Idea of Africa

If we dispense with the racial conceptions of Africa, we are left with geographical and historical notions, Africa as a spatiotemporal construct that is at once a process, product, and a project of a complex and contradictory historical geography. The concept of historical geography, sitting at the intersection of two disciplines, has allowed scholars to combine the spatial and temporal interests of geography and history, to understand that the physical environment and human agency are mutually constitutive, that people's creativity and thought produce places as much as places produce people's cultures and identities, in short, that landscapes are not only important aspects of culture, they are products of historical processes.

Whereas nobody denies that a geographical entity called "Africa" exists, for some this is merely a cartographic reality not a cultural one, an exercise in mapping devoid of experiential meaning for the peoples that have lived within the continent's porous borders. They would be right, some contend, if the argument were that Africa's peoples have always been conscious of living in a place called "Africa." Clearly, they have not, no more than people who in the twenty-first century are called "Asians" or "Europeans" have always had such a spatial consciousness. Historically, local spatial identities, encapsulated and articulated in ethnic, regional, and national terms, have been far more important, while broader (continental) spatial imaginaries have tended to develop as the processes of globalization, understood here to mean the expanding circuits of transregional connectedness, have grown in extensity and intensity.

Thus, in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, there is a hierarchy of spatial identities that are interwoven and interactive in complex ways engendering multiple cultural identities. Space and the spatial stage contextualize cultures, economies, and politics, and invent and inscribe places and landscapes with ethical, symbolic, and aesthetic meanings. "'Space' is created," argues Doreen Massey, "out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the noninterlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global" (pp. 155–156). Space, then, is not a static and passive template of social existence, but an active, constitutive force of the social's very composition and construction.

Seen in this way, then, the multiple mappings of Africa are indeed to be expected. The numerous peoples and societies that have carved out a place of their own across this vast continent have, in a sense, been creating their little Africas, each laying their bricks of African identity across the huge and intricate cartographic, cognitive, and cultural construct known as "Africa." Therefore, a geographical conception of Africa does not need the existence of racial solidarity or the invention of cultural homogeneity. But this is not an empty cartographic vessel either in so far as the diverse cultures and identities that have emerged and have yet to emerge have been and will continue to be shaped by the mapping and materiality of Africa as an ever changing spatial entity and social construct.

The map of Africa, as with all maps, entails many things. Maps are not simply representations of the geographical world. A map is, as David Woodward and Malcom Lewis argue in their massive global history of cartography, simultaneously a cognitive system, a material culture, and a social construction. They speak of "cognitive or mental cartography," "performance or ritual cartography," and "material or artifactual cartography." Recent studies on indigenous cartography in Africa demonstrate that all three have been employed by Africa's various peoples to map, name, and claim their landscapes, stretched over varying scales of expansiveness.

In the nineteenth century, many European explorers solicited and used some of these maps to produce their own maps, which shows cross-cultural intelligibility between African and European maps. To quote Thomas Bassett: "Notwithstanding broad epistemological divides separating Europeans from various African cultural groups, it appears Europeans had little difficulty in reading these maps. Solicited maps demonstrate that Africans had the spatial competence and requisite sign systems to produce maps spontaneously.… Indeed, there is evidence that [these] maps were influential in shaping the form and content of European maps of the continent" (p. 37).

Quite clearly African maps influenced European mapmaking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in several ways. They enabled European explorers to construct or correct their maps, and were essential for topological determinations, and place-names, which were widely transcribed onto European maps. In turn, European influences also became increasingly discernible in African mapmaking in terms of the materials used, the northerly orientation of some maps (e.g., Ras Makonnen's famous map of Ethiopia of 1899), and the methods employed in their construction (e.g., Cameroonian King Njoya's topographic survey from 1912 to 1916).

For more than fifteen hundred years maps of Africa produced in northern Africa, southern Europe, and western Asia had reproduced the maps made by Ptolemy in Alexandria in the second century B.C.E., only "altering them slightly to suit their needs" (Mbodji, p. 44). The creation of new and more accurate maps of continental Africa began with the emergence of "scientific" cartography and the beginnings of European global voyages and conquests in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the broad external and internal contours of the continent were finally filled out as we know them today. The European mapping of Africa was implicated with imperialism both directly and indirectly, directly in that mapmaking facilitated the voyages of exploration and colonization, and indirectly insofar as it was part of the ideological architecture of inscribing European nationalisms at home and forging collective European grandeur globally: from Gerardus Mercator's (1512–1594) projection, still widely used in the twenty-first century, tiny Europe was inflated in size and massive Africa was dwarfed. It was almost as if Africa's civilizational diminution had to be accompanied by a cartographic one.

Upon this shriveled "blank darkness" Europe sought to write its cartographic and epistemic will by dividing the continent into colonies, themselves further splintered into allegedly primordial and antagonistic ethnic enclaves, a cognitive mapping sanctioned by the structuralist-functionalist paradigms of anthropology, the premier colonial science. But against the "tribalization" of Africa and African cultures and identities by the colonial administration and colonial anthropology, which were contested by local circuits of exchange, movement, and interaction so that borders served not simply as points of separation and struggle but often as places of convocation and conviviality, there emerged the countervailing elite paradigms, politics and projections of Pan-Africanism, the progenitor of the numerous territorial nationalisms in Africa.

As an ideological, intellectual, and institutional formation Pan-Africanism embodied within itself conflicting tendencies and imaginaries of Africa, premised on racial, spatial, and ideological constructs. While there always existed different versions of Pan-Africanism premised on diverse spatial conceptions of Africa (for example, trans-Atlantic Pan-Africanism embraced the African diaspora in the Americas), the one that received lasting institutional expression for independent African states was continental Pan-Africanism, which was sanctified in 1963 with the formation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). In 2001 the African Union (AU), a more ambitious project of continental unification, succeeded the OAU.

The formation of the OAU and later the AU entailed a remapping of Africa, the creation and consumption of new national, regional, and continental maps that were produced, performed, and internalized everywhere from schools, the media, and academic and political conferences, to international forums where regional blocs assumed representational identities. In short, "Africa" the map and the place was becoming increasingly "Africa" the idea and the consciousness, buttressed by an intricate web of hundreds of continental institutions covering an ever expanding range of spheres from politics, the economy, environment, health, education, and culture, to technical cooperation and the prosaic world of leisure involving competitive games and sports and forms of popular entertainment.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, "Africa" was perhaps more "African" than it had ever been in its history, that is to say, more interconnected through licit and illicit flows of commodities, capital, ideas, and people, not to mention multilateral conflicts and ecological and health panics, and more conscious of its collective identity in the global panorama and hierarchy of regional identities. The historical geography of Africa had been stretched and deepened despite, on the one hand the centrifugal push of spatial and social identities within the continent itself (some of which degenerated into destructive conflicts including civil wars, massive migrations, and state collapse), and on the other the centripetal pull of contemporary globalization and its "glocalization" effects—its tendency to simultaneously internationalize and localize identities and cultures—and the enduring seductions of extracontinental alliances for some regions and countries.