Geography Of Africa Research Articles

IS GEOGRAPHY GOING PLACES?

ABSTRACT During the past two decades the British education system has undergone extensive changes and this has ushered in changes and new perspectives on the nature and place of Geography education in schools. This paper raises some of the issues that have faced geographical education in the UK and describes some of the strategies that UK geographical bodies have adopted in an attempt to strengthen the position of Geography at all levels in the education system. In so doing, it raises the question, ‘What is the likely future of Geography as a discipline in its own right in South African schools, colleges and universities?’ It is suggested that in post-apartheid South Africa it should not be difficult to make a strong case for Geography in the context of Curriculum 2005, and The Society of South African Geographers has a crucial role to play in this. The key to success will be ongoing dialogue and action among the entire geographical community. In the ‘new’ South Africa, Geography can play a vital role in areas such as development and environmental education, as well as promoting an understanding of social and cultural patterns and processes, all of which are highly topical in the South African context.

Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World's Fair, 1939–1940

On April 30, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the New York World's Fair open. Moments later a flood of eager humanity surged onto the one-and-a-quarter thousand acre former municipal dump in Flushing Meadow, Queens, now home to what the New York Herald Tribune termed “the mightiest exposition ever conceived and built by man.” While Europe shivered on the brink of a war, the United States focused its attention on the distinctive silhouette of a seven hundred foot spire and a globe two hundred feet wide: the “Trilon” and the “Perisphere,” centerpieces and emblems of the New York World's Fair. The fair stretched around their base in a teeming sprawl of concrete and electric lights. Its precincts embraced all manner of amusements, including a vast funfair with such thematic attractions as a Cuban village, an African jungle, and a Merrie England area. While most of the visitors seemed intent on enjoying themselves, the fair was intended by its organizers to serve a serious educative purpose. Its theme was “building the world of tomorrow,” with two-thirds of the fair ground given over to exhibitions by corporations, U.S. federal agencies, and foreign governments. The fair's corporate exhibitors vied with each other for the most spectacular vision of what this world might be. General Motors offered the “Futurama” exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes, in which 28,000 visitors a day traveled on a conveyor belt ride through a projection of the American landscape forward twenty-five years, to a Utopia liberated by the automobile. In a similar vein, inside the Perisphere visitors could view a diorama of a future metropolis, “Democracity.” But popular acclaim lay elsewhere.

The Physical Geography of Africa

1 c Tectonics, Geology, and Long-Term Landscape Development: M. A. Summerfield: . 2: C. Nyamweru: The African Rift System. 3: A. S. Goudie: Climate: Past and Present. 4: S. Nicholson: Environmental Change within the Historical Period. 5: M. Hulme: Climate Change within the Period of Meteorological Records. 6: D. E. Walling: Hydrology and Rivers. 7: W. M. Adams: Lakes. 8: O. Areola: Soils. 9: A. S. Goudie: The Geomorphology of the Seasonal Tropics. 10: M. E. Meadows: Biogeography. 11: A. Grainger: Forest Environments. 12: M. E. Adams: Savanna Environments. 13: N. Lancaster: Desert Environments. 14: A. Orme: Coastal Environments. 15: F. M. R. Hughes: Wetlands. 16: D. Taylor: Mountains. 17: H. Allen: Mediterranean Environments. 18: M. Stocking: Soil Erosion. 19: A. Warren: Desertification. 20: N. Myers: Biodiversity and Biodepletion. 21: W. M. Adams: Conservation and Development. Index

The Physical Geography of Africa

The Physical Geography of Africa

Representing Africa: The Geography of Africa in World Trade, 1960-1992

Abstract One feature of the contemporary world situation about which there seems to be wide agreement is that “Africa” is in dire economic and political straits. There is disagreement only about why this is so. But many commentators agree, whatever their theoretical predelictions, that Africa's declining position within world trade is symptomatic of “the continent's problems.” This paper challenges this consensus by using a long time-series of data on Africa's trading patterns and questicning the geographical assumptions about Africa upon which the conventional wisdom is based.

FROM APARTHEID TO INTEGRATION: A ROLE FOR THE SOCIETY OF SOUTH AFRICAN GEOGRAPHERS

ABSTRACT The broad South African society is currently undergoing a major transformation process from its former apartheid mould to an envisaged integrated structure. Concomitant with the launch of the new democratic and non-racial South Africa, the community of geographers of this country followed suit when two former independent and separate academic organisations amalgamated to form one powerful national Society of South African Geographers in 1994—the year when the new post-apartheid South Africa was born. The founding of this new united Society acknowledged the context of two separate histories in co-existence for many years.

The Dialectic of the Familiar and the Unfamiliar: `The Jungle' in Early Slum Travel Writing

This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the `jungle' in its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the late Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of `the jungle' is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of explorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analogies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well as, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduction, growth and decay. This particular image of `the African jungle' was then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vice, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the Way Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre of cultural hegemony that can be called `the dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar'.

Commentaries

Commentaries

René Guillot's portrayal of the African jungle in children's books

Animals were the first to occupy the whole of the African jungle. They then imposed themselves as lords over men who came to settle later on in the jungle. Men borrowed lands from their animal sovereigns and made a pact with the animals. At first men faithfully fulfilled their contracts with the animals; but later some men failed to honour their contracts and they were punished. Throughout the animals’ reign the whole African jungle was in turmoil: men ravaged and plundered the forests; animals waged wars with animals; animals threatened the lives of other animals; and animals suffered under their own laws.

The postcolonial African state and development geography

One of several important changes that have taken place in Anglo-American human geography over the last two decades is the development of a radical political geography (Clark & Dear 1984, Harvey 1985, Johnston 1986, 1989, Short 1989, Taylor 1993a, b). This ‘new’ political geography has been largely confined to analyses of the role of the state in capitalist societies (Driver 1991). Although it has become common within development studies to recognise the centrality of the postcolonial state in generating and regulating economic and social processes, human geographers have paid little attention to the characteristics of postcolonial politics (some exceptions are: Blaut 1987, Corbridge 1988, Samatar 1989, Samatar & Samatar 1987, Slater 1989a, b. Watts 1984, 1987, Watts & Bassett 1985). This calls for some brief comments on radical political geography and those fields of development geography most likely to be concerned with postcolonial politics.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF POST‐COLONIAL AFRICA: SPACE, PLACE AND DEVELOPMENT IN SUB‐SAHARAN AFRICA (1960–93)1

ABSTRACTThis overview of human geographic studies of sub Saharan Africa begins with the contributions made by West European geographers to the colonial service, and the growing interest in post‐war ‘development’ and to the anti‐imperial movements in the late colonial period (1945–60). The paper provides an intellectual map of the contributions by European and African geographers to the broad array of development problems which emerged after 1960. North American geographers made significant contributions to the debate somewhat later, particularly in association with the growing involvement of U.S. development agencies in the 1970s. Particular emphasis is given to geographic studies in fields such as agrarian change, ecological degradation, industrialization, human mobility and patterns of urbanization and settlement.

The Discomforts of Distance: Post-Colonialism and South African Geography

Abstract Since the early 1980s, the intellectual decolonization of South African geography has wrought major changes in the practices, rhetoric and self–image of the dlscipline .One practleal result of this quest for a postcolonial geography has been a weakening of lines of contact and influence with the heartlands of geographical enterprise. Recently, geographers in the metropole have begun to engage with the fundamental challenge of postcolonial scholarship. This paper attempts to prepare the ground for a rapprochement between South African geography and postcolonialism. It argues that the recene history of South African intellectual life (includmg that of many geographers) provides an exemplary case of the struggle to construct a postcolonial knowledge. On the other hand, postcolonialism challenges South African geography to push the project of decolonization still further in the future.

South African geography and post-apartheid reconstruction

South African geography and post-apartheid reconstruction

Townscapes, townshapes, townships: Investigating experiences of urban South Africa through black art

The humanistic movement is poorly represented in South African geography. Minor excursions into the black urban environment as experiential place make almost exclusive use of literary material. Township art offers a wealth of images to extend this initiative into the visual realm and to deepen the local humanistic project in general. Its value lies partly in its documentation of black urban life and activities from an insideŕs perspective. More importantly, the evolution of township art from a medium for descriptive socialrealism towards an expression of urban consciousness and an ethos of resistance prefigures and commends a more socially relevant geographical investigation of indigenous qualitative material.

The Truth of Modest Realism

Central concepts of epistemology -knowledge, for example, or epistemic justification, or intellectual virtuederive in one way or another from that of truth. Assigning such a central role to truth makes one an externalist in epistemology. What is more, my externalism has a realist cast: the River Nile, the city of Khartoum, and the Mediterranean Sea are so related that the first flows from the second to the third, and does so independently of all beliefs, conventions, cultures, or conceptual schemes. Given only its meaning, the truth of my utterance about the Nile derives from a large and mindindependent feature of African geography. Moreover, when explorers and geographers, when astronauts and astronomers ply their trades, what drives them at least sometimes, at least to some degree, is just plain curiosity, the sheer desire to discover the truth in a certain realm, to find out the lay of the land, or of the heavens. Such a perspective on knowledge and reality comes quickly into conflict with ideas on truth currently on the market. Richard Rorty's new pragmatism, for example, embraces a noncognitivist account of truth, justification, and knowledge.

Une géographie africaine, pour quoi faire ?

African geography: to what ends?— Geography in Africa is still confined to its status as a mere subject taught in schools while remaining dominated by the colonial influence. Most researchers in geography are trained abroad and the continued presence of 'Africanist' geography hinders the emergence of genuine African geography. The latter is seeking its own identity by gradually freeing itself from the environmental approach the better to analyse spatial phenomena and the social processes of the production of space.

‘From the Best Authorities’: The Mountains of Kong in the Cartography of West Africa

This study goes beyond the ‘first and last appearance’ approach of cartographic historians to examine the social contexts in which the Kong Mountains were first depicted in and then eliminated from nineteenth-century maps of Africa. This history shows that the conventional periodization of the history of cartography into ‘decorative’ and ‘scientific’ phases is greatly exaggerated. We trace the mountains' origins to the geographer James Rennell and show how their purported existence served to support his arguments on the course of the Niger River at the turn of the nineteenth century. The enduring depiction of the Kong Mountains throughout the century illustrates the authoritative power of maps. This authority is based on the public's belief that cartographers are guided by an ethic of accuracy and are applying scientific procedures in mapmaking. Despite doubts about the existence of this mountain chain, the ‘extraordinary authority’ of maps helped to perpetuate an erroneous spatial image of West Africa until Binger's famous expedition in the late 1880s. With the publication of his travels and maps, Binger became the new authority on West African geography. His work altered the subsequent cartography of the region and substantially contributed to French empire-building.

The Liberal Studies Agenda vs. the Basic Education Agenda: Finding the Proper Balance

Abstract During the past few years, the idea of imparting to students a “liberal” education has attracted a great deal of attention. Considerable discussion has arisen over (1) the definition of “liberal” education, (2) its merits, and (3) the mechanism by which it would be imparted. Recently, much of the controversy has been resolved and academicians are now charged with the responsibility of putting the idea into practice. This paper uses the course Geography of Africa as an example of how the liberal education requirements can be fruitfully incorporated. In pursuit of this goal, the term “liberal education” is analyzed, its scope and objective(s) defined, and a model course proposed. The model course draws from ideas contained in a survey administered to the members of the Africa Speciality Group of the Association of American Geographers. Contained in the model course syllabi are suggested topics, key issues/themes, exercises, resource materials (films), outside readings, suggested textbooks, etc.

Race and Slavery in the Middle East, An Historical Enquiry

From before the days of Moses up through the 1960s, slavery was a fact of life in the Middle East. Pagans, Jews, Christians, and Muslims bought and sold at the slave markets for millennia, trading the human plunder of wars and slave raids that reached from the Russian steppes to the African jungles. But if the Middle East was one of the last regions to renounce slavery, how do we account for its--and especially Islam's--image of racial harmony? How did these long years of slavery affect racial relations? In Race and Slavery in the Middle East, Bernard Lewis explores these questions and others, examining the history of slavery in law, social thought, and practice over the last two millennia. With 24 rare and intriguing full-color illustrations, this fascinating study describes the Middle East's culture of slavery and the evolution of racial prejudice. Lewis demonstrates how nineteenth century Europeans mythologized the region as a racial utopia in debating American slavery. Islam, in fact, clearly teaches non-discrimination, but Lewis shows that prejudice often won out over pious sentiments, as he examines how Africans were treated, depicted, and thought of from antiquity to the twentieth century. If my color were pink, women would love me/But the Lord has marred me with blackness, lamented a black slave poet in Arabia over a millennium ago--and Lewis deftly draws from these lines and others the nuances of racial relations over time. Islam, he finds, restricted enslavement and greatly improved the lot of slaves--who included, until the early twentieth century, some whites--while blacks occasionally rose to power and renown. But abuses ring throughout the written and visual record, from the horrors of capture to the castration and high mortality which, along with other causes, have left few blacks in many Middle Eastern lands, despite centuries of importing African slaves. Race and Slavery in the Middle East illuminates the legacy of slavery in the region where it lasted longest, from the days of warrior slaves and palace eunuchs and concubines to the final drive for abolition. Illustrated with outstanding reproductions of striking artwork, it casts a new light on this critical part of the world, and on the nature and interrelation of slavery and racial prejudice.

The Politics of Trade Liberalization in Africa

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Politics of Trade Liberalization in AfricaHenry BienenHenry Bienen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Economic Development and Cultural Change Volume 38, Number 4Jul., 1990 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/451830 Views: 39Total views on this site Citations: 12Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1990 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Nils-Christian Bormann, Yannick I. Pengl, Lars-Erik Cederman, Nils B. Weidmann Globalization, Institutions, and Ethnic Inequality, International Organization 75, no.33 (Apr 2021): 665–697.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818321000096Adewole Musiliu Adeolu How Resource Endowment Affects Institution and Development: A Theoretical Analysis, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2017).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2896066Danielle Resnick, Finn Tarp, James Thurlow THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF GREEN GROWTH: CASES FROM SOUTHERN AFRICA, Public Administration and Development 32, no.33 (Jun 2012): 215–228.https://doi.org/10.1002/pad.1619Martha C. Johnson Lobbying for trade barriers: a comparison of poultry producers' success in Cameroon, Senegal and Ghana, The Journal of Modern African Studies 49, no.44 (Nov 2011): 575–599.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022278X11000486Nicolas van de Walle The Institutional Origins of Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa, Annual Review of Political Science 12, no.11 (Jun 2009): 307–327.https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.11.063006.092318Edward Addo, Robert Marshall Ghana’s non-traditional export sector: expectations, achievements and policy issues, Geoforum 31, no.33 (Aug 2000): 355–370.https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-7185(99)00049-4Richard Grant Economic Globalisation: Politics and Trade Policy in Ghana and Kenya, Geopolitics 4, no.11 (Jun 1999): 57–82.https://doi.org/10.1080/14650049908407637Richard Grant, John Agnew Representing Africa: The Geography of Africa in World Trade, 1960-1992, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 86, no.44 (Dec 1996): 729–744.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01774.xDerick W. Brinkerhoff, Nicolas P. Kulibaba Perspectives on participation in economic policy reform in Africa, Studies In Comparative International Development 31, no.33 (Sep 1996): 123–151.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02738991 Bibliographie, (Jan 1996): 279–321.https://doi.org/10.3917/kart.hibou.1996.01.0279Nicolas Van De Walle Political liberation and economic policy reform in Africa, World Development 22, no.44 (Apr 1994): 483–500.https://doi.org/10.1016/0305-750X(94)90106-6Yilma Gebremariam Obstacles to trade liberalization and economic cooperation among west African states, Journal of International Development 5, no.11 (Jan 1993): 79–92.https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.3380050105