Cartography, which includes maps and plans as well as the processes and contexts of their production and use, played an important role in shaping colonial encounters in Africa. The early manuscript and print maps of the limited spaces of interaction, where Europeans expressed power prior to the 19th century, tended to be broadly representative of wide areas or focused closely on key locales, usually forts or coastal settlements. Until the late 18th century most tended to be imprecise and relational, with few clear markers of dominion or signs of administrative structures, and heavily dependent on local exchanges of knowledge.
As with other European fields of scientific knowledge that intersected African spaces and places, however, cartography accelerated in importance and changed in character with the expansion of colonial rule and the emergence of modern bureaucracies from the late 19th century. Although manuscript maps never lost their importance to local administrators or their place in the collection of information, cheap lithography after about 1850 assured colonial governments a greater number of precise and elaborate representations than ever before, which created a variety of notional spaces and spatial notions for the deployment of colonial power. Into the 20th century, compilation mapping from variegated data continued to yield slowly—and incompletely—to even more precise survey-based maps that claimed to approach truly objective representational accuracy. This claim of accuracy in turn abetted a variety of new economic, social, and political schemes under colonial auspices.
Overall, the relationship between cartography and colonialism was cyclical in that mapped processes framed colonial visions of African territory and spatiality and translated these illusions into instruments of power to advance those colonial designs on people, land, and resources. A lack of consideration for spatialities beyond the idealized model of planimetric positional representation or, thematically, colonial priorities and schemas of organization may be the most consistent characteristic of mapping in colonial Africa. At the same time, this cartography continued to depend on the knowledge of African informants or assistants and, ultimately, the work of locally trained professionals through political independence, which created spaces for interpretation, opposition, and coproduction that shaped the map output. The colonial relationship and colonial priorities thus framed cartography in African spaces throughout the era, although the discursive nature of mapping and its processual nature meant influences traveled in more than one direction, and the map was not simply a direct imposition.
Article
Cartography in Colonial Africa
Lindsay Frederick Braun
Article
Disease Control and Public Health in Colonial Africa
Samuël Coghe
Disease control and public health have been key aspects of social and political life in sub-Saharan Africa since time immemorial. With variations across space and time, many societies viewed disease as the result of imbalances in persons and societies and combined the use of materia medica from the natural world, spiritual divination, and community healing to redress these imbalances. While early encounters between African and European healing systems were still marked by mutual exchanges and adaptations, the emergence of European germ theory-based biomedicine and the establishment of racialized colonial states in the 19th century increasingly challenged the value of African therapeutic practices for disease control on the continent.
Initially, colonial states focused on preserving the health of European soldiers, administrators, and settlers, who were deemed particularly vulnerable to tropical climate and its diseases. Around 1900, however, they started paying more attention to diseases among Africans, whose health and population growth were now deemed crucial for economic development and the legitimacy of colonial rule. Fueled by new insights and techniques provided by tropical medicine, antisleeping sickness campaigns would be among the first major interventions. After World War I, colonial health services expanded their campaigns against epidemic diseases, but also engaged with broader public health approaches that addressed reproductive problems and the social determinants of both disease and health.
Colonial states were not the only providers of biomedical healthcare in colonial Africa. Missionary societies and private companies had their own health services, with particular logics, methods, and focuses. And after 1945, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) increasingly invested in health campaigns in Africa as well. Moreover, Africans actively participated in colonial disease control, most notably as nurses, midwives, and doctors. Nevertheless, Western biomedicine never gained hegemony in colonial Africa. Many Africans tried to avoid or minimize participation in certain campaigns or continued to utilize the services of local healers and diviners, often in combination with particular biomedical approaches. To what extent colonial disease control impacted on disease incidence and demography is still controversially debated.
Article
French Mapping and Colonization of 19th-Century West Africa
Thomas J. Bassett
Maps stand out in popular images of European colonization of Africa but are rarely discussed in the scholarly literature. This essay fills this gap by exploring the intertwined nature of mapping and colonization. French mapping of late 19th-century West Africa demonstrates the contribution of maps and mapmaking to colonialism as well as the influence of colonialism on map history. The essay begins with a review of contrasting approaches to map history. Conventional approaches focus on maps as increasingly accurate representations of reality and the role of individual mapmakers. Critical approaches emphasize mapping discourses and practices. This section is followed by a case study of French imperial and colonial mapping of West Africa that adopts a processual approach to map history. It views mappings as contingent processes that unfold in the course of solving socio-spatial problems. The essay presents a network mapping approach to investigate the relational nature of mapping in the making of colonial French Sudan. The final sections point to the major map archives in France and the primary and secondary literature pertinent to this topic. The essay concludes with a call for further research that explores the impact of mapping on the imperial and colonial history of Africa and the effects of imperialism and colonialism on map history.
Article
Western Education and the Rise of a New African Elite in West Africa
Apollos Okwuchi Nwauwa
With the arrival of Europeans in West Africa in the 15th century, which preceded formal conquest and pacification, missionaries took the lead in introducing Western education as an indispensable tool for effective evangelism. Subsequently, the various European colonial governments appropriated education as a means of consolidating colonial rule in West Africa. By the middle of the 19th century, Western education began to produce a new, educated elite, at the core of which were “liberated slaves” in Sierra Leone. Western education produced its own contradictions. On the one hand, it produced educated hybrids who were alienated from their own peoples and cultures and who collaborated with Europeans to entrench colonialism in West Africa. On the other hand, the new elite, educated both in Africa and overseas, subsequently morphed into the new nationalists who became valuable agents for the liquidation of European imperialism in Africa. The emergent institutions of higher learning and the three new universities in West African founded in the aftermath of World War II became hotbeds of intellectual discourse just as the debate over the need for adaptation and Africanization resurfaced. Following the end of colonial rule, the “new elite,” now expanding in number, continued to provide contentious, neocolonial leadership and direction for development in postcolonial West Africa. Thus, despite its undesirable effect on European colonialism, Western education played into the hands of the educated elite who appropriated and deployed its latent, potent force in order to dislodge Europeans from Africa.
