Unmapped

(Below) a section of Gurugram, near Delhi, in India.

On the left is an aerial view; on the right is the street map. Notice anything odd?

(Above) There are many buildings which don’t seem to have a road near them. That’s because this is a poor section, a slum, and no one has mapped it. There ARE roads there, but they may not have street names, and they certainly can’t be found on maps.

I found out about unmapped areas in “The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power”, by Deirdre Mask. She explains that “People often think of their street names and house numbers as banal. But they’re an essential part of proving your identity. Want to register for school? Open a bank account? Build credit and start a business? Show proof of address.” The government is in no big hurry to map these place and give these people addresses…because then they can qualify for aid, and they can VOTE.

(Above) An aerial view of Rocinha, a giant slum near Rio de Janeiro , Brazil. Rocinha is about 350 acres in size, and about 100,000 people live there. (Below) Here’s a closer look:

(Below) Google Maps shows the dark mass of buildings and the woefully few roads that are mapped to connect them.

(below) Bing maps show a few more roads….but why are the buildings missing??? Where did everyone GO??

According to https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/mapping-rios-favelas-180959816/ Rocinha is in the process of being mapped in a project called “Tá no Mapa” (it’s on the map).

I started searching online after reading her book. It’s not always easy to find these places. Mask writes “Native Americans, the largest minority group in North Dakota, have some of the highest rates of poverty in the country. They also disproportionately lack street addresses. Many live in rural locations, where streets have never been systematically numbered and named, and where the Postal Service still does not deliver. They rely largely on P.O. boxes — and a P.O. box doesn’t count as a “residential street address” under the North Dakota law.”

I spent a long time looking at aerial views of reservations, the Dakotas and Arizona. I found an awful lot of very empty space…and some weird mapping:

(Above) This aerial view of some reservation in Arizona shows roads on the road map. But on the aerial map, these ‘roads’ are just gray lines, randomly drawn across the landscape. What is going on?

Here’s the last map, which became rather important:

(Above) The Makoko section of Lagos in Nigeria. On the left is the aerial view, showing hundreds of homes on or near the water. On the right, they magically disappear. Take a closer look:

At least Google Maps indicates that there’s some buildings there. Over at Bing Maps, we don’t even have that. In fact the Bing map refuses to acknowledge all the stilt houses built over the water, and shows just empty blue water (Below).

As I’ve been researching cartography, I kept waiting to find something that inspired a new textile project. Next week, you’ll see the project triggered by the maps of Lagos.

Back to cartography....

When last we visted cartography, we talked about mental maps - cartography you carry in your head. If your culture relies on mental maps, it can be very difficult for outsiders to recognize your cartographic skills. Which is why there are almost no pre-colonial African maps.

“Various indigenous communities ..in .. Africa have their own cartographic traditions, which are frequently stored within songs, stories and rituals” it says at https://academicjournals.org/journal/AJHC/article-full-text/58F548754869 “The indigenous peoples of Africa largely practiced oral cartography rather than the contemporary hard copy or digital cartography we are so used to. Nonetheless, the deftness with which the indigenous people verbalized their cartographic or geographic knowledge created an incredible and indelible mental map in the minds of recipients of such information.”

So they didn’t write it down. They carried it in their minds….which means I have very few pictures to show you. One of the few solid cartographic remnants is this (Below):

(WIKI) Lukasa memory boards are wooden tablets covered with multicolored beads & shells, or are incised or embossed with carved symbols. The colors and configurations of beads or ideograms stimulate the recollection of important people, places, things, relationships and events . A lukasa serves as an archive for the topographical and chronological mapping of political histories.

So, more of a history text than a map.

The best evidence we have of African cartographic skills are found in the writings of some early European explorers. The explorers would ask locals where to find some river or mountain, and the local would use a stick to draw out a map on the ground. But “during the 19th and early 20th centuries, map-making European travellers, missionaries and scholars depended profoundly on the geographical knowledge provided by indigenous informants in Africa. In their diaries, travel accounts and maps, however, Europeans tended to conceal their dependence and depict African authorities as unreliable” https://history.icaci.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Fritsch_Voigt.pdf

However, at the DECOLONIAL ATLAS https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2016/05/21/east-african-ground-maps/ we find that:

The scene of Africans drawing ground maps to the profound surprise of Europeans is a recurring theme of the exploration literature. The German geographer Karl Weule was “overwhelmed” by the number of maps members of his caravan produced during a six-month research expedition through German East Africa in 1906. Between marches, he supplied his carriers with paper and pencils to see what they would draw. This is the map made by a Mambwe man named Sabatele, originally from the southern shore of Lake Tanganyika near the present Tanzania-Zambia border. The map, which traces caravan routes across Tanzania, was made in Lindi at the very beginning of Weule’s expedition. Weule notes that Sabatele’s map was oriented with south at the top, but he turned it around 180 degrees “in order to bring it into agreement with our maps.” (Below, the map and explanation, which I have to admit I can’t quite follow):

Which brings us to toponymy, which means the place-names of a region and the etymological study of these names. Africans had descriptive names for places (probably made them easier to remember), but Europeans came in and either completely renamed these places or corrupted them so they no longer made sense. For example, the place now called Victoria Falls was originally  Mosi-oa-Tunya, translated as ‘The Smoke That Thunders’. Emtshonalanga (meaning ‘toward the setting sun’ ) was distorted to Mashonaland. ….just like so many Europeans had their family names mangled by the officials at Ellis Island.

If you find this interesting, you can go to…..

https://press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/HOC_V2_B3/HOC_VOLUME2_Book3_chapter5.pdf

…..where you will be able to read THE HISTORY OF CARTOGRAPHY Volume Two, Book Three (cartography in the traditional african, american, arctic, australian, and pacific societies) Edited by David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis  

Next week we move on to areas that are still not mapped - the places that Google Earth can’t find.