Malcolm E. Bondy · 1951
Malcolm E. Bondy reviