Crowdsource Mapping Cameroon
First, a confession: ever since I was a kid I’ve been obsessed with maps, mapmaking, route finding, terrain, satellite imagery—you name it. Once, for a middle school science project, I painstakingly traced the elevations of a contour map I found for an area near my family’s house and reproduced it as a three-dimensional model, complete with landmarks, roads and rivers. The project took weeks. It was the first and last of its kind. But it remains an interest I’ve carried well into my professional career.
Earlier this week, I Twittered Google’s opening 45 African countries for editing in MapMaker. Google is seeking to harness the power of local knowledge and crowdsourcing to transform vast, empty swaths of the continent’s online map data. Google maps for urban centers in East and South Africa such as Nairobi, Kampala and Cape Town are already well established. In the case of Nairobi, Google has partnered with students at three Kenyan universities to develop the region’s online map presence.
This, of course, is a good thing for African development, since having access to accurate maps is vital for planning, investment and local commercial activity. The corollary to this is the often thorny issue of property ownership which occurs when outsiders begin drawing boundaries in rural areas. Just ask my roommates, who recently returned from a visit to the village of M’muock to scout sites for their wind power project. They abandoned any notion of mapping the area when they discovered that doing so would swiftly embroil them in a mess of village politics.
Unlike the cities mentioned above, Central and West African urban areas remain devoid of any street-level detail. This includes Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital and Lagos, Nigeria; the second largest city in Africa after Cairo—a truly labyrinthine city (and stunning map) if there ever was one. The prospect of mapping the maze of streets in Douala or Yaoundé may be too much to chew for an individual. But I’ve already started contributing my local knowledge to the SW of Cameroon.
The next time I see one of my professor friends from the University of Buea, I’ll test the idea of a student project to put Buea on the map. Literally.
I also wonder about the ways in which maps like these could be problematic. But I know I come from a perspective that tells me to question anything touted as a development tool. Also, I confess, my perspective is a rather distant one, in some ways deeply alienated from the realities of places I know little or nothing about.
I retreat to poetry, I suppose. And, a good thing: I will refrain from posting my rather longish response here lest I inundate your blog with words, the way I am about to do to the blog of OurManInBda. Poor guy! He just got the wrong town, that’s all. Smile. I will post a small excerpt of my response here if you want, but for now you can view my complete response temporarily posted at my blog.
Please keep writing. This blog, oh, na some fine fine ting. Believe it. Where I come from, we are quite stingy with compliments, as you probably already know; we do not give them away too easily and so, when we want to say nice things and when we do, people just don’t believe us. :)
I also liked this sentence you wrote: “The corollary to this is the often thorny issue of property ownership which occurs when outsiders begin drawing boundaries in rural areas.”
What would you do if you were in your room-mates shoes? Would you do things differently or not at all? Is the project a relevant one for M’muock? If there is resistance from the residents there, then perhaps there is something about the project that makes it a questionable fit. But, like I mentioned above, I am kind of an “academic” about these things, and I am certainly out-of-touch with many things in Cameroon. So these are just some thoughts. I wish them the best in their work. I admire their efforts. Je les souhaite “Bonne chance et bon courage.”
The issue of outsiders drawing boundaries is an interesting one. It’s useful to consider this on a larger historical scale, as in the 1884 Congress of Berlin (or so-called “Scramble for Africa”) in which most of Africa’s present-day boundaries were arbitrarily drawn up by European colonial interests. During this time, colonial domains were superimposed on the continent with little or no consideration for the traditional political boundaries that had persisted for centuries. The result was a hodgepodge of new borders that both divided coherent groups and lumped together incoherent groups that didn’t always get along. In the process, they also ignored linguistic, cultural and tribal boundaries already established by indigenous peoples. Witness north and south Cameroon. Colonial powers later selected puppet rulers from the dominant tribe. There’s little debate that this political fracturing of the continent led to Africa’s undoing.
As for my roommates in M’muock, mapping the village was a secondary goal to help choose sites for their windmills. They visited offices in Buea looking for maps made by the Cameroonian government, but found none. After they arrived, they began asking people about property markers. They found that almost no formal surveys had ever been done in the region. Instead, people would judge a land boundary along an imaginary line dividing roughly the center of two geographic features, such as mountain tops, from a certain vantage point. Even then, there were disputes over the criteria used to define what belonged to whom. For two white men to arrive with a GPS unit and begin accurately mapping the area would effectively establish volatile, political boundaries—not unlike the Congress of Berlin on a local scale. To hear them tell it, it’s an idea they won’t attempt a second time.
I think any effort to map a village like M’muock must begin at the level of the traditional leadership. I also think it would be ideal if much of the actual survey were conducted by or involved local people to some degree. This begs the question, however, does M’muock need to be mapped? Does Buea need to be mapped?
