Cartography and Photography on Safari in Colonial and Postcolonial Tanzania

Movement on safari today is dominated by automobile travel and its related networks of roads and maps. In many ways, however, photography seems to have usurped cartography as today's visitors, like the colonialists, attempt to re-present the world for consumption back home. Both involve the amalgamation or layering of perspectives. Cartography during the colonial era produced landmarks through description, location, and the creation of cultural or natural relevance. It was instrumental to the colonial enterprise, not only allowing European governments to claim particular lands and relegating people to specific areas, but enabling the popular imagining of a new place. The making and dissemination of the photograph is reminiscent of this colonial enterprise of claiming and imagining. Photography on safari today is similar to cartography of previous centuries. Early Tanganyika ‘explorers' brought cartographic supplies; today's tourists carry cameras. Both cartography and photography also produce products that are displayed as proof of experience. Like the production of landmarks on a map, photographing also mirrors and embodies the official ‘viewpoint', whether it be sights seen from the park road, or the scenic overlook endorsed by the parking lot. The contemporary safari visits landmarks and uses roads made pertinent by colonial cartographers, such that the contours of safari predicate the contours of the colonial map. Today's safari map pictures only roads relevant to the visitor; other thoroughfares and landscape features are ignored. Where one photographs is also structured by government boundaries. Regulating photography within parks aids in relegating area Maasai to named and defined places, much like colonial cartography drew physical boundaries around imagined Maasai ‘reserves' and official game reserves. The relationship between map and photograph on safari in Tanzania today therefore appears dialectical; both are very much products of a colonial past and attributes of a postcolonial present.