This is a guest post by Miller Jaquet, Junior Fellow in the Geography and Map Division
“YOU ARE HERE. Turn left at the light. 250 miles to New York City.” These are the kinds of answers we expect from maps: objective statements about our present locations, desired destinations, and the physical world we experience. Before working at the Geography and Map Division, I thought this was all maps could tell us.
As a Library of Congress Junior Fellow this summer, I worked with West African maps in the Division’s Title Collection, which consists of single-sheet maps that came to the LOC before the advent of digital cataloging, and created finding aids that make them more accessible to patrons. While sorting, studying, and inventorying 488 maps of six countries, I explored the undercurrents of mapping 19th century West Africa and found that maps preserve all kinds of information about both their subjects and the circumstances of their creation. In this blog, we will examine four maps of West and Central Africa — including two from the Liberian title collection — to see what they reveal about power, politics, and how we got HERE.
To govern territories, one must know them.
From Mapping Colonial Conquest: Australia and Southern Africa. Norman Etherington, 2007.
Africa became a site of international power struggles in the 1880s, as European empires raced to divide the continent and indigenous African polities acted to resist those efforts. This battle for territorial control lasted until roughly the end of World War II—when the wave of African independence movements began— and was waged with many weapons, including cartography.
Present-day Cameroon was part of a German protectorate from 1884 until 1916, when Allied forces exiled the Germans and turned it over to British and French rule. Anticipating the regime change, Sultan Ibrahim Njoya of Bamum (a kingdom within the protectorate) sent the below map of his domain– and a letter petitioning for protection from Germany– to the British authorities.
An accomplished cartographer and politician, Njoya depicted his kingdom as including territories that were in fact heavily contested amongst local groups– the British, not knowing this, accepted it as fact.

When we look at it, we see how Njoya’s grasp of European imperial sensibilities enabled him to protect his role as sovereign over Bamum’s traditional territories, secure British favor, and even expand his kingdom in one shrewd move– the British just saw a map. There are many similar stories of exaggeration, erasure, negotiation, and resistance embedded in West African cartography from this period, including some examples from the Liberia Title Collection.
Below is an 1833 tracing of a map produced by Jehudi Ashmun, the founder and first governor of the colony of Liberia. From the moment he arrived at Cape Mesurado, Ashmun carefully studied not only the land but also its people; his written account of Liberia’s early years– History of the American Colony in Liberia, from December 1821 to 1823– speaks to the importance of the colony’s relationship with local indigenous groups. Ashmun writes about each tribe in detail– their language, reputation, and internal politics– as well as a general movement to resist the Americans; he tells of lootings, colonists taken hostage, threats, and at least one major attack on the settlement, all driven by fears of displacement. Clearly, these communities were a major part of life in the young colony— but there are no indigenous towns or residences, no mentions of tribes or their kings on his map. We know from his writings they were there, and yet the maps representing what he witnessed bear no trace of that rich history of contention.
Anderson’s 1879 map tells a story of natural border expansion and peaceful (or nonexistent) transfers of power: annotations indicate that the coastal areas were all “purchased,” lands in the interior were “acquired by treaties and agreements,” and so on. Like Ashmun, Anderson completely omits the indigenous Africans from whom these lands were purchased and acquired, and with whom the Liberian government would dispute its borders for decades to come. The only trace of this struggle is a note on the site of the original colony, “Acquired by Purchase and Conquest, 1822 to 1847.” Examining these elements more closely, we see evidence of the political structure of this era– dominated by an Americo-Liberian elite– which withheld the right to vote from indigenous people until 1946.

Looking further into the continent, Sultan Mohammed Bello of the Sokoto Caliphate in present-day Nigeria met the British explorer Hugh Clapperton in 1824 on the latter’s expedition into the African interior. In conversation one day, Clapperton asked Bello about the course of the Niger River, to which the king replied by drawing its course in the sand, creating for Clapperton a crescent curving from the east to where the river empties into the ocean above the Sahara. Yet Bello’s parting gift to Clapperton was a map on which the Niger flowed south and turned into the Nile as it reached Egypt. Clapperton later wrote that these and other inconsistent accounts were likely due to the popular opinion that “strangers would come and take their country from them, if they knew the course of the [Niger].”

Towards a Critical Cartography
Our interpretation of maps, especially those of Africa in this period, is enriched by understanding them not simply as empirical depictions of an uncomplicated world, but as attempts to objectively portray a subjective reality and its contested details. Though maps are familiar tools for navigation in our daily lives, it is critical to remember that the content, creation process, and cartographers each contribute to a unique and deeper history than is immediately evident. As I learned from my Junior Fellow project, maps lend vital context to modern problems and circumstances, preserve stories that may have been lost to time, and show us—in many ways— where we’re heading.
You can browse finding aids for the collections of maps from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
Learn more:
- Competing Cartographies in Cameroon – post on Library of Congress blog
- The Genius of Cameroon’s Sultan Ibrahim Njoya – post on Library of Congress blog
- History Of Liberia: A Time Line – Library of Congress article on the history of Liberia
- For more information about efforts to make our Title Collection maps easier to search, see our digital collection dedicated to Title Collection folders and map sheets.