Marie Huber · 2022
Marie Huber examines the 1962 A Preliminary Atlas of Ethiopia as an early product of the state’s national atlas project. Its 34 black-and-white maps were presented as provisional responses to a shortage of information about Ethiopia. Huber finds that they relied heavily on foreign sources, theoretical assumptions, and extrapolation, with limited field-survey foundations. She criticizes the language map’s division of 11 languages into three families and interprets its use of “Negroid” in relation to racial distinctions asserted by Christian highland elites. Coarse hatching and patterning further emphasized apparently bounded language areas. Social mapping was limited to population density, while a world map centred on Addis Ababa positioned Ethiopia internationally. Huber reads these cartographic choices as part of the state’s effort to define national space and communicate a unified Ethiopian identity. The 1970 revision was unavailable to her and receives no substantive analysis.
