imperial territory became standard practice, maps themselves justified territorial conquest. In British popular culture, the “pink” of British imperial territory became a kind of shorthand for the extent of British geopolitical power and cultural dominance in the age of empire.

Although not a map of Africa proper, this “Isochronic Distance Chart” foregrounds Africa’s place within an emerging sense of global interconnectedness. The map, centered on England, shows swaths of color emanating concentrically based on the length of travel time from London. Presented in a commercial atlas, a subgenre of the atlas that became widely popular in the late nineteenth century, the chart would presumably be useful for calculating the time needed for the transportation of goods and labor between metropolitan centers and locations around the globe.

More subtly, by introducing the element of time into a representation of space, the map suggests the uneven pace at which global modernization was proceeding at the beginning of the twentieth century. While travel from Great Britain to points as distant as the central United States or the Siberian steppes might be made in less than ten days, the African interior, though much closer geographically, would take at least forty days to reach. The visual image of the map, with Africa appearing as a wedge cut out of a progressively expanding global space, seems itself to present an economic argument for colonization: for Africa’s goods and resources to be made fully available to imperial markets, a transportation infrastructure would need to be extended to even the most impenetrable portions of the African interior. In a sense, then, this chart reflects a shift in the British view of African colonization from a mission of exploring the dark and primitive terra incognita to a project of modernization that would integrate Africa into the economic and cultural spaces of global modernity.

Corresponding to the distance chart discussed above, this economic map of Africa further indicates the transformation of the continent from an unknown space of darkness and savagery to a bounty of resources to be exploited by commercial interests. While imperial states were busy marking out territorial boundaries and filling in colonial possessions with the appropriate national “colors,” economic enterprises viewed the continent as a source of raw goods and materials. In E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel, Howards End, Margaret Schlegel looks disapprovingly upon a similar map of Africa in the office of the imperial businessman, Henry Wilcox, remarking that the continent “looked like a whale marked out for blubber.”⁵

This 1914 map of Africa de-emphasizes imperial boundaries, instead presenting the continent in terms of its “available” resources. No mention is made of the topographies that might impede the acquisition of these materials, nor the tribes that may make conflicting claims. Instead, emphasis is laid on the plentitude available in the central and southern parts of the continent — where British colonization was most prevalent — ranging from rubber to cotton, ivory to gold. This map shows another side to the imperial enterprise: while nations frequently justified their colonization of Africa with reference to enlightenment aims of spreading civilization and knowledge throughout the “dark continent,” European colonization of Africa was largely driven by the need to supply precious resources to expanding consumer markets.

In this “Map of European Expansion,” from a South African atlas of 1922, the previously “blank” geography of Africa appears as a tangled skein of borders, territories, and treaty lines. The solid colors, indicating European colonial possessions of 1866, represent a relatively small area of the continent. On the other hand, the dotted and colored lines representing post-1866 treaties and annexations speak to the rapid consolidation of imperial administration over much of central and southern Africa. The design of the map compresses sixty years of imperial history into one image, sacrificing a clear portrayal of territorial boundaries for a more complex image of the European “scramble” for Africa in the late nineteenth century.

This map suggests the arbitrary nature of imperial “claims” on African territory, as territorial lines appear as transient, contingent, and negotiable from year to year. The geography of Africa, far from being resolved into a clear image of truth, was itself being constructed during the imperial years by nation-states continually seeking to acquire “strategic” territories. As with other imperial maps of the continent, no reference is made to native or aboriginal territorial claims; the prior “blankness” of Africa suggests that the continent is a tabula rasa onto which Western notions of abstract geographical space can be projected.

Taken from the Oxford Historical Atlas of 1929, this set of “historical” maps in fact shows the apparent absence of any African history that predates European colonization. The compression of the history of a continent to five maps on one page indicates the common conception of Africa, even well into the twentieth century, as a land without history. What little history is granted to Africa is a direct product of European colonization rather than any native presence. The map in the upper left-hand corner shows a picture of the “modern Europeanization” of the continent at the outbreak of World War I, suggesting that “history” can only occur when the geography of the continent can be marked out in terms of clear colonial boundaries. Note also the map’s use of dye-color to indicate territories of imperial possession, as in the “political” map above (Image 5).

The history presented is also, not surprisingly, slanted toward a British perspective. The inset maps show regions and events of British significance, such as the Zulu and Boer Wars and the Great Trek of the late nineteenth-century. These maps show that the selection of maps for an historical atlas is highly arbitrary and strongly conditioned by a specific understanding of history in terms of political and military “events.” Inscribing historical events on maps seems to make them inevitable, even natural, yet these are almost always inscribed to tell a specific story from a situated national or cultural point of view.

1. Winwood Reade, “Map of African Literature,” in African Sketch-Book, vol. 2. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), back fold-out. Newberry Library G749.734
2. “Political Map of Africa,” in J. G. Bartholomew, Globe Hand Atlas (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, [1891]), pp. 44-45. Newberry Library G10.0707
3. “Isochronic Distance Chart, 1906,” in John Bartholomew & Co., Atlas of the World's Commerce (London: George Newnes, [1907]), pl. 28. Newberry Library fH7001.08
4. “Economic Map of Africa,” in J. G. Bartholomew, Atlas of Economic Geography (London: Oxford University Press, 1914), pl. 38. Newberry Library fH3100.1
5. “Central and Southern Africa,” from Eric A. Walker, Historical Atlas of South Africa (Cape Town: Humphrey Milford/Oxford University Press, 1922), pl. 24. Newberry Library F7401.95
6. “Africa,” from Ramsey Muir and George Philip, Philip's New School Atlas of Universal History (London: George Philip & Son, 1929), pl. 56. Newberry Library folio oG1019 .P575 1929

² Joseph Jacobs, The Story of Geographical Discovery (London: Newnes, 1899), 172.

³ Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” Last Essays (London: J.M. Dent, 1926), 19-20.

⁴ Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899; New York: NAL, 1983), 73. 5 E.M. Forster, Howards End, (1910; New York: Vintage, 1989), 212.

⁵ E.M. Forster, Howards End, (1910; New York: Vintage, 1989), 212.