Many of us harbour a fascination with maps, a legacy of childhood reading, writes Maureen Brady.
Mapping colonial conquest: Australia and Southern Africa
edited by Norman Etherington
(University of Western Australia Press)
Mapmaking probably began when one of our far-distant hunter-gatherer ancestors first drew directions to the nearest waterhole in the sand. Over time, this idea evolved into the commonplace things we now pick up for free in tourism centres to use for our own narrow purposes, just to get from A to B. Be warned: there’s a long and bloody history locked up in that Z-fold.
Many of us harbour a fascination with maps, a legacy of childhood reading. Not just for maps of the ‘real” National Geographic world, fantasy maps too, for Treasure Island, for Middle Earth, for Neverland. Maps in books are keys to other worlds, real or imagined, ones we can enter and occupy, however vicariously.
In truth, we owe our real-world maps to bands of earlier occupiers, people we now call ‘colonisers”. Where the earliest maps were made by people born and raised in that land, colonisers looked in from the outside, and saw things from their own point of view, without regard for the rights of the indigenous people. One of the tools colonisers used to tame new lands was to map them, to demarcate them, to usurp them, for their own gain. Inevitably, as history shows (and goes on showing), this leads to conflict, bloodshed, death — the aftershocks of which continue to bedevil all our lives.
These days, we take maps and atlases for granted, without ever thinking about who first made them or why. If we were asked whether we believed that maps represent an underlying, objective geographical ‘truth”, we’d most likely say yes.
Historians of cartography, on the other hand, believe that maps are social constructions, a form of power-knowledge that presents the world to us ‘through a veil of ideology”. To penetrate this veil, we need to read the history embedded in historical maps, to examine the lives of the people who made them, and to understand the context of their lives.
This pioneering study does just that by comparing the role of cartography in the colonial conquests of Australia and Southern Africa. By probing the ‘secret histories” encoded in maps, which continue to influence the political, legal, social and cultural institutions of each country, the writers attempt to show how these influences subtly shape our policies and democratic processes. They also examine how the maps of colonisers ‘erased, wrote over and displaced indigenous conceptions of space and power”.
Set out in eight essays, each of which deserves to be interrogated in its own right, the project explores diverse aspects of historical cartography, from an inherent Eurocentrism to the use of fantasy maps in works of fiction.
The first essay, by classically trained cartographer Vivian Forbes and Marion Hercock, provides a broad overview of the role the British Royal Navy’s Hydrographic Office played in charting the Indian Ocean and its surrounding territories, emphasising how the rivalry between the various European imperial powers spurred on the race to lay claim to overseas territories. The map on the cover amply demonstrates who won this contest.
Next, Lindy Stiebel and Norman Etherington look at how fanciful representations of landscapes have been used to lend ‘an aura of verisimilitude” to novels such as Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines, even Winnie the Pooh’s ‘100 Aker Wood”, and draw some surprising conclusions.
Janda Gooding introduces us to an early surveyor-explorer in Australia, Robert Dale, and in particular to his painting, Panoramic View of King George’s Sound, which provides ‘a cohesive statement about the nexus between military activities, visual representation and colonial conquest”.
Etherington illustrates the role of cartography in mapping ethnicity, from maps based on the Bible that delineate the ‘portions” given by Divine Right to the 12 Tribes of Israel on to how tribal territories were drawn in Southern Africa and Australia before the 20th century.
Jane Carruthers demonstrates how cartographic knowledge was manipulated by politicians, among others, during the period known as the ‘Scramble for Africa”, highlighting the rivalry in Southern Africa between Britain and Germany. In this context, she focuses on the German-born Friedrich Jeppe, who became postmaster-general for the Transvaal Republic and played a pivotal role in ‘creating — an acceptable nation state from settler chaos”.
To show how history gets written into maps, Etherington probes the life and remarkable work of George W Stow, a close colleague of those other eminent Victorian anthrophilologists, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, and paints a sympathetic portrait. Among his manifold accomplishments, Stow is credited with drawing the first map that reflects the mfecane. The discussion on the uncertain origins of this term is illuminating.
Christopher Vernon delves into the creation of two colonial capital cities: Pretoria and Canberra, to see how power projects itself on to the landscape. With the Herbert Baker connection and the triangle of power depicted on the cover map, a comparison with New Delhi would have been apposite.
Indeed, it’s a pity this study does not include the third leg of the British Indian Ocean triangle — India — given South Africa’s own close historical ties with that country.
The last essay, by Stiebel, outlines the South African government’s Millennium Project and, inter alia, revisits the vexing issue of who is entitled to be called an African. She then, perplexingly, describes an outline for a Mapping Exhibition, without any explanatory detail of when and where or even whether it has ever been held. Stiebel concludes that, since Frene Ginwala’s departure from Parliament, this project lost its main driver — a great pity. As in the old adage, a picture (map, exhibition) speaks a thousand words —
Maps and mapping
Given their preoccupations and their need to worry, humans want to know where things are. Maps have been used to assist by determining the location of things and providing a degree of certainty to the stressed hominid. These descriptions of place vary from the post-it-notes describing how you must just keep right to find a particular café, to atlases that encompass the world.
Atlases have proved popular among publishers because of the lower cost of printing in colour and the rapid pace of current affairs that requires frequent new editions. One such atlas is Geographica: The Complete Illustrated Atlas of the World (2003). The book attempts to condense the study of geography into 500 pages. This is an impossible task and the text only provides a crumb of information on topics varying from astronomy, to geopolitics, which makes the effort of including the text pointless. Maps are divided into six colour-coded global regions. These feel dull and are without texture, though the cartographer has succeeded in managing the difficult task of deciding what detail to exclude. The best parts of the Atlas are its stunning photographs of places around the world, and its pen sketches of nation states. It is a book for students at high school who require an introduction to geography and undergraduates who may have missed the odd lecture.
Another book on maps designed for students, though accessible to all, is Maps That Made History (2004) by Lez Smart. The book analyses certain maps from the British National Archive. These include well-known maps such as the map of the London Underground, as well as more obscure maps such as the map accompanying Michael Drayton’s poem Poly Olbion. Smart encourages the reader to be critical when assessing a map, to be aware of the bias of the cartographer and the perspective that he/she attempts to portray. He also shows what an important role maps play in swaying public opinion. Though the examples are mainly from Britain, the application of critical assessment in map reading is in keeping with the tenets of outcomes-based education.
An aspect where maps have been critical in informing and influencing public opinion is that of warfare. Maps of War (2007) by Ashley and Miles Baynton-Williams, published by Quercus, is a beautiful collection of 130 maps depicting European battles fought between 1547 and 1900. Some of the maps are well known, while others are rare copies. The book starts with the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh and the ‘Englishe” army shattering the ‘Schottes’s” positions with cannon and musket fire. It includes a colourful plate of Drake’s raid on Cartegena in 1586, complete with sea serpents and iguanas, and renderings of Admiral Vernon’s raids on the same region during the War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1739. The continental battles fought between the various European protagonists are covered extensively, as is the American War of Independence. This is book with an unashamed British bias, for those with an interest in military history and battle re-enactment and representation. You will spend a long time poring over these charts. Be sure to have a sturdy coffee table or a strong pair of thighs, as it is a large tome.
Geographica: The Complete Illustrated Atlas of the World and Maps That Made History are among the 320 000 titles at the Exclusive Books Summer Sale, now on countrywide