From the head of the snake to the unity of the world: mapping blurred transitions at the Congo estuary, 1859–1880

Abstract The Congo estuary is a space of transitions not only in hydrological but also in historical terms. When from the 1860s the centuries-old slave trade ended and foreign companies established trading posts along the lower river to export raw materials, mapmakers from Europe began to relate the Congo with what they perceived as “world traffic” in new ways. Grounded in a close reading and contextualisation of two nautical charts by the British Admiralty, a general map from a German geographic journal, and an economic map by a French officer, this article discusses how maps reflected the dynamics at the lower section of the river under the conditions of colonial globalisation. During the nineteenth century, mapping rivers and oceans translated notions of globality into a visual language and thus significantly contributed to envisioning aquatic and terrestrial parts of the earth as a spatial continuum. Driven by an underlying capitalist desire increasingly directed towards the Congo basin, the maps in question transformed the river area from a terra incognita into a potentially controllable area and confirmed interpretations of the estuary as a portal of global relevance. Royal Navy officers mapped the estuary in contexts of unfolding imperial power and at times during military operations. While aiming at demystifying the river, the maps also formed projection surfaces for fantasies, fictions, and imaginations. Mapmakers processed knowledge from the riverine BaKongo communities only selectively and filtered it through a standardised repertoire of cartographic signs, thus participating in a “nihilisation” (Luckmann/Berger) of African knowledge.