African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 88
Cartographic Perspectives
Cartography has been usefully described as a key facet of any “general history of
communication about space” (Harley 1987 I, 1). David Woodward and G. Malcolm
Lewis (1998) distinguish three broad foci of cartography: material cartography,
performance cartography, and cognitive cartography. It is the intersection of each of these
categories that will be the focus of much of the present essay.
Mental maps, a term widely used in much cognitive cartography, can be employed to
designate mental representations of key human spatial ideas. Consider the example of the
“cardinal direction cross” (two intersecting lines with terminal points marked N, S, E,
W). How might such a mental representation form? For centuries now, material signs
such as the cardinal direction cross have been an important part of human “surrogate
reasoning,” that is, problem solving employing “external” aids such as the calculator,
pen, compass, or diagram. Over time, the cross was constructed as a “mental surrogate”
(Barwise and Shimojima 1995) which, throughout the process of its construction,
invested place with novel meanings (performance), while being invested itself and
articulated with other meaning systems such as corporeal schemata, language, and a host
of material objects.
This dialectic between cognitive, performative, and material representations is, of
course, at work in many African cultural forms and practices. Consider the example of
the aduno kine (life of the world), a Dogon rock painting found on the Bandiagara
escarpment in Mali. In this painting, the cardinal directions cross forms the arms and
torso of the universal order while two ellipses at the head and legs signify celestial and
terrestrial placentae. Marcel Griaule (1949) demonstrates that this generative image
became the architectural basis for “village” layout, individual residences, hearth spaces,
the organization of agricultural fields, weaving designs, and even gendered sleep patterns.
Similarly, in rock paintings of a Dogon creation myth, the cardinal direction cross—this
time with a circle at its center—represents the god Amma, who, in creating the earth,
threw a ball of clay which expanded in four directions—the top being north and the
bottom being south. The same representation of the cardinal directions is also found in
the kanaga mask and sanctuary wall drawings (Griaule and Dieterien 1951).
Cardinal directions also figure prominently in the Bakongo tendwa kia nza-n’kongo
(the four moments of the sun). Here, the corner points of diamond and cross shapes
signify the sun’s travel through four stations—dawn, noon, sunset, and midnight.
Variations on the Bakongo design are also found in Kongo funerary art from the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and rock paintings from Angola (Thompson
and Cornet 1981). The Tabwa people of the DRC have a variety of aids for the telling and
remembering of myths and oral histories. One example is the incisions on the skin of
initiates to the Butwa society that tell of the migration of mythic and ancestral figures. A
V-shaped line on a society member’s back intersected by a second line running up the
spine distinguish east from west and mirrors the path of the Milky Way and Orion’s Belt
(Woodward and Lewis 1998). Finally, Tabwa “villages” are generally plotted in a northsouth
orientation (Roberts 1988). Each of the cultures mentioned above worked with the
skies in imagining the cardinal directions.