Assignment, Week 2

1. Briefly describe your city’s setting (environment) and its most notable features.
2. Compare the different Google Earth "views" of your city (satellite, hybrid, roadmap, terrain, physical, street map). Compare two different neighborhoods using Google Earth satellite. How does your city appear in 1675 and 1770 maps (AfricaMap). Where does your city lie in malaria distribution?
3. Locate and mark (using Google Earth) the main city center and avenues/streets coming into it. Include screen shots of your results.
4. Discuss your city using five different layers of AfricaMap. Provide screen shots in your overview.

Bangui is situated in central Africa on the Ubangi River, at a point where the river pivots and begins flowing south instead of west from its source in the eastern Congo. The distinguishing feature of this segment of the Ubangi is a series of treacherous rapids which make it very difficult to navigate (“Les Rapides du Haut-Oubangui”). Inland to the north is sporadically forested savannah (Blier). Bangui is approximately 400 m above sea-level, with a forested hill approaching 600 m just north of the city center (Google Maps).

A simple Google roadmap of Bangui shows a neatly gridded, logically spaced district in the southeast corner of the city, close to the river; moving inland, there are at least a dozen vaguely rectangular, irrational clusters of streets that look more like tangram solutions than planned neighborhoods. Switching to satellite view reveals the reason: the city begins to disintegrate within 2 km of the city center. Planned neighborhoods give way to informal assemblages of small, white roofs which have roads in the most unusual arrangement—or none at all.¹ From a high enough elevation, these houses look very much like grains off salt shaken onto an uneven surface.

The nicely organized city center (bottom right) quickly gives way to a disorganized hodgepodge of ethnic slums.

The other features that jump out of the satellite image are the colors of Bangui. Two predominate (besides the white of the roofs): a dark green and a light reddish-brown. Green is the backdrop for every manmade feature in the city, from the spacious planned areas by the center to the cramped inland slums.² Reddish-brown is the color of dry, equatorial dirt, and is therefore also of most of Bangui’s roads.³ Only a few of the major thoroughfares are paved; the rest are simply worn down. In case there was any doubt, the Central African Republic is one of the world’s least-developed countries, and looking at a satellite picture of Bangui reinforces the impression that its capital is really not far removed from nature; unlike other cities, Bangui’s residents appear to coexist with their environment, rather than mastering it.

Admittedly, it has not had much time; the city is only about 125 years old (though some would point out that many newer cities have come out looking a lot better). Indeed, before the 1880s, no Europeans had ever navigated the Ubangi River—or even known it existed (“Les Rapides”).⁴ To early modern European cartographers, the entire interior of Africa was unknown and therefore to be filled with anecdotes and fantasy. Early maps tended to include the current location of Bangui at the eastern edge of the imaginary Kingdom of Biafar, just west of the make-believe Lake Niger and near the invented town of Guidan.⁵

The Gbaya, Ngbaka and Banda (left to right, respectively) converge on Bangui (outlined in red).

Though each is different, most ethnographic maps convey that Bangui is located approximately at the intersection of three ethnic groups: the Banda, the Gbaya and the Ngbaka-Ma’bo (Blier), which are linguistically similar but culturally distinct (Villien et al. 12–13). Partially because this, Bangui’s outskirts now comprise many semi-enclosed ethnic quarters (Adrien-Rongier).⁶

If one is interested in avoiding tropical diseases, one should stay away from Bangui. At just 4.36º N, it enjoys year-round malaria, and the adjacent prefecture of Ombella-M’poko reported a yellow fever outbreak in 2009 that required over 300,000 emergency immunizations (Blier; “Yellow Fever in the Central African Republic”).

Other layers of AfricaMap show that the C.A.R. has had a somewhat unusual history for an African country. To start, unlike other areas, its growth was not stunted by the slave trade because it is so far inland (Blier). On a different note, the Armed Conflict Location and Events Dataset lists numerous events in Bangui, enough to rival Freetown or Mogadishu but of a different nature: in other failed states, violence in the capital often means a rebel group overrunning the government. In the C.A.R., this has never happened; here, most conflicts have involved mutinous government troops or rioting civilians, all usually discontented due to poor governance and inadequate pay (Blier).⁷

Bangui’s City Center, With Main Roads Marked

The city center is at the bottom right, and the Ubangi River runs horizontally just off the map to the south.

Footnotes

¹	The hybrid view shows that, in some cases, Google’s map-tracers simply gave up and left some of the smaller roads off of their street-map.
²	In the planned central district, it is likely that the colonists made a conscious choice to include abundant vegetation, but everywhere else the implication seems to be that the trees were simply never cleared.
³	Astute readers might remember from the first post that most of the Central African Republic consists of ferralsols, soils which are distinctive for their mineral deficiency and high iron content, from which comes their reddish color (“Ferralsols”).
⁴	The first European to navigate the Ubangi was the English pastor George Grenfell; he reached the area of what would become Bangui on 13 October 1884 (Pounouwaka 9).
⁵	The name “Biafra,” as in the secessionist Igbo region of Nigeria, is etymologically derived to this “Biafar,” but most of the locations so named on old maps have no resemblance to what would later be known as Biafra.
⁶	This agrees with what Europeans found when they arrived and founded the city, and even after the founding of the colonial city there were several African towns of various ethnicities on its outskirts (Villien et al. 40).
⁷	To be sure, the Central African Republic has had its fair share of revolts (some ongoing), but these have mostly been concentrated in the north and have been associated with spillover violence from Chad, Darfur and Southern Sudan (Polgreen). The unusual location of the capital in the southwestern corner of the country may have inadvertently made it easier to defend from said rebels.

References

Adrien-Rongier, Marie-France. “Les Kodro de Bangui : Un Espace Urbain « Oublié ».” Cahiers d’Études Africains 21.81/83 (1981): 93–110. Print.

Blier, Suzanne. ”AfricaMap.” WorldMap. 29 Jan 2012. Web. 29 Jan 2012 <http://worldmap.harvard.edu/africamap/>.

“Ferralsol.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online Academic Edition. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 29 Jan. 2012. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/707602/Ferralsol>.

“Google Maps.” 5 Feb 2012. Web. <maps.google.com>.

“Les Rapides Du Haut-Oubangui.” Bulletin Société Royale Belge du Geographie 18 (1894): 494–501. Print.

Polgreen, Lydia. “Central Africa Guard Unit is Implicated in Atrocities” The New York Times, New York ed., sec. World: A12. Web. 16 Sep 2007.

Pounouwaka, Martin. Les Explorateurs en Oubangui-Chari, 1884–1914. 2 ed. Bangui, 1996. Print.

“Yellow Fever in the Central African Republic.” 5 Feb 2012. Web. <http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_12_01/en/index.html>.