I can make a case for mapping a city such as Douala or Yaoundé. But I hear what you’re saying about putting Buea “on the map” as it were. Partly, this is just because I think maps are cool, and I’d like to contribute to Buea’s online map presence. You’re right, though—Buea already exists on an innumerable number of personal maps (ie, people’s hearts and minds) whether or not it appears on Google.
I have my own issues with mapping Africa’s wild places as well. A Google map of Buea’s streets is one thing; a detailed contour map of the remote, richly biodiverse rain forest between Mt. Cameroon and Korup, for example, is quite another. Maps of this variety are required before roads can be built, before timber can be felled, minerals extracted and so on. In this case, I’d sooner support an Edward Abbey-esque monkey wrench gang before a survey crew. This makes me recall Steve Jackson’s quote about his feeling that development work was “making the world safe for capitalism.” Beyond this, I like knowing that there are still wild places on the planet that have escaped man’s measure.
Regarding other childhood interests continuing into adulthood, as a kid I used to spend days digging tunnels and excavating deep sections of earth to see what was under the next layer. I suppose that’s not such an atypical thing for boys to do. My attraction to anthropology in university was due, in part, to the related discipline of archeology, which I still follow casually today. Go figure. ;)
There is this fascination I have with maps, not unlike the fascination Philip Gourevitch feels when he travels to Rwanda and sees the skulls of Tutsis, blank-staring things sitting where one-time heads had fallen. Memorialized. A disturbance that is quiet now. Maps can be such silent, clean things. Were there good maps in Rwanda? How were they used? And how have Rwanda’s maps been changed by its history? They have certainly changed in ways that the “Scramble for Africa” foretold, as your astute historicizing above shows, such as the pitting of ethnic groups against each other when they have much more in common than geographical boundaries could ever give credence to.
Africa aside but still on the painful topic of war, I wonder, is it possible that maps are partly to blame for the messiness of the USA in Iraq? I’m curious to hear what you think, as an American. I am not an expert on the war but my inner anthropologist believes that when our president looked at a map of Iraq he did not realize just what he was looking at. Perhaps, what he saw was this: A small Iraq on a map. Maybe the same thing happened with Afghanistan, a landlocked place that looks pretty finite, controllable on a map.
I am now paying more attention to the webpage your roommates have set up for their project. I read a news article about their work published earlier this year and it gave me the sense that the project has been very well thought out.
By the way, I liked that you included a description of the way the people in M’muock determine boundaries. I would like to know more about their methods. Not to get too philosophical, but I find it interesting that their lines are termed “imaginary” and the methods and measures of a GPS are termed “accurate.”
I could be wrong about this but, traditionally, land tenure in some African societies was very communal, distributed or leased out by chiefs, as needed and perhaps passed down in families. I am not very knowledgeable about the Cameroonian context but there has been some ethnographic work done in NW that documents women’s access to and ownership of land through marriage and through their fathers. When land becomes something that can be bought and sold, what happens to those who can’t afford it, or, eventually, to those who hold the land and choose to sell it off? I need to discuss this with my father; he’ll no doubt have some great insights. For the Western world, I read this book in grad school that discussed property ownership (Europe, post-Industrial Revolution) and some of the problems with this; unfortunately (or fortunately), I can’t remember much of what I read in grad school (See: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, by Frederich Engels). :)
A recent issue of Reader’s Digest examined the multiple ways in which maps can be created and used. Most interesting is a map of the world as lit up by electrical power. Africa is beautifully and frighteningly “dark” but I like the balance that the caption for the picture gives us. The map can make Africa look like one of the darkest places, as if the night in Africa is any darker than the night in other spots on the globe. A lie and a truth are told, in the same breath, in the same map. But I suspect what people see is the lie. You can see this fantastic map here, as well scroll back to see another equally great map of the USA by Republican and Democrat uneven splits: http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/4-ways-of-looking-at-a-map/article100119-4.html
All this said, I am drawn to maps. They are alive in their own way. I keep my atlas by my bed; I look at it a lot. Now that I think about it, I look at some places more than others, focus on places I know or places with people I know. In secondary school, we had to do “map reading” for the GCE O’Levels. I liked it a lot. When I got to the USA, it took me a long time to learn the names of all the states and sometimes I forget the order of some of the northern states. The vastness of this country only became meaningful to me when I traveled across the USA by train last year (coast-to-coast, MD to CA). I saw places that looked like hell on earth and some places that looked like heaven. It was humbling. I saw things that made me feel awe for the USA that I hadn’t felt before, a new fondness for this country that is, technically, just as much my home as Cameroon is.
(This comment has also been posted on my blog for a reader who requested that I re-post my essay, “Buea Will Draw a Map of You.”)
Here’s the full article.
Interesting correlation with the composite satellite view of the earth at night, no?
I’m impressed that you’ve traveled across the US by train. That’s something I doubt very few Americans have done.