Geography Of Africa Research Articles

Place and Humanistic African Cultural Geography: A Tanzanian Case

Humanistic cultural geography studies of the experience and meaning of place in sub-Saharan Africa are fairly rare. The narration of senses of place has occupied a crucial niche in Anglo-American cultural geography for several decades. Yet edited volumes in humanistic cultural geography seldom have Africa-related chapters, and relatively few Africa-based research outcomes in cultural geography are forthrightly concerned with place meaning from a perspective influenced by humanistic thinking. I suggest in this essay possible means by which to construct humanistic cultural geographies of African places, using Jongowe, a small settlement in Tanzania, as an empirical referent. My two emphases are on building from African forms of humanism and on developing a politically and historically grounded yet global sense of African places out of a political ecology lens.

The Past, Present and Future of Geography in Africa: The Case of Nigeria (Speech given to the Africa Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, March 10, 2004, Philadelphia, USA)

The Past, Present and Future of Geography in Africa: The Case of Nigeria (Speech given to the Africa Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, March 10, 2004, Philadelphia, USA)

Talking with the Dead: Leo Africanus, Esoteric Yeats, and Early Modern Imperialism

On 9 May 1912, William Butler Yeats was attending a séance in London when a mysterious voice emerged from the end of a tin trumpet placed in the middle of the table around which the participants sat. Addressing itself to "Mr. Gates," the voice declared that it belonged to a spirit that had been with the poet since his birth.1 In what Yeats later noted to be a stagy Irish accent, this spirit ultimately named itself as "Leo the writer and explorer" (A, 19). Subsequent research by Yeats turned up the figure of Leo Africanus, born al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezaz, al-Fasi, the sixteenth-century North African Christian convert, papal advisor, and writer of the most authoritative early modern account of North African geography, translated into English by John Pory as A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600). What followed was a six-year esoteric dialogue between Yeats and his imagined Africanus through various psychic media such as séances, card readings, and automatic writing sessions. Though skeptical, Yeats began to write a series of letters to Africanus, as well as their replies. He notes in his séance diaries, "He asked me to write a letter addressed to him as if to Africa giving all my doubts about spiritual things and then to write a reply as if from him to me. He would control me in this reply so that it would be really from him" (A, 13). These letters, only recently published, indicate the centrality of Africanus to Yeats's poetic and philosophical project. His discovery that the sixteenth-century Moor was "a poet among his people" (A, 19) proved irresistible to such a lover of the dialectic, and Yeats quickly adopted Leo as his antiself or daimon, an objectively existing spirit figure which came to replace his earlier concept of mask. Africanus was the poet's counter-personality: "He was drawn to me because in life he had been all undoubting impulse . . . I was doubting, conscientious and timid. His contrary and by association with me would be made not one but two perfect natures" (A, 13). This esoteric formulation proved central to Yeats's artistic project, as [End Page 1019] well as to his somewhat obfuscated theory of mind. Moreover, it involved a four-hundred-year-old dead African in the development of an Irish national identity and struggle for self-government. John C. Hawley has noted a certain transhistorical potential in the adoption of Africanus as a figure who denies a simple colonialist monologic: "What he endured, how he portrayed his adventures and how they have, in turn, been portrayed by others, offers some suggestive angles of vision on the more recent adventurers who have crossed borders or found themselves adrift across cultures."2 By this token, Edward Said, following Seamus Deane's positioning of Yeats as a participant in a culture of resistance, has usefully outlined the Irish poet's similarly liminal status: He shares with Caribbean and some African writers the predicament of a common language with the colonial overlord, and of course he belongs in many important ways to the Protestant Ascendancy whose Irish loyalties, to put it mildly, were confused.3 Interestingly, Said proceeds to account for the more esoteric nature of Yeats's poetry in terms of this highly fraught political identification: For Yeats the overlappings he knew existed between his Irish nationalism and the English cultural heritage that both dominated and empowered him as a writer were bound to cause an overheated tension, and it is the pressure of this urgently political and secular tension that one may speculate caused him to try to resolve it on a "higher," that is, non-political level.4 The problem here is that Said involves Yeats's eccentric mysticism in his resolution of this schism in his political identity, but strangely manages to view the product as "non-political." Furthermore, he fails to note that...

Karen Jochelson, The colour of disease: syphilis and racism in South Africa, 1880–1950, St Antony's Series, Basingstoke, Palgrave in association with St Antony's College, Oxford, 2001, pp. xii, 248, £55.00 (hardback 0-333-74044-0).

This is an impressive study of the incidence of venereal disease (VD) in South Africa during a period of seventy years and official and medical efforts to control it. Drawing upon a wealth of original sources found in municipal, provincial and national archives, Karen Jochelson delineates the construction of racial identity in modern South Africa through medical and scientific discourses. In doing so, she demonstrates that the process of defining disease and disease carriers as medical problems is inherently political, meaning embedded in broader contested processes of political, economic and social change. Therefore her study is valuable to scholars concerned with the analysis of epidemics in South Africa specifically and the history of medicine generally. Jochelson uses a blend of political economy and social constructionism to present a history of the causes and cures for VD, and, more significantly, to restore the disease to its social and historical context. The study links the spread of VD among the majority African population to socio-economic processes such as conquest, land dispossession, poverty, migrancy, urbanization and industrialization, which were devastating to African societies and disrupted their social networks and stable sexual relationships. At the same time it explores the myriad ways that VD and suspected carriers were constructed, demonstrating how concerns about wider social changes were reflected in the perception of potential VD carriers. For example, Africans and “half castes” were viewed as disease spreaders at a time of increasing racial interaction in cities, as were white and black urban women who were rapidly gaining relative economic independence from their patriarchal families. According to Jochelson, fears about both VD and the marginalized segments of society considered responsible for its spread may have reflected “wider fears about social and moral disorder, rather than a real increase in the incidence of disease” (p. 4). The first chapter is especially effective in demonstrating the intimate relationship between massive social changes and socially constructed medical knowledge in the perception and response to VD. In the 1880s there was an epidemic of syphilis among Africans that most doctors assumed was venereal syphilis, which is sexually transmitted. But Jochelson argues that the epidemic at this time was actually endemic syphilis, an indigenous disease related to venereal syphilis but transmitted through unhygienic working and living conditions such as those to which Africans were subjected in urban centres. She explains how predominant scientific racist ideas about African sexuality in combination with the decline of assimilationist ideology shaped the emergence of erroneous medical perceptions of this epidemic. Subsequent chapters trace how assumptions about African sexuality and physiology, and the hardening of segregationist ideology, led to racially differentiated health services for poverty-stricken sufferers of VD during the course of the twentieth century. They also discuss doctors' anxiety about the prevalence of the disease among the mainly Afrikaans-speaking “poor whites” and how it reflected fears about the fragility of white political supremacy. The colour of disease will be greatly appreciated by readers concerned with the practice and politics of medicine in South Africa, not least because the study of the history of disease in that country is still, as the author herself points out, relatively uncharted territory. At the same time, medical historians in other national contexts may find this book frustrating at times, for it is clearly aimed at an audience that has sophisticated knowledge about South Africa. Jochelson's account of the penetration of VD from urban to rural areas, for example, assumes a great deal of familiarity with South Africa's geography—there are no maps—and political history, for place names shift from Afrikaans to English and from pre- and post-Union without explanation. For example, she uses the names Transvaal, the South African Republic and its Afrikaans acronym ZAR, and Gauteng to refer to the same region within the country, names that denote major political developments during the past century and a half. But without maps or chronologies to which to turn for clarification, readers who are unfamiliar with the country's history may find themselves confused. Yet the book's methodological innovation will impress researchers seeking explication of the inseparability of biology and politics in the making of, and response to, epidemic disease. Most notably, the work provides a framework for contextualizing the AIDS pandemic currently ravaging South Africa (indeed much of sub-Saharan Africa) for, as the book's conclusion makes explicit, the contemporary AIDS disaster bears striking similarities to venereal disease in both the material basis of its transmission and the racist response of the white minority.

On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction (review)

Reviewed by: On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction L. Christie Rockwell On Fertile Ground: A Natural History of Human Reproduction, by Peter T. Ellison. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. 358 pp. $19.95 (paperback). On Fertile Ground begins with two starkly contrasting tales of childbirth, one in the African jungle of the Congo basin, the other in the urban jungle of the American Northeast. However, it is not simply the cultural and environmental context that distinguishes these stories. They also represent extremes in a biological continuum of human birth experiences. We first read of an Efe pygmy woman in the Congo who prematurely delivered twin sons following a brief labor. Both babies die. Surprisingly, it is their births, not their deaths, that trouble the woman and her community; folk wisdom recognizes that twin births are not the norm. In contrast, the birth of the author's son in a Boston hospital was successful after 24+ hours of labor, epidural pain relief for the mother, an attempt to assist the delivery using forceps, and finally a cesarean section, which was necessary because of pelvic-cephalic incompatibility. This birth illustrates the ability of medical technology to alter the process of natural selection. From this captivating foundation, the book develops as a narrative of the proximate (physiological) and ultimate (evolutionary) causes of the operational details of human reproductive physiology. Ellison's premise is that selection on the reproductive system must be particularly strong because variation in reproductive function is often directly linked to variation in reproductive success (pp. 8–9). Ellison portrays the ovary as the central figure in the female reproductive system. The female gonad is attuned, he argues, to the energetic status of the mother such that ovulation is less likely when available energy is inadequate, thereby preventing the woman from becoming pregnant. Ellison not only explores how metabolism affects ovarian physiological function but also suggests why such responsiveness of the female reproductive system to energetics influenced the direction of human evolutionary history. The concepts are illustrated by the review of numerous studies over the course of nine chapters, each written to direct the reader's attention to a particular phase or component of the human reproductive life cycle. Each chapter is punctuated with select black-and-white photographs that evoke the human lives and experiences that Ellison seeks to explain, and this contributes to the appealing [End Page 947] presentation of the material. The level of detail with which reproductive physiology is explained makes this an excellent reference for anthropologists who ordinarily may limit their pursuit of reductionist explanations. Furthermore, this knowledge is essential to Ellison's ability to rephrase some of the most intriguing questions that have been raised in the field over the past decade, such as those regarding the evolution of menstruation and menopause. His approach is unusual and valuable because the proximate and ultimate causes of the reproductive phenomena under investigation are so well integrated. In the first chapter, "Two Births," endocrine physiology is introduced. Ellison likens the action of hormones, molecular messengers, to a lock and key in order to describe how important the hormone receptors located on target tissues are to the effect of hormonal signals. Both protein [e.g., follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH)] and steroid hormones (e.g., estrogens, progestins, and androgens) figure prominently in the succeeding chapters, and the introduction to their function in the first chapter is useful. In the second chapter, "Surviving the First Cut," the drama of fertilization and implantation of the conceptus in the uterine endometrium is reviewed. Here, Ellison directs our attention to the reasons that early pregnancy is so risky. For one thing, the mother's body mounts an immunological response to the conceptus, a foreign body. It is genetically distinct from the mother because of the presence of paternally derived genes. A second factor that influences the risk of early pregnancy loss is the quality of the endometrium. Therefore the cycle of growth, degeneration (including menstruation), and renewal of the human endometrium is explained in the context of implantation. The chapter concludes with a review of two prominent papers on the evolution of menstruation originally published in...

Postcolonialising Geography: Tactics and Pitfalls

The moves within postcolonial theory to “provincialise Europe” encourage an acknowledgement of the parochial nature of much of what still passes for universal theory in the western academy. Within geography, postcolonialism has generated a strong interest in colonial histories and contemporary postcolonial politics, but this has not displaced the dominant parochial forms of theorising in the discipline. The paper argues for a more cosmopolitan theoretical project within geography, one whose routes through a range of intellectual traditions and contexts might encourage a broader scope to conversations about space and nature, and produce more lively and creative insights into some of the urgent political issues facing the world today. A geography whose intellectual vision is limited to the concerns and perspectives of the richest countries in the world has little hope of effectively participating in the debates that will matter in the twenty‐first century. Within the frame of this long‐term intellectual project, this paper will suggest some initial practical steps which researchers, writers, teachers and students in geography might take to start to decentre the predominant Euro‐Americanism of the discipline. The specific sources of inspiration for this argument are drawn from comparative urbanism and Southern African geography.

Learning to Manage Global Environmental Risks, vols. 1 & 2. By The Social Learning Group. Edited by William C. Clark, Nancy Dickson, Jill Jäger, and Josee van Eijndhoven. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Vol. 1: $75.00 cloth, $30.00 paper. Vol. 2: $60.00 cloth, $27.00 paper.

I have a colleague who collects maps of Africa that demonstrate a specific phenomenon: the developed world's unlearning of African geography. Across the centuries, the maps seem to show that mapmakers know less about the geography of the African continent—particularly the internal parts—than previously was the case. Rivers change direction; mountain ranges disappear. This unlearning, my colleague argues, comes from notions about the acceptability of sources of information previously used. These maps show the social nature of “learning,” the idea that while in many cases there may be actual answers (after all, African geography exists), what information you look for, and from whom, determines how you will view the information you get, and ultimately what you will do with it.

FROM APARTHEID APOLOGISM TO POST-APARTHEID NEO-LIBERALISM: PARADIGM SHIFTS IN SOUTH AFRICAN URBAN GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT This paper presents an overview and review of trends in South African urban geography. The paper will reveal that until recently, the Eurocentric dominance was very evident in urban geography. Initially the sub-discipline served to legitimate the apartheid status quo. In the 1980s a new generation of radical scholars began to challenge the Eurocentric hegemony, calling for de-colonisation and the development of an indigenous approach to geography. By the early 1990s urban geographers were contributing to reconstruction, development and planning in a non-racial democracy. Many urban researchers became policy makers and consultants to the government and this inevitably led to a decline in critical scholarship At the turn of the century a new breed of critical scholars were challenging the neoliberal urban strategies in the fledgling democracy.

THE ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY OF SOUTH AFRICA: INTERNATIONAL PARALLELS AND LOCAL DIFFERENCE

ABSTRACT This paper provides a review of the state of the art of research produced by South Africa's small pool of economic geographers. The focus is particularly on current debates and research in local economic geography which has been produced in the last decade (post-1990) covering the period of the post-apartheid transition and beyond. Three broad sections of review and analysis are presented. These deal with the themes of economic drivers, the state and the changing space economy; enterprise studies; and, so-termed economic geography in practice or research issues on local economic development in South Africa. The review of local economic geography is located in the context of international research noting certain parallels and differences. The strength of local economic development studies and of a broad policy relevant emphasis in research emerge as distinguishing features of contemporary South African economic geography writings.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRESS AND SOUTH AFRICAN GEOGRAPHY

ABSTRACT The question of how much progress has been made in any sphere of life calls for the interrogation of both the meanings and measurements of progress. This applies to discussions on ‘progress’ made by scientific disciplines. For a discipline such as geography, which stands at the confluence of philosophies of science, evaluating progress is a complex undertaking. Nevertheless, philosophies of progress could possibly highlight the ebbs and flows of the discipline. In this paper, I appropriate one of the many versions of the philosophies of progress to assess the achievements and shortcomings of South African geography over the last three decades. The paper concludes that, while the influence of mainstream geography cannot be discounted, local political environments have profound impact on the twists and turns of local geography.

POPULATION GEOGRAPHY IN SOUTH AFRICA

ABSTRACT This paper is a review of contemporary population geography issues in South Africa. It examines the nature, character, methodologies and significance of this sub-discipline in the study of geography by exploring the publications of South African geographers since the dawn of the twentieth century. The study shows that colonial and apartheid policies had such an impact on the development of the South African space economy that, although local geographers made valuable contributions on regional population studies in academic journals, population geography is generally still in its infancy in South Africa. The establishment of the democratic political dispensation in 1994 coupled with international concern about population, environment and development, generated an increasing interest in population studies in South Africa. The paper demonstrates the necessity for a closer collaboration between population geography and other allied development disciplines. Population geography is increasingly being recognized in South African institutions of higher learning as a subject of universal, pragmatic and practical value.

GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT IN SOUTH AFRICA

In the last decade, environmental management has emerged as an exciting and relevant sub-discipline of geography in South Africa in line with global trends. The paper examines the relationship between geography and environmental management in South Africa; the role that geographer's are playing in this discipline; and the future of this relationship. The paper identifies eleven themes in the environmental management literature in South Africa and suggests that geography plays a crucial role in providing the theoretical foundation for the more applied paradigm of environmental management. It is proposed that South African geographers need to develop new approaches that challenge the status quo and lead to social, environmental and ecological justice.

?When Hearts Beat Like Native Drums:? Music and the Sexual Dimensions of the Notions of ?Savage? and ?Civilized? inTarzan and His Mate, 1934.

Since the advent of sound in film, music has provided a vital counterpoint to the stunning visuals and electrifying action of Hollywood productions. Offering more than a tangential backdrop of auditory color, music plays a significant role in creating and defining the images portrayed in film. Though the part music plays in shaping these images is often overlooked, its powerful influence on the North American general public's understanding of peoples, places, and ideas as they are constructed by Hollywood cannot be underestimated. Of the many Hollywood films made about Africa, perhaps the Tarzan films are some of the most pervasive in creating stereotyped notions of African peoples, geography, and social organization. An examination of the portrayal of Africa and Africans in one of the Tarzan films provides a window into how music has been used to generate these stereotypes and calls into question the degree to which these (mis)conceptions, under the same or different guises, have survived into the twenty-first century.

Remembering Mary, Shaping Revolt: Reconsidering the Stono Rebellion

ON SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1739, SIXTY-ODD SOUTH CAROLINA SLAVES took up arms and revolted, killing, as one terrified contemporary styled it, twenty-three Whites after the most cruel and barbarous Manner.(1) While there is no direct testimony regarding the insurgents' motives in the Stono rebellion, an analysis of some hitherto unexamined sources, bolstered by logic, forensic reconstruction, and a detailed understanding of the insurgents' and Catholic background, as well as by recent historical work by colonial specialists and Africanists, may offer an answer to a neglected question: Why did the slaves revolt on the particular Sunday of September 9, 1739? The answer has implications beyond the immediate concern of chronology, for it highlights the importance of the rebels' memories of Catholicism generally and of the Kongolese veneration of the Virgin Mary specifically--memories that not only prove to have been crucial factors in the insurgents' timing and iconographic shaping of the rebellion, but that also have broader consequences for historians of eighteenth-century American slavery. This article will carefully examine the timing of the Stono rebellion in order to better reconceptualize and reevaluate our understanding of acculturation in colonial North America. Stono's timing and religious geography expose the shortcomings of an older debate on the extent to which transplanted slaves retained elements of their African culture, and they also lend credence to recent work that examines the historically specific ways in which Africans who had already been exposed to Europeans prior to their forced relocation to the New World incorporated aspects of this culture into their own cosmologies. This more recent emphasis helps avoid an essentialist and temporally static notion of what is or is not African and instead allows for the possibility that pre-enslavement, European-African contact might have helped shaped cultural systems and values in the context of New World slavery. The interpretation offered here helps us move beyond the familiar and unhelpful binary established years ago in the debates between Melville J. Herskovits and E. Franklin Frazier, as well as some of their subsequent supporters and detractors. Herskovits and his followers stressed the continuity of broadly conceived West culture in shaping Afro-American values under slavery, particularly in the Caribbean and South America. While certainly important for alerting historians, anthropologists, and ethnographers to enslaved Americans' retention of West culture under New World slavery, Herskovits's model was too static and sweeping, as several subsequent critics have pointed out. Because it paid insufficient attention to change over time within specific pre-enslaved societies, Herskovits's argument tended to slight and simplify the process of cultural exchange and syncretism between Africans and European colonizers. In this context it makes little sense to talk of Africanisms and retentions in the New World without understanding how Africans adapted, rejected, or accommodated elements of European colonizers' culture prior to their forced relocation to the Americas.(2) Work by Stanley M. Elkins and Jon Butler notwithstanding, subsequent scholars tended to support Herskovits's broad conclusions while avoiding the pitfalls of his model. Historical and, especially, anthropological studies by Lorenzo Turner, Norman Whitten and John Szwed, and Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price refined Herskovits's work by showing that Africanisms survived in the New World (the Caribbean particularly) in a bewildering array of forms, including family, kinship, language, and ethnic identity. Mintz and Price offered a more sophisticated interpretation of African-European cultural exchange, not least because they were rightly sensitive to change over time and the specificity of geography and identities.(3) In the past thirty years, historians of the American colonial and antebellum South have further refined our understanding of the ways that cultural identities survived and adapted in the New World. …

The shifting sand of geography in South Africa

South African geography, like other subjects, has to undergo the arduous process of curriculum change in order to meet the demands of the new education system and to contribute to a broader agenda of national reconstruction. Changes within geography can shed light on the impact and implications of the new national curriculum on teaching subjects. The paper suggests that the introduction of environmental education into Curriculum 2005 offers geography educators the opportunity and the challenge to advance geographic knowledge.

The shifting sand of geography in South Africa

South African geography, like other subjects, has to undergo the arduous process of curriculum change in order to meet the demands of the new education system and to contribute to a broader agenda of national reconstruction. Changes within geography can shed light on the impact and implications of the new national curriculum on teaching subjects. The paper suggests that the introduction of environmental education into Curriculum 2005 offers geography educators the opportunity and the challenge to advance geographic knowledge.

TANZANIA'S NEW POLITICAL REGIONALISM AND INTRODUCTORY GEOGRAPHY'S PORTRAYAL OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

ABSTRACT Regionalism in Tanzania's recent transition to multi-party politics is examined as a means of interrogating themes from political geography as they appear in introductory geography textbooks from North America. The textbooks are used as examples of broader popular perceptions and representations of Southern Africa in North America generally. Although Tanzania would appear from textbooks to have a high potential for divisive regionalism, the evidence from Tanzania itself instead suggests that geography textbooks, like widespread Western media accounts of Southern African politics, can be misleading as sources for interpretive tools about African affairs. Given what these textbooks suggest about Tanzania and Southern Africa, it is apparent that basic ideas conveyed to introductory students in North America, as a subset of the Western public at large, about African political geography require reconsideration, especially given the dramatic decade of transition since 1990.

AN ANALYSIS OF GEOGRAPHY TEACHER EDUCATORS' PERCEPTIONS OF CURRICULUM 2005

ABSTRACT The implementation of Curriculum 2005 and outcomes-based education within the South African education system is posing a considerable challenge to geography teachers and teacher educators. Many fear that the place of geography in the school curriculum is under severe threat and that much more than the name ‘geography’ will be lost as geography content is fragmented across different learning areas. This paper explores the feelings, concerns and plans for action of leading South African geography educators as they prepare to face these challenges. The insights emerging from the analysis of in-depth interview material will, it is hoped, contribute to clarifying the issues and illuminating the way forward.

GEOGRAPHY EDUCATORS' PERCEPTIONS OF TEACHING ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION IN SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLS

ABSTRACT The relationship between geography and environmental education, as perceived by South African geography educators, is explored in this study which was conducted as part of an international survey of geography teachers and teachers educators. Overall, South African geography educators strongly support the teaching of environmental education through school geography, particularly with regard to the development of environmental awareness, environmental knowledge and environmental attitudes. Less support is given to encouraging students' active commitment to and participation in environmental causes. South African geographers are more open to the idea of formal linkages between environmental education and geography education than their international counterparts, however, their overuse of teacher-centred instructional methods may hinder their attempts to address goals of environmental education. The need to place greater emphasis on student-centred teaching methods such as fieldwork and student action in and for the environmental is indicated. Such approaches will be suited to the new emphasis on outcomes-based education in South African schools.

WHERE HAS ALL THE GEOGRAPHY GONE? A SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVIST PERSPECTIVE OF CURRICULUM 2005

ABSTRACT The apparently tenuous position of geography in Curriculum 2005 suggests the need to reassess the nature and role of geographical education for the South African learner. The new curriculum is designed to provide a general education experience and this paper therefore considers geography's role within this framework. In so doing it raises questions that impact on the view we take of geography within Curriculum 2005 and explores the implications for teaching and learning within this educational band. For many learners in South Africa geography is seen as little more than ‘book knowledge’. Not only has the content been de-contextualised from the learner's reality, but also the method of learning is largely dependent on the rote learning of a frightening array of facts from a single textbook or teacher designed notes. However, the learner-centred approach adopted by Curriculum 2005 creates considerable possibilities for the development of geographical understanding in the sense of making meaning, problem solving and the development of creative and critical thinking. The situation of geographical education in the GET band of Curriculum 2005 presents geography educators and teacher educators with considerable challenges and demands a radical shift in perspective in terms of what constitutes geographical knowledge in this band as well as its acquisition. The paper argues that a social constructivist approach within the ‘new’ systems theory, creates possibilities for learners to acquire the conceptual understanding, skills, values and attitudes needed as a foundation for further learning in geography and to enable them to function effectively and responsibly in space-place and time.