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MAKING RAIN, MAKING MAPS: COMPETING GEOGRAPHIES OF WATER AND POWER IN SOUTHWESTERN AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 June 2017

MEREDITH MCKITTRICK
MEREDITH MCKITTRICK*
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington
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Abstract

This article explores the alchemy whereby ritual and political worlds invisible to Europeans were rendered visible on European maps. It begins with a puzzle: representations of southwestern Africa's rivers on those maps bear little resemblance to physical reality as the cartographers would have understood it. Using GIS technology to georeference a series of maps and highlight the placement of rivers on them illustrates the convergence of cartographers’ representations and regional political cosmologies linking power to control over water. Travelers’ accounts and colonial archives illuminate how knowledge was produced and why African ideas about geography were inadvertently embedded in those maps well into the twentieth century. This method opens a window into otherwise-obscured African intellectual history and demonstrates that even something as apparently and unambiguously ‘European’ as modern mapping was the result of on-the-ground negotiations well into the colonial period.

Keywords

NamibiaAngolaBotswanaSouthern Africacartographyenvironmentexplorationintellectual
Type
Nineteenth-Century Reconstructions
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , July 2017 , pp. 187 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Thom McClendon, Lynn Thomas, and the two sets of anonymous readers for The Journal of African History, whose sage advice improved the piece substantially. I'm also deeply indebted to Jean Aroom, who grappled with both a complex argument about a complex hydro-scape and a series of detailed and very confusing historical maps. Jean performed alchemy of her own, turning those maps into something comprehensible and placing them in conversation with the story I tell here. Thanks to Georgetown University for granting me the funds for the GIS work. Author's email: [email protected]

References

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