The Geographic Regions of the Sudan" by George T. Renner Jr.: a Pre-1950 study on Mali

During my initial attempt of searching for "Mali landscape" amongst papers published before 1950, I realized that I could not find anything; not even something remotely related to Mali. I started to wonder if there was something fundamentally wrong with my search, specially when I did find many pre 1950 sources on other African countries.  I suspected that Mali might not have been called "Mali" back then, so I read up its history on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali). I learned that Mali actually fell under French control during the late 1800s, and it became part of "French Sudan". Later on, in 1959, French Sudan became independent and joined Senegal to become the Mali Federation; it was only a year after this that Senegal withdrew itself from the federation, and the remaining Sudanese Republic declared   independence, with the name the Republic of Mali, which is the Mali that we know today. 

It is still a bit ambiguous as to what name I should be searching for the Mali back then, since it was only part of the French Sudan, and the then Senegal is no longer part of the Mali today. Therefore, I decided to turn to physical location instead of political name. From Wikipedia, I learnt that the early Mali Empire was formed on the Upper Niger River, located in West Africa. As a result, I refined my search to "Upper Niger River" and "Senegal". Amongst my search, I found a very good article depicting the landscape of this region that I am interested in, "The Geographic Regions of the Sudan" by George T. Renner Jr., published in the 1926, April version of Economic Geography, by the Clarke University. The direct link to this article is http://www.jstor.org/pss/140868. 

This article deals with precisely the Geography of the Sudan area back in the early 1900s; however, I was alert that I had to be careful with geographical information since names and borders in Africa have changed rigorously in the recent decades. In this context, Sudan was referred to "the broad belt of tropical grasslands lying between the Sahara on the north, and the equatorial forests of the Guinea Coast and Congo Basin on the South", which was where the Upper Niger River was located in. In this sense, this article differs from AfircaMap in the sense that it could date back to the timing that the article was written in, the borders are very different from what I saw on AfricaMap where Mali was a distinct country with strict and clear-cut border line. According to Renner, the then Upper Niger River occupied the great broad lowland north of the Guinea Uplands; this lowland, which stretched from Bamako to Timbuctoo, was watered extensively annually by the irregular floods of the Niger. The Niger river leaves a surface of abundant alluvium in this valley, just like what the Nile does to Egypt. Interestingly, due to this very gift from nature, the French actually called this area "their Egypt", and was attempting to develop cotton plantation there as a strategy to beat its rivalry Egypt in cotton production; these historical details is again, another factor that AfricaMap could not be as precise in. 

It is also refreshing to see the landscapes in this area being described in very primitive adjectives, for example, he says "[t]his narrow zone of tropical vegetation showing green in the midst of a brown country is called locally the "Shamama." From August to November the floods of the Senegal, overflowing its braided channels, make this a huge marsh." Maybe due to my own concentration on Economics normally, I tended to read articles on Mali regarding its development economy and modernization, I was very captivated by these suburban descriptions put forward by Renner. It also seemed to me that this period (1900s) was the time when Western scholars started to study West Africa as Renner spends a lot of time on explaining the climate situation there, revealing the then unfamiliarity with this land. Climate leads itself to the animal and food sources of the Mali populations as Renner goes into how the rain allows the perfect grass for pasturing sheep, cattle, horses and donkeys. The abundance of these animal growings naturally lead itself to trade, and below is a photograph capturing the transportation route in the Upper Niger River for export to the coast area: 

Transport on the Native Path of the Guinea Uplands. 

One last interesting fact that I found about this area is its peanut production. At the time that the article was written, the Upper Niger area was by far the greatest portion of export, especially towards industry in Southern France. The amazing twist here is that all these peanut farms are communally owned by native farmers; and that up to 20,000 "strangers" would come up here for the peanut season temporarily and returned to their native land when harvest is collected, revealing the cultural abundance the Mali was bound to accumulate. To end, I find this a very useful experience as I realized what the limitation of AfricaMap were; while AfricaMap was excellent in providing me with indices and factors that are highly relevant to my area, I need to build upon these indices, treat them as the beginning points for my further researches into the deeper historical developments beneath the country, the people and the landscapes.  

Africamap features : Mali

Throughout the process of using Africamap to discover my area of interest, Mali, I found the "Map Layers" function to be the most useful one to grasp the overall, and broader division of the area. I am not sure if we could edit the transparency or opacity of these Map Layers on Africamap, so I found it easier and more productive to download the 3D Map onto Google Earth, since I could easily manipulate multiple layers' opacities and priorities there.

The first feature that I wanted to learn about Mali was its political freedom / level of democracy, and conveniently, Map Layers has a layer on Index of African Governance. Here is a screenshot of how the Africamap "Map Layers" look on Google Earth for Mali, while zooming into the Mali area:

Mali, IAG Map Layers on Google Earth.

Refer back to the Legend link of IAG on Africamap, I see that Mali receives a score of 51-60 out of the 18-85 scale, positioning itself on the middle range level. Another useful feature here is the "Reference" link which allows me to read more about the indices and measurement methods. From here, I was able to look up the particular score of Mali, which is 55.9, ranked 23 out of 48 countries listed. By viewing the historical development of the IAG indices, I was also able to detect the trend of its political situation: It received a score of 49.6 in 2000 to the most recent score 55.9 in 2008, proving a promising development. This report was so detailed that I could view the components of this IAG index, which shows that Mali excels itself in Safety and Security (77.8) while lacking in Sustainable Economic Develpment (31.4). While haven't dwelled into Mali's landscape/art scenes, these indices make me wonder if the slow economic development would help Mali's art to preserve its nativity.

Following the procedures that I used above, I continued to play around with other Map Layers functions available and combine the few interesting ones together on Google Earth; here is one that is of very different nature and time period from the IAG that I listed above - Inheritance rule for real property:

Inheritance for Real Property, Mali, Google Earth

This was interesting because of two reasons: firstly, it was from data based on 1959; I thought it could become handy in the future when I had to explore some landscape or artifacts in a much older period. Secondly, I was very intrigued by the data itself : I was expecting some pretty much unified data on Mali. I.e. I thought that the Inheritance rules would be pretty much the same all over the country, and was expecting deviance only across countries. This shows me that Mali is actually such a diverse country with countless groups, and changed my original thought of thinking that landscape/artifacts would be similar as long as they are from the same birth place. This was a useful experience with Africa Map and I am confident that it will help me to stratify and narrow down my studies in the future.