NEW POPULATION MAPS OF UGANDA, KENYA, NYASALAND, AND GOLD COAST

Abstract

IN 1954 I collaborated in the publication of a study on the population geography of humid tropical Africa' in which distribution of native people was represented on a smallscale dot map and a choropleth map. The data used in the construction of these maps were the latest available in early 1953. Because of the very small scale at which the two population maps of tropical Africa were reproduced, they were capable of exhibiting only the broader outlines of distribution, so that the text accompanying the maps focused upon only the larger elements of population arrangement. Most conspicuous on the small-scale population maps of tropical Africa referred to above is the fact that the African natives are concentrated in two widely separated general regions, one in western and the other in eastern tropical Africa, where the overall density is 10 to 100 persons per km2. These two regions of concentration are separated by a central African area where the average density is only 3.4 persons per km2. In the West AfricaSudan region the bulk of the inhabitants live within three large, discontinuous subregions, two of them coastal belts and the third an irregular and discontinuous one roughly paralleling the coast at a distance of 400-500 miles inland. The East African concentration, chiefly in the plateau area, is characterized by a highly complex alternation of spots of high and low density.2 With the assistance of graduate students an attempt has been made to analyze in greater detail the distributional elements of population in four of the political subdivisions of tropical Africa.3 One of these, the Gold Coast,