The Changing Map

I was always keen on geography.  In class or out.  I adored maps.  I adored spinning our family globe of the world, putting my finger on a spot, then wondering what lay at that very point.  I put maps on the walls beside my bed.  Using National Geographic photos, I rendered Pakistani boats, Welsh dancers, African landscapes into watercolors.  In fact, I decided that I wanted to work for National Geographic.  Go out on assignment.  See these places, not simply paint them from photos.

When I moved to the East Coast as an adult, I even went to their office and applied for work but was told I'd only be hired as a secretary (and thus stay in D.C.) ... except--though I had good typing skills--I didn't know shorthand.  Well, nuts to that, I thought.  I'll just go out and see the world some other way.  So that's what I did.  Later, out on the road, I met a geographer, married him, and got to see the world all over again.

But as the years went by, things kept changing.  I mean, when I was in school we spoke of Peking, Burma, Ceylon, Tanganyika.  Granted, Persia had already changed its name to Iran.  And Siam to Thailand, so those names seemed quite normal.

When Mrs. Miller was my 7th grade Social Studies teacher, I loved the fact that she'd once gone to Africa.  I yearned to do that.  It didn't matter which country--I simply wanted to set foot on that beguiling continent and experience its (for me) antipodal sense of place.  So, for a school project, I made a large map of Africa and asked my brother (who could print better than I) to write in the names of each country.

Today, of course, that map is horribly out-of-date.  Egypt and Morocco are still there.  And a few others.  But French West Africa is gone as are French Equatorial Africa, Northern and Southern Rhodesia.  Bechuanaland is now Botswana.  South West Africa is Namibia.  Nyasaland is Malawi.  Tanganyika became Tanzania.  Kenya changed its pronunciation from Keen-ya to Ken-ya.  Perhaps a third of my map was British Commonwealth and another third French.  And Libya was still an Italian colony, to receive its independence imminently.

India, too, has experienced changes even since my last visit including a couple of new states carved out of old.  Though I've long since learned to call Peking Bejing, I doubt I'll get used to turning Bombay into Mumbai or spelling Calcutta Kolkata. 

Then, with the more recent map changes there's the problem of not knowing whether I've been to a country or not.  I mean, yes, I've been in Yugoslavia--by bus from one end to the other.  But does that mean I've been in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia?  No, I wouldn't say so.  As for the Soviet Union, at least the new countries kept the names of the old Soviet republics--Ukraine, Uzbekistan, etc.--so that presents less confusion. 

But getting back to Africa, as it turns out, I've been on something of an Africa jag lately.  I watched the ten-part series, Long Way Down, in which Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode their bikes (motorcycles, to me) from the tippy top of Scotland, John o' Groats, down to the tippy bottom of South Africa, Cape Agulhas.  Then I read Alan Moorehead's now-classic, The White Nile, about the search for the source of the Nile (by various Victorians including Burton, Speke, Livingstone) and the subsequent British attempts to maintain hegemony over the river.  (Mostly, they didn't want anyone messing with Egypt--tampering with the Suez Canal and their easy access to India.)  Now I'm into Moorehead's follow-up, The Blue Nile--the river that starts in the mountains of Ethiopia and connects with the White Nile at Khartoum.

All this made me want to get out that 7th grade map and connect old and new place names.  And, yes, I did eventually set foot on African soil after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and reaching Tangier.  I was thrilled.  My husband's immediate reaction was to quote Pliny the Elder:  "There's always something new out of Africa."

This dates from ca. 1951.