Matt and I love maps. We are big nerds who spend hours getting lost in geography games on Sporcle and Geoguesser. Whenever we make our way over to DC's Eastern Market we stop at small white tent to thumb through boxes of antique maps. Several weeks ago we came across one we couldn't pass up. We found an 1872 map from "Mitchell's New General Atlas" entitled "Map of Africa Showing its Most Recent Discoveries".
The map is in great condition with a lot of detail along the coasts of the continent but swaths of blank spaces in the middle. Of course we looked to see what it said about the land we now call Zambia and found this: unknown interior. My first, very Social Studies teacher thought was "unknown to whom?". Surely it was only a blank space to the American cartographer; people who had lived there for generations must have known it quite well. Livingstone had explored the area by 1872 but the British would still take a few years to grant the land to Cecil Rhodes, who would become its namesake for several decades. Before the West called it Northern Rhodesia, Zambia was simply referred to as "unknown interior".
The map is in great condition with a lot of detail along the coasts of the continent but swaths of blank spaces in the middle. Of course we looked to see what it said about the land we now call Zambia and found this: unknown interior. My first, very Social Studies teacher thought was "unknown to whom?". Surely it was only a blank space to the American cartographer; people who had lived there for generations must have known it quite well. Livingstone had explored the area by 1872 but the British would still take a few years to grant the land to Cecil Rhodes, who would become its namesake for several decades. Before the West called it Northern Rhodesia, Zambia was simply referred to as "unknown interior".
I had decided long before we acquired the map that I wanted to learn more about this land and its people. However, I reluctantly acknowledged that Zambia remained an unknown to me. In my last post I mentioned having difficulty finding information about the place but have recently had better luck with my research. I started with a fantastic, brutally honest, memoir written by a British-born, African-raised woman called Don't Let Us Go to the Dogs Tonight. Her story unfolds during her childhood in the 1960s and 1970s at the time when African countries shrugged off their colonial rulers. Her family were farmers, convinced that they had rights to the land because of their "European superiority" and better agricultural techniques. She does not shy away from including her parents' racist views but presents them as historical fact. She talks about her connection to the land and her identity as a white African growing up in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia. It was a compelling read that I highly recommend. It helped me think about history and about how I can avoid falling into a colonial mindset.
I am also in the middle of two other books about the region - one fiction and one history. Both focus on British gentlemen who try to make a better life for themselves in southern Africa. In a 1914 letter mentioned in The Africa House by Christina Lamb, Stewart Gore-Browne wrote: "It was all so magical that I felt I had entered a fairy kingdom". He was enchanted by the untouched beauty of the land where big game roamed and the Earth was rumored to be filled with gems.
It is interesting how outsiders write about Africa as an exotic place full of magic and mystery. I must admit that despite my knowledge and disdain of colonialism I feel the same way. I find it fascinating to imagine bustling cities with vast open lands full of giraffes and elephants just an hour's drive away. I am excited to see it for myself so I can conceive of the two worlds existing side by side. To a certain extent, places you have never been are unknown. That is what I find so exciting about travel: I am slowly filling in those blank spaces on my own map.
