Status Updates From This Way Up: When Maps Go W...

Today, the Mountains of Kong are a curiosity, present on numerous old maps over a period spanning nearly a hundred years — a symptom of an embarrassing period of European history and mapmaking that spanned the 18th and 19th centuries. They serve as a towering phantom monument to European ignorance in proto-colonial times, and are a foreboding sign of a much darker era to follow.

The true geography of Africa finally being understood by Europeans did not lead to an age of enlightenment and harmony between the two continents, but instead enabled and encouraged European powers to divide the continent up for themselves and exploit its resources. In 1893 the Ivory Coast became a French colony, with Louis-Gustave Binger as governor (due to his map-correcting mission).

You couldn't really ask for a clearer visual metaphor for how Europeans thoughtlessly imposed the concept of national borders onto a continent they'd demonstrably never visited. It betrays an extraordinarily flagrant disregard for the people who actually lived there, as if the map of the place were the place itself.

Despite the Mountains of Kong being imaginary, they nonetheless had a huge influence on how Europeans thought about Africa. Explorers steered clear of their vicinity, taking a completely unnec essary long way round on expeditions. The mountains were seen as an impassable barrier, preventing any thought of trade or travel between the two sides.

“James Rennell (1798) knew that the existence of these mountains was a guess, and that there was a good chance they weren't there at all. So trusted was his authority on geography, and so well drawn were the mountains, that the Mountains of Kong were assumed by everybody to be completely real.”

And that’s how you get a fake mountain on maps for 100 years

(Part 2) Mungo was the first European to explore the Niger but also through the process of:
• Getting captured and detained in a small hut he shared with a pig for three months
• Being robbed again
• Being detained again
• Being put on display and made to eat raw eggs to entertain the crowd
• Losing his horse
• Catching one more fever before making his way home to England on a slave ship (via Americas)

(Part 1) Mungo Park was the first European to explore the Niger but also through the process of:
• Catching malaria
• Getting arrested for not paying trader's dues and paying them off with half his belongings
• Befriending a local guide who took half his belongings again
• Getting caught between two warring nations in the desert
• Being robbed by bandits

‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.’

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1880