Describing almost 1400 maps of Africa in three months. It's no small task that student assistants Artemis Mantheakis and Beatriz Veiga have been working on within the joint ASCL-UBL Africa Maps Project. The project's aim is to describe and catalogue a 20th-century map collection of the library of the African Studies Centre, that is housed in the Special Collections of Leiden University Libraries (UBL).
The student assistants have strong ties to Africa: Artemis is from Tanzania and recently graduated from the Research Master African Studies at Leiden University. She is currently pursuing a Master in Political Economy at the University of Amsterdam. Beatriz is from Mozambique and is a Master student of African Studies in Leiden.
The two of them work in an office in the University Library (UB). In front of them are maps of the former British colonial Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland - a territory now covering Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. There is a separate 'hunting' map, a map indicating 'natural farming areas', a 'rainfall utilization' map, just to mention a few of the themes that were rendered in maps - all dating from the 1950s to 1960s.
Meticulously and systematically
The more than thousand maps they describe and catalogue are all from the 20th century. They are part of the map collection of the Library of the African Studies Centre, which is housed in the UB. The collection consists of several series. For example, the Africa maps from the World Maps Series, initiated by the American military after many African countries became independent (particularly in 1960), and in which mostly British and occasionally French military services were involved. Meticulously and systematically, using squares on the larger map of the entire continent, Artemis and Beatriz move from west to east, and from the equator to the south in describing the maps that they've received.
This collection of the African Studies Centre very well supplements the Africa maps in the UBL collection, says Martijn Storms, UBL curator for Maps & Atlases. 'We have Africa maps dating from other periods. For example in the collection of Bodel Nijenhuis, a 19th century collector, we have maps dating from the 16th to 19th centuries. Other maps from Africa, mainly from the 20th century, can be found in the collection of the former library of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), that the UBL was able to partly acquire in 2013.'
