- Title
- Maps for Africa
- Creator
- Cosser, M
- Creator
- West, Walter O
- Date Issued
- 1994
- Date
- 1994
- Type
- Text
- Identifier
- vital:555
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020643
- Description
- [Introduction] Opening address by Oakley West at exhibition: Maps: Knowledge and Power - A Teaching Exhibition at the Albany Museum, November 1992. Maps, like art, reflect man's perception of the world in which he lives. Often they are coloured both by the known and unknown, by fact and fancy, myth and mystery. Maps are not just merely bits of paper. They are, and have been, important instruments in conquest and empire building. They reflect not only the perceived glory of war and occupation, but survival under siege, the protection or defence of people, property and resources, and, believe it or not, the accidental inheritance of territory, like India. Maps reflect the build-up of nations bent on expansion, resulting in the dreadful years of trench warfare in 1914 - 1918. And who of us can honestly admit that we knew exactly where Kuwait was before that conflict began? Thus in many cases lands were often first claimed on paper before they were effectively occupied. It has been said that no place is truly discovered until it has been mapped and as much as guns and warships, they have played significant roles in manifesting the realities of conquest and empire building. Maps are storehouses of knowledge and information and often it is in that very knowledge that lies the power to conquer, control, defend, divide or develop, to govern or administer or even mislead or misinform. This exhibition attempts to trace almost 2 000 years of cartography. It starts with the great insights of Claudius Ptolomy and his Geographia, continues through the retrogressive perceptions of the Church fathers and their decrees that Jerusalem was the centre of the world, to the perception of a flat Earth and a rather whimsical look at modern "upside-down" cartography which has proved to be only 300 years late in its conception. One can explore the opening up of the dark continent of Africa with its myths and mysteries, the source of the Nile, Mountains of the Moon and the mythical kingdom of Monomatapa. One can "see" the gradual growth of knowledge as first the coasts and later the interior was discovered and made known by men like Diaz, Da Gama, Livingstone, Stanley and Andersson. The discoveries of these explorers were recorded in the great maps of cartographers like John Arrowsmith and Henry Hall, the former incidentally never ever having visited Africa. A quantum leap takes us to some of the newest techniques, the satellite image, which still reflects the historical heritage in the shapes and patterns formed, in what has become known as Settler Country, from as early as the 1800s. By these images one is still able to appreciate the ravages of drought, overgrazing and perhaps the mismanagement of natural resources. Maps show us a different Grahamstown, a Graham's Town lit by gaslamp light. They help us to "see" prison gangs building the Queen's Road to Fort Beaufort, or appreciate the scramble for river frontage farming land. We see the early conceptualization of a harbour scheme at the mouth of the Kowie River, dreamed of by those intent on opening up a gateway to the Eastern Frontier through its wide waters. (A scheme, incidentally, which finally found a different, but nonetheless effective, realisation in the Marina built in the 1990s). Dreams were dreamed of a wide-spread colonial administration, though not without its nostalgic overtones: King William's Town would be the principal town in the county of Middlesex and Komga that of the county Cambridge in British Kaffraria! One can trace in maps the expanding horizons of the colonial powers as they appropriated land in the name of civilisation. As the church and the courts moved in to replace tribal customs and laws, maps reflected the more tangible results of expansion - telegraph, road and rail networks, as well as the more abstract and intangible - the spread of violence. On the other hand, we can follow the development of a great city, the city of London, though almost 400 years, witnessing the growth of its urban sprawl, the depiction of the famous bridges over. the Thames and who could not but be thrilled by the panoramic sweep of London from the Houses of Parliament through St Pauls to the sailing ship harbour, cartography par excellence which evidences the birth of a rail system with engines looking distinctly more akin to Stevenson's rocket than the locomotives we are used to seeing. An exceptionally fine relief model of the Western and Southern Cape coastal area serves to highlight the unending struggle of cartographers to portray that troublesome third dimension, height, on flat pieces of paper. Such struggles are revealed both in maps of topographic landscape as well as the urban complex - some successful, some not so. Finally, the exhibition touches lightly on the wonders of satellite imagery and the coming of the computer to cartography, as in all things. An attempt is made to explain in simple terms the art, science and technology of the cartographer in the production of the multicoloured maps we are all so familiar with.
- Format
- 53 pages
- Format
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Cosser, M. and West, W.O. (1994) Maps for Africa. Published by the Geography Department, Rhodes University in collaboration with the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa. ISBN 0-86810-267-9
- Rights
- [From the opening address by Oakley West at the exhibition: Maps: Knowledge and Power - A Teaching Exhibition]: Throughout time maps have served a multitude of purposes. They have been the instruments of rulers and conquerors, of entrepreneurs and of hunters of game or fortune. They have not only guided man's passage on the earth, but beneath it, around it and over it. The exhibition "Maps: Knowledge and Power - a Teaching Exhibition" (for which this handbook was prepared), focused mainly on historical maps and aimed to show the progress over time of cartography as a science, as well as an art. By no means does the compiler profess the handbook to be all-inclusive; however, it is hoped that it will, nevertheless, be an inviting introduction to this many-faceted art...or science?
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