Maps and the Shaping of the Image of Africa or How the Non-Existent Mount Kong Lies in Poland

• In Event: Law, Landscapes, and Legitimacy: Polish Professionals and the Conquest of Africa

Abstract

Until the 1920s, Polish schoolchildren used a map of Africa that differed significantly from their European counterparts. The map in question—authored by Jozef Michal Bazewicz, one of the best-known Polish map publishers at that time—, in its depiction of West African regions, assigned strikingly a prominent position to Mount Kong, a mount that as non-existent, disappeared already in the 1890s from the European maps. On the Polish map in use in the late 1920s, however, Mount Kong still found its imaginary place. One might ask why the author, given the new state of knowledge, did not update his knowledge of Africa. Or, as I will do in this paper, what such an account reveals about the Polish discourse on Africa, on the one hand, and about the Polish (colonial) tradition of mapping Africa, on the other.
Maps are mimetic instruments of power, enabling their authors to assert territorial claims or reinforce certain political images. They reflect the moral and rational integrity and worldview of their authors and are products of translation and intercultural encounters; in the Polish case not only African-Polish, but mostly intra-European encounters. Polish cartographers, who shifted their belongings and (colonial) imaginaries between the three empires (Prussia, Russia, and Habsburg) and later the independent Polish state, were part of the narratives and traditions that oscillated between these spaces in which the images of Africa were generated. Beginning with Stefan Szolc-Rogozinski, his expeditions to Cameroon, and the first independent Polish naming of African landscapes inspired by him, through Bazewicz’s map and beyond until the 1960s, this paper looks at the different modes of Polish cartographic representations of Africa over the years, discussing their colonial elements and legacies and their impact on shaping images and narratives of what and how Africa was represented in Polish culture.

Author

• Justyna Aniceta Turkowska, U of Bielefeld (Germany)