Visit scenic Rhodesia

[naomikritzer]

I was in Molly's classroom to volunteer today, and before I left I pulled out the map of Africa and noted down every country name that struck me as odd or unfamiliar. I was curious if I could determine just how old this map was.

Here's what I wrote down:

Spanish Sahara
Western Sahara's old name; it changed in 1975.

R.A.U. (Egypt)
Still Egypt, but it hasn't been the United Arab Republic since 1971.

South-West Africa
This was one of the weird ones -- I'd never heard of South-West Africa. It's been Namibia since 1968.

Union of South Africa
South Africa became the Republic of South Africa in 1961.

Rhodesia
Already noted: became Zimbabwe in 1979.

Malagasy Republic
Madagascar was the Malagasy Republic from 1958 through 1975.

Portuguese Guinea
Guinea-Bissau was Portuguese Guinea until 1974.

Dahomey
Another one I had never heard of. It was French West Africa until 1960; was Dahomey from 1960 through 1975; and is now Benin.

There was one other totally odd one: tucked into a corner of Ethiopia, IIRC, was a country labeled "Afar and Irsa." I may have written that down wrong. I was able to determine that Afar is a region in Ethiopia (as well as a language and a group of people who live in Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea) but Wikipedia doesn't mention it ever having been a country. I haven't been able to find anything useful for Irsa. I didn't have enough time to lay this map out next to a current map and see if that helped me out at all, so I am mystified by that one.

Anyway, based on Dahomey existing from 1960 onward, and the Union of South Africa ceasing to exist in 1961, I do believe I have dated this map: it was printed in 1960 or 1961. Jodi found it buried in a communal storage closet, but I don't think the school was actually founded until sometimes closer to the mid-1960s, though I could be wrong about that. Anyway, I strongly suspect that this map was bought used when the school was founded and has literally been out-of-date for the entire time it's been in use in this school.

I'll note regarding the Africa map that at least the national boundaries have stayed pretty close to the same, so I think the teacher uses this map just for those, and has students look up the country names in an atlas. There is still something really horrifying about seeing Rhodesia (and other colonial names -- Spanish Sahara, Portuguese Guinea) on a map in use in a classroom in 2009.

(One final note: while googling for information about names changes and so on, I stumbled across this fascinating yet horrifying PDF of an old tourist brochure from Rhodesia. If you download it and look, you'll discover that Rhodesia has elephants and lions, but no black people. I am serious. You see many people in the brochure, some of whom are tourists and some of whom live in Rhodesia: every single one (unless I missed one somewhere) is white. Now admittedly, there are a fair number of white people who live in Zimbabwe, even now. They make up an entire 0.5 percent of the Zimbabwean population as a whole. So maybe the photographer just didn't see any black people?) (<--That last bit was sarcasm, in case that wasn't clear.)

Comments

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

OMFG. Although if you think the brochure is horrifying, you need to check out the main page of the site it links from. (To be fair, probably there were lots more white people in Zimbabwe back when it was Rhodesia than there are now. But even so, that brochure is probably about as representative as, say, a 2008 tourist film about Toronto in which everyone speaks English.)

South-West Africa is an interesting one. (I edited a whole article about the "Herero wars" in proto-Namibia recently. Talk about horrifying.) It was German South West Africa from sometime in the 1880s until 1919, at which point the League of Nations accorded South Africa a mandate on what then became South West Africa -- essentially rubber-stamping the facts on the ground, which were that South African forces had successfully captured the territory from the German colonial army early in the war -- 1915, I think. Namibia has been officially called that, and independent of SA, only since 1990. Everyone wanted the diamonds, of course, and I remember my mom's impression when she was there, maybe about 10 years ago, was that the majority of the country was still owned by De Beers...

[pennski.livejournal.com]

I saw an old tourist brochure for South Africa in the 80's that seriously suggested that the land was empty of people when the Boers arrived and all the "Hottentots" then came down from the north.

"Dahomey" is referenced in "Showboat" and I was never quite sure if it had been a real country or not.

[naomikritzer]

WOW.

[maevele.livejournal.com]

now, what kind of school is this? Public school? I forget

[naomikritzer]

This is a public magnet school.

[redbird]

Djibouti used to the Territory of Afars and Issas.

Dahomey I'd heard of, in something or other written when it was the current name. "Union of South Africa" is familiar because of a title of a political movie (which I haven't seen) from late in the apartheid era, called U.S.A./U.S.A. comparing the United States with South Africa.

And it took me a moment to figure out that R.A.U. was one French-language acronym among the English-language names (Malagasy Republic, not Republique Malagasy, but Republique Afrique Uni; don't trust my French).

[naomikritzer]

AHA. I wondered if maybe it was Djibouti.

[wolfgangemilio.livejournal.com]

The reason the brochure doesn't show any natives is because they don't really do the things that tourists do. I mean, you see the tourists eating, walking around, sitting on boats. Natives of Rhodesia never really did any of those things. Cut the publisher some slack.

[notthatedburke.livejournal.com]

Seward opened in 1966, but it replaced a nineteenth century school of the same name (that was, no doubt, far too pretty). But it apparently didn't become a Montessori until much later. So, no good explanation for why there's a Montessori map from about 1960 there. Probably got it when some other school liquidated supplies.