the original whitey keeping darky down

While i was putting together my file for my recent performance review, i was alerted to this article about the website i worked on at Northwestern before i told them to stick dat job and shove it. (If my review goes through and they keep me around dis joint collecting dust, my pay in July will have gone up $26K since i was at NU just a year and half ago, living on what i could forage from Evanston alleys and dumpsters...but i digress...oh, yeah, have i told you how much NU SUCKS? If there was a way Henry Bienen could get away with not paying anyone anything, with no benefits, if that's what the market dictates, he would...oooh, what a further digressment...) Oh yeah, a couple of stories like this came out about the same time, also in the international press. The American press? Not so much.

The Independent: Lost worlds
Independent, The (London, England) - January 12, 2007
Author: Ed Caesar
Joseph Conrad notes, in Heart of Darkness, that "the conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much." Conrad's celebrated novella was set against the backdrop of Europe's "scramble for Africa", when its conquest seemed - as it had done for centuries - a very pretty thing indeed. And in a series of 113 maps of Africa - dating from 1530 to 1915 and now available for download from Northwestern University's archives - all the romance and ignorance of Europe's developing relationship with Stan-ley's "dark continent" becomes clear. Because the early cartographers had never been to the places they were attempting to map, some of Northwestern's exhibits are a significant departure from reality. The Nile changes position any number of times, while mountains, lakes and other topographical features mutate like putty. But it is the names that leap out from the maps. One vainglorious example, from 1747, refers to the entirety of West Africa as "Negroland". Other maps, meanwhile, chart defunct civilisations - Dahomey (in what is now Benin); Abyssinia (in modern-day Ethiopia); and the southern empire of Monomotapa (now in Zimbabwe and Mozambique). The skill of the cartographers is undeniable. Indeed, in the luscious example here - drawn by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and published in Amsterdam in 1635 - the continent is rendered in minute, if inaccurate, detail. But the telling evidence of what is not yet known leaps from the page. Whereas Africa's coastline is peppered with place names and the mouths of rivers, much of the interior - particularly the area that is now Congo - is blank. Blaeu clearly considered white space a crime, and filled these gaps in European knowledge with friendly-looking beasts - a chubby elephant; an unthreatening lion; a cheeky monkey. What all these maps display is that the great powers to the north had conquered Africa long before white men stepped ashore and claimed the territory in person. In the simple act of charting and naming, the European imagination had already sliced up the continent. http://www.library.northwestern.edu/govinfo/collections/mapsofafrica/