Week 2 Plan of Action

PLAN OF ACTION

This week I want you to think about how people described Africa in words and visually, the latter especially through mapping, in the 19th century. Sometimes these books and maps were written and drawn by Africans, sometimes by Europeans, but all can be read carefully to get a close look at African societies in the 19th century, especially the ways in which people produced food, made and marketed all sorts of manufactured items, governed themselves, and developed religious ideas. Above all, the point I want you to understand this week is that people throughout Africa were engaged in all sorts of productive uses of their environments, and that the descriptions that you read written in the 19th century portray very different societies from those often stereotyped in our contemporary media.