HRAC Mapping and Representations of Class in Senegambia

The “mapping” discerned in the Human Relations Area File layer for Africamap complicates issues of landscape and brings forth many larger questions about the usage of landscape.  Right off the bat we notice that most of these classifications cut across both man-made boundaries such as borders, and natural boundaries, such as rivers.  In this blog post, I will primarily be concerned with the division of man-made boundaries since it speaks to the extent to which man can alter the landscape.

Africamap: Map of Senegal and Gambia depicting class stratification

The layer I will focus on here is the class stratification layer.  When you look at a map of Senegambia with this layer in place, you immediately realize that there seems to be a pretty strong division between classes in the region. At first glance, the division appears to have no rhyme or reason; however upon closer inspection, we discern that the class divide is centered around the capital city of Dakar, Senegal.  This division immediately brings up issues of colonization.  Generally speaking, the most prosperous cities in Francophone Africa are coastal cities; these were cities were used as ports to transport goods (and oftentimes slaves as well) in and out from Europe and other places.  These cities, not coincidentally, became the capital cities in most of these countries and these socio-economic divisions still exist today.

The implications of this on landscape are enormous.  While the majority of Africa remains rural, there has been a shift towards urbanization in the latter part of the past century.  The divide between urban and rural, however, is still enormous, with most state resources being focused on capital cities and not much else outside of that.  The rural people of Senegal maintain agriculture as their main source of income transforming the landscape over and over as they learn new strategies of farming and stick ardently to others.

Africamap Overview

Africamap has certainly shaped my conception of the African continent since it is my first real exposure to issues in Africa.  I think that the geographically based approach that Africamap takes in terms of organizing data is particularly helpful since it allows you to immediately situate things in space and time.  I think that the tool is useful though not incredibly accessible, since it requires the user to a) have some previous guidance in terms of figuring out how it works, and b) know something about the issue they’re interested in studying to really make full use of the resource.  In my opinion, it serves more as a tool to reaffirm or discover new aspects about issues that one is already researching than as an entry point to research.  In this sense, I found Africamap increasingly more useful as the semester went along.  As you begin to narrow your field of focus, it becomes much easier to understand what you're looking for and how to use Africamap to find it.  One aspect of Africamap that I found really cool was how you can have different feeds from websites such as Picasa or Youtube.  This injects your research with an interesting multimedia approach that academic work sometimes lack.  The idea that you can use media sharing websites in scholarly work is a relatively new one, but is certainly fruitful and can lead to many interesting insights.