AFRICAN STUDIESAs a strategy, colonizers chose and groomed
new African leadership to reinforce the ideals of
newly formed, imposed nation-states, thereby cre-
ating a native elite and fostering division and
mistrust among the colonized. The strategic ap-
proach to implementation varied for different
colonial powers. France and Britain were the most
successful Western European colonizing powers.
Interestingly, their approaches to subduing and
exploiting the African colonies differed vastly. The
French saw traditional African heads-of-state as
occupying the least important position within their
new administrative system. Existing African gov-
ernments were viewed as obstacles to the ultimate
integration of Africans with French culture and
society. Thus, achieving the French goal necessi-
tated the utter destruction of established govern-
mental systems as well as the absolute eradication
of traditional cultures. Similar to American laws
during the era of slavery, practicing ancestral relig-
ions, speaking traditional languages, and partici-
pating in customs such as dancing were deemed
unlawful and were punishable by whipping, tor-
ture, and even death. The British, on the other
hand, were more indirect. They sought to mold
traditional governmental structures to accomplish
their goals at the district level, while closely regu-
lating the colonial administration nationally. The
intention was for their African colonies to follow
the examples of Canada and Australia, eventually
emerging as self-governing extensions of the Brit-
ish Empire.
The institutionalized practice of misrepresent-
ing the scale of Africa in relation to other conti-
nents is another point of contention. A European-
inspired and -dominated cartography has success-
fully institutionalized blatantly misrepresentative
views of African topography. The traditional world
map portrays Europe’s landmass as much larger
than its true physical reality. Since the 1700s, the
Mercator map scale, the most widely used carto-
graphic scale in the world, has distorted the sizes
of continents to favor the Northern Hemisphere.
While traditional mapmaking and representations
have instilled a picture of North America as equal
in size to Africa, the Sahara Desert alone is in fact
roughly the same size as the United States. The
African continent has nearly four times the land-
mass of North America and comprises approxi-
mately twenty percent of the world’s landmass.
More subtly, the world’s geographic view of Africa
has evolved to attribute a unidimensional image of
Africa as consisting wholly of lush, impenetrable,
tropical forests. This view of African geography
fails to do justice to the rich, variegated landscape
of this vast continent. Tropical rainforests repre-
sent only the smallest fraction of Africa’s myriad
landscape, which ranges from snow-capped moun-
tains to deserts to high plains to hardwood forests,
from rippling fields of grain to placid lakes. In fact
the world’s largest desert, the world’s longest riv-
er, and natural wonders from the spectacular Vic-
toria Falls to snow-capped Mount Kilamanjaro, all
characterize the diversified topography of this
continent.THE PEOPLE OF AFRICA‘‘Where is Africa?’’ We see that the answer to this,
the most essential or rudimentary of originating
questions for sociological research, can be quite
elusive. Facts of history and perception combine
to make what should be a simple interrogatory
quite complicated. Equally elusive, if not more so,
is the task of defining ‘‘Who is African?’’ The
answer to this seemingly straightforward question
seems obvious. More often than not, answers to
this question conform to the widespread view of
Africans as a race of black people characterized by
dark skin, curly hair, broad noses and numerous
other physical features. In fact, the biological di-
versity of Africans matches and, at points, surpass-
es Africa’s vast geographic diversity. Few other
continents in the world approach or match the
breadth of human biology and physiology histori-
cally found in Africa. Africans run the gamut of
the human color spectrum, encompassing the range
of human prototypes—the Negroid, the Mongol-
oid, the Caucasoid. For centuries the continent of
Africa has been home not only to people of tradi-
tional biophysical description, but also to people
descended from Europeans, Asians, Arabs, and
Hispanics. Moreover, centuries of biological inter-
mingling have produced a continent of hybrid
people. Africa is truly a continent where the hu-
man reality defies attempts to neatly categorize
race and racial identity.Traditional images of race fail to embrace or
represent the African reality adequately. Modern