Geographers in Africa

Abstract

uUMAN geography, defined recently by a group of geographers as the 1 1 geographical study of those features, objects and phenomena of the earth's surface which relate directly, or are due, to man axd his activities,1was the subject of Professor R. H. Kinvig's presidential address in Section E (Geography) at the British Association at Liverpool in 1953.2 He considered the geographer as humanist and in stressing the many-sided aspects of his study suggested that human geography provides the fundamental background for the understanding of many of the problems besetting mankind in thc local, national and international fields. In recent years there has been a tremendous increase in the number of geographical studies made of British colonial territories generally, and of Bntish Africa in particular Part of this advance may be attributed to the Tropical Africa Research Committee of Section E of the British Association) established at the Oxford Meeting of the Association in 1926. Lord Harlech (then the Hon. W. G. A. Ounsby-Gore) was President of the Section and addressed it on the economic development of tropxcal Africa and its effects on the native populatiot.3 The Committee was to inqqxire into the present .state of the Hs4man Geography of Tropical AfricaJ and to make recommendations for furtherance and development. Parliamentary visits had just been made to both East and West Africa,4 and geographers together with anthropologists economists, politicians and many others seem suddenly to have become aware of the extent of the British responsibilities in the tropics and of their owrs ignorance of the conditions and potentialities of these areas. The Committee's method was the circulation of a questionnaire5 to administrators, educationalists, missionaries and others throughout tropical Africa. Diverse questions were asked, ranging from water-supply to population data and from food crops to means of transport. The response, in both quantity and quality, naturally varied greatly from territory to terntory: but enough data came from Northern Rhodesia for it to form the basis of Professor A. G. Ogilvie's presidential address to Section E of the British Association in 1933.6 The late Walter Fitzgerald's Africa: a social, economic and political geography of its major regions appeared in the following year. This volume, now in its seventh edition still have great value, though, hardly surprising, it is showing signs that it was first published over twenty years ago.7 For geographers and many other students of Africa as well it has been an sndispensable commentary to later and more comprehensive or more detailed studies including Lord Hailey's An African Srvey which was weak on the geographical side. Fitzgerald's book has been a very real stimulus to many students in widely diffenng fields and must be regarded as British geography's