MILLENNIUM
COUNTDOWN
Bryan Rostron
Can South Africa’s white tribe, the argument grumbles on, fit into the modern map of Africa? Before tempers fray and fights erupt, let’s face it: it’s a headache, this map. For a start, it was drawn by Europeans.This leads to all kinds of problems. Earlier this year, for example, the former and current presidents of Zambia used this colonial blueprint to declare each other unfit to run for office: Kenneth Kaunda pointed to Frederick Chiluba’s birth in the former Zaire, Chiluba to the fact of Kaunda’s Malawian descent.
Maps, frankly, have been a disaster for Africa. Europeans, to demarcate conquest and for administrative convenience, drew lines which frequently brushed aside underlying linguistic, kinship and migratory patterns. They imposed an order in their own minds; on such charts was Africa drawn and quartered.
But then, the picture of the entire world has actually been drawn up by the usual suspects: middle-aged white males.
Consider a world map. Chances are it shows Africa as about the same size as Greenland. Actually, it’s 14 times larger. But you’ve almost certainly been looking at a traditional map, where the northern hemisphere occupies two-thirds; the southern hemisphere, twice the size, is squeezed into the remaining space.
This map, still in almost universal use, is based on the projections of 16th-century Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator. Given that two-dimensional illustration required some distortion, it is not surprising Mercator favoured Europe. Such inaccuracies have, however, inevitably skewered European attitudes. And such unthinking bias, rightly, rankles.
The problem is, as soon as someone charts something, you can be sure they are about to lay claim to it. It is also a way of ruthlessly excluding people. Think of the clich: “wipe him off the map”. The think of the old apartheid apologia: the colossal lie that much of the land was unoccupied anyway – and that whites and blacks just sort of met up at the same time, so whites had an equal historical claim.
I have two maps of the Cape, dated 1710 and 1815; it is striking that in both the presence of indigenous people has virtually been obliterated from the landscape. These maps, marking white settlements and identifying rivers and mountains with European names, have almost eradicated evidence of other people, different customs. More recently, maps often blanked out black townships, whose population was sometimes larger than adjacent, named white towns.
Maps are power. The Portuguese and Spanish empires even considered them state secrets, revealed on the pain of death. In 1688, Heinrich Claudius was deported from the Cape for showing his sketch maps of the interior to passing French Jesuits.
The earliest surviving cartographic record of Bartolomeu Dias rounding the Cape was probably tampered with by the Columbus brothers. The exquisite Martellus map of 1489, now in the British Museum, shows the Cape as so exaggeratedly far south that it actually breaks through its frame – thus lending support to Christopher Columbus’s contention that the way to the Indies was westward.
Ever since, maps have been used as instruments of propaganda, justifying occupation and invasion. The Martellus Atlas, subconsciously, still promotes imperious assumptions. The Peters Projection Map, created in 1974, tried to redress the balance. It restores Africa – with different distortions – to its rightful size. In the United States, the Peters Projection is widely used in training seminars, as a way of showing there is a radically different way of looking at the world. It helps people rethink assumptions.
In South Africa, whites still control most of the wealth – on a scale of Mercator- sized distortion. If this over-privileged minority began to think in terms of the Peters Projection, it may gain a desperately needed new perspective.
Maps, essentially, are mental constructs. They shape the way we think, outline the world we take for granted, and frame our cultural horizons. In short, they peg out our social boundaries.
In South Africa, our defining framework is very recent. My late father was born in 1908 – two years before the Act of Union, which created our present borders. My mother was born in 1912, the same year as the African National Congress. And I was born (in Hillbrow, nogal) in 1948, the year the Nats came to power.
Yet how soon we accept such outlines as immutable. Today, our (white-drawn) national boundaries define a new South African xenophobia. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida defined apartheid as “a system of mapped-out solitudes”. The silhouette of that same map of solitudes and exclusion, it seems to me, continues to dominate the row over who is an African.
What map, then, can we use to find our way forward? The old one of rigid lines and arbitrary frontiers? Remember: the former regime, to keep the realities of Africa at bay, even made its perimeter along the Mozambican border a vast electrified fence.
Fact is, we are all, black and white, still trapped by these outdated co-ordinates. The question “does whitey have a place in the modern map of Africa?” might be answered better when Kaunda and Chiluba can agree where they fit in, too.
Let’s face it: on the cusp of the millennium, spinning ever faster with globalisation, our mental map needs to be redrawn. But not along old racial contours; otherwise it will remain one of exclusion, ringed around with electrified fences.