I. The Map as Historical Argument
This hand-painted map presents West Africa around the year 1660, a moment of unstable equilibrium between older trans-Saharan systems and an emerging Atlantic world. Rather than depicting a continent awaiting European “discovery” or domination, the map insists on African political geography as primary. European presence appears as a coastal overlay—dense, competitive, and disruptive, but still marginal when set against the scale and complexity of African states, trade networks, and cultural zones.
The year 1660 is not arbitrary. It falls several decades after the Moroccan invasion of the Niger Bend and several decades before the large-scale consolidation of Atlantic colonial empires. It is a moment when no single power—African, North African, or European—possessed uncontested dominance. The map is therefore structured not around empires alone, but around zones of interaction: caravan corridors, river systems, forest–savanna transitions, and littoral trading belts.
II. Framing the World: Borders, Motifs, and the Language of Design
The decorative frame draws consciously on West African textile and architectural motifs, evoking woven patterns, carved reliefs, and rhythmic repetition rather than European baroque ornament. This choice situates the map visually within Africa rather than presenting Africa as an object framed exclusively by European aesthetics. The repeating geometric patterns along the borders recall strip-woven textiles—often associated today with kente and related traditions—without attempting a direct ethnographic imitation.
Color is used not decoratively but structurally. Political entities are outlined in bold, contrasting hues, allowing overlapping sovereignties and neighboring states to remain legible without implying rigid modern borders. Rivers are emphasized as organizing features, especially the Niger system, which functions here as the spine of the interior world. The Sahara was inhabited, traversed, and economically vital.
Calligraphy alternates deliberately between clarity and period affectation. European-derived labels such as Aethiopian Ocean or Gulf of Guinea coexist with African place-names rendered in historically attested European spellings—Timbuktu, Katsina, Lingee—making visible the act of translation and mishearing that shaped early modern cartography.
III. The Narrative Vignettes: Windows into a Connected World
Along the top border, four illustrated panels frame the map’s central argument.
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Fort Christiansborg represents the fortified European presence on the Gold Coast, emphasizing architecture, cannon, and maritime access rather than territorial control.
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Gorée Island evokes the strategic islands that anchored Atlantic trade networks, poised between African polities and transoceanic routes.
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Timbuktu, shown as a desert city of scholarship and commerce, anchors the trans-Saharan world—still vital in 1660, though increasingly strained.
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Abomey, capital of Dahomey, signals the rise of militarized inland states whose expansion would soon reshape the Slave Coast.
These vignettes establish the map’s dual orientation: north and south, desert and ocean, caravan and ship.
IV. The Trans-Saharan World after Empire
For centuries, West Africa’s political and economic orientation had been northward. Gold from Wangara fields, salt from Taghaza, and enslaved people moved along caravan routes linking the Niger basin to Morocco and the Mediterranean. Cities such as Oualata, Ouadan, Araouane, Timbuktu, Djenné, Gao, and Agadez formed a chain of commercial and intellectual exchange.
By 1660, this system had been profoundly disrupted. The Moroccan Saadian invasion of 1591 shattered the Songhai Empire and fatally weakened Mali’s successors. The map reflects this by depicting the Saadian Pashalik around Timbuktu as geographically constrained and politically isolated—an assertion of authority without deep territorial integration. Moroccan control existed largely along routes and cities, not across the countryside.
In the wake of imperial collapse, a patchwork of Mandé and Soninke successor states emerged: Khasso, Kaabu, Bambara polities centered on Ségou, and smaller Mandinka realms around Kangaba, Kouroussa, and Siguiri. These states were relics struggling to adapt to new economic pressures, including declining trans-Saharan trade and growing Atlantic demand.
V. The Interior Mosaic: States, Peoples, and Power
The interior of the map is intentionally dense. The Great Fulo marks the wide dispersion of Fulani pastoral and political influence, while the Mossi Kingdoms form a formidable block of cavalry states resistant to both Islamic reform and European intrusion. To the east, the Hausa Kingdoms—Kano, Katsina, Zaria, Daura—appear as a commercial constellation tied to craft production, long-distance trade, and Islamic learning.
South of the Niger, the forest–savanna belt hosts some of the most dynamic polities of the period: the Bono Kingdom, Akan states such as Denkyira and Akwamu, the Oyo Empire, the Borgu Kingdoms, Nupe, Igala, and the Kwararafa Confederacy. These states controlled trade corridors between forest resources and savanna markets and would soon become deeply entangled in Atlantic commerce and warfare.
Crucially, the map does not flatten ethnic, political, and linguistic distinctions. It preserves names such as Wolof, Susu, Mandinka, Soninke, Ijaw, and Akan, acknowledging peoples as historical actors rather than merely inhabitants of states.
VI. The Atlantic Turn: Coasts, Commodities, and Captivity
Along the coast, European naming practices impose a new economic geography: Pepper Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, Slave Coast. These are not neutral descriptors but indices of extraction. Malagueta pepper, ivory, gold, and enslaved people are the commodities that increasingly bind West Africa to the Atlantic world.
European forts—Portuguese, Dutch, English, French, Danish, Swedish, and even Courlandic—dot the coastline with remarkable density. The Dutch network is especially prominent, reflecting their mid-seventeenth-century ascendancy. Yet these installations remain visually subordinate to inland polities, emphasizing their dependence on African rulers and brokers.
Maritime routes arc westward across the Aethiopian Ocean, explicitly labeling the Middle Passage. This is one of the map’s starkest interventions: the Atlantic system is shown not abstractly, but as a set of lines carrying human lives toward the Americas.
VII. Ethiopia, Guinea, and the Weight of Names
The use of Aethiopian Ocean preserves an older European worldview in which “Ethiopia” referred broadly to sub-Saharan Africa—a classical inheritance rather than a modern racial category. This terminology coexists uneasily with more empirical geographic knowledge, revealing a world in transition not only politically, but conceptually.
Historical cartographic terms such as Negroland, Sudan, and Guinea reveal how Europeans named—and misunderstood—the continent even as they became increasingly entangled within it.
VIII. Conclusion: A World Not Yet Decided
This map captures West Africa at a moment when outcomes were not foregone. Trans-Saharan systems were weakened but alive; Atlantic systems were expanding but incomplete. African states remained sovereign, adaptive, and powerful, shaping the terms of engagement with both Moroccan armies and European merchants.
By foregrounding African political geography, by embedding European presence within rather than above it, and by integrating aesthetic choices drawn from African visual traditions, the map argues—quietly but firmly—that seventeenth-century West Africa was not a prelude to colonization, but a fully realized world navigating unprecedented change.
Bibliography (Selected)
Blaeu, Joan. Africae Nova Descriptio. Amsterdam, 1663.
Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 4: From c. 1600 to c. 1790. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
UNESCO. General History of Africa, Volume V: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
Princeton University Library. Historical Maps of Africa.
https://lib-dbserver.princeton.edu/visual_materials/maps/websites/africa/maps-continent/continent.html
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Trans-Saharan Gold Trade Map.
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=16t2avx1qAZeQqIIcRQ6g7WwrQq
RareMaps. Africae Nova Descriptio (Blaeu) and related seventeenth-century maps.
https://www.raremaps.com
African Exponent. “The Atlantic Ocean Was Once Known as the Ethiopian Sea.”
https://www.africanexponent.com/post/8414-the-atlantic-ocean-was-once-known-as-the-ethiopian-sea/