What is Africa to me? The regional representation of Africa in undergraduate Geography of Africa textbooks, 1953 to 2004

1. What is Africa to me?The regional representation of Africa in undergraduate Geography of Africa textbooks, 1953 to 2004 Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Ghana Geographical Association, 7-10 September, 2005 Akosombo International School, Akosombo, Ghana

2. Purpose and method • Purpose: • To understand how and why geographers have regionalized Africa in the past. • To create a better regionalization for use in Cole and de Blij (2006) Survey of Africa: A Regional Geography, Oxford University Press. • Method: • Forty-two English-language texts were examined. • All regionalizations were mapped. • The rationale for regionalization was found in the text or inferred if not made explicit by the author.

3. Regionalization • Process of dividing the earth or an area of the earth’s surface into smaller, more homogeneous, units for close analysis (breaking down). • Process of grouping like units into larger units (building up). • The character and uniformity of subsequent regions depend on what criteria are used for the grouping.

4. Results • Thirteen “systematic” texts treated Africa without regionalization. • One systematic text mentioned 4 regions but neither put forward any rationale for the regions nor used the regions in any way to organize the text. • Twenty-eight texts regionalized the continent. • Number of regions ranged from 4 to 12. • The mean number of regions was 7.5. • The geographic extent of regions was highly variable. • Rationales for each regionalization scheme were equally variable. • To a limited extent almost every “regional” text treated the entire continent is a “systematic” way.

5. 14 Texts that contained no regionalization * An entirely systematic text that merely mentioned that Africa has 4 “regions.”

6. 28 Texts that regionalized Africa

7. Authors represented Africa as a world region (realm) in one of three ways • Continental Africa. • Sub-Saharan Africa. • Tropical Africa.

8. The continent, Subsaharan Africa, and authors

9. The African Tropics and authors

10. The regional geographies • A total of 60 different names were used to identify the regions of Africa. • Three basic concepts were identifiable from the region names. • The authors employed a wide variety of regionalization schemes as well.

11. Three regionalization concepts were observable in the names of the 60 regions

12. Frequently-used names for regions

13. Regions identified by <10% of authors

14. Regionalizations 1953-1964

15. Regionalizations 1964-1967

16. Regionalizations 1967-1972

17. Regionalizations 1974-1988

18. Regionalizations 1990-2003

19. The regionalization concepts over time

20. Overview of regional texts 21.4% agreed with this definition of West Africa 25% agreed with this definition of Southern Africa 32% agreed with this definition of East Africa 10.7% agreed with this definition of West Africa 42.9% agreed with this definition of East Africa 17.8% identified this group as a region but called it Central, Equatorial, Equatoria, or Congo Basin and Cameroon 21.4% identified this group as a region but called it Central, Equatorial, or West Central Africa Stamp 1953 Suggate 1957 Harrison-Church 1964 Kimble 1960 Sillery 1961 Kingsnorth 1962 de Blij 1964 Mountjoy & Embleton 1967 Hodder & Harris 1967 Fordham 1965 Hance 1965 Fitzgerald 1967 Hance 1967 Grove 1967 Harrison-Church 1977 Stamp & Morgan 1972 Coysh Tomlinson 1974 Best & de Blij 1977 Pollock 1968 Prothero 1969 Pritchard 1971 Mountjoy & Hilling 1988 Chapman & Baker 1994 Aryeetey -Attoh 2003 Boateng 1978 Udo 1982 Hickman 1990 Newman 1995

21. ConclusionHeritage (1925) by Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

22. Conclusion In the texts examined, four criteria, alone or in combination, seem to have been used to define regions. • Physical features and climate. • Human cultural geography. • The colonial legacy. • Relative location.

23. Conclusion At the small scale, the regionalization of Africa has little empirical integrity especially when the country is used as the unit of regionalization. The almost bewildering array of regionalization schemes, rationales, and changing components suggests that the complex physical, environmental, and cultural geographies of Africa make any regionalization of the continent inadequate – even ideosyncratic – using the country as the grouping unit. At the small scale, regionalization should be used as a device to get us closer to the ground – and nothing more. Relative location might be the best way to define the regions of Africa.

24. An improved, single-assumption regionalization based on relative location