Geography of Africa

Abstract

This chapter reviews the state of North American geographical research on Africa in the 1990s. During the 1980s research on Africa dwelt on the many crises, some real and some imagined, usually sensationalized by the media, such as the collapse of the state in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, and Rwanda and the economic shocks of structural adjustment programs. The 1990s witnessed momentous positive changes. For example, apartheid ended in South Africa and emerging democratic systems replaced dictatorial regimes in Malawi and Zambia. Persuaded that Africa had made progress on many fronts largely due to self-generated advances, some scholars began to highlight the positive new developments (Gaile and Ferguson 1996). Due to space limitations, selecting works to include in this review has been difficult. In many instances we stayed within five cited works (first authorship) for anyone scholar to ensure focus on the most important works and to achieve a sense of balance in the works cited. Thus, research reviewed in this chapter should be treated as a sample of the variety and quality of North American geographical work on Africa. One major challenge was where to draw the boundary between “geography,” “not quite geography,” and “by North American authors” versus others. In these days of globalized research paradigms, geography has benefited tremendously from interchanging ideas with other social and natural science disciplines. Thus, separating North American geographic research in the 1990s from other groundbreaking works that profoundly influence the discipline of geography is difficult. For example, while the empirical subject matter included agriculture, health, gender, and development issues, the related theoretical paradigm often included representation, discourse, resistance, and indigenous development within broader frameworks influenced by the ideas of social science scholars such as Foucault (1970, 1977, 1980), Said (1978), Sen (1981, 1990), and Scott (1977, 1987). This chapter engages these debates. Building upon T. J. Bassett’s (1989) review of research in the 1980s, the chapter develops a typology for the growing research on African issues and related theoretical orientations (Table 36.1). The reviewed works fall into the three main subdisciplines of geography—human geography (by far the most dominant), physical geography now commonly referred to as earth systems science or global change studies, and geographic information systems (GIS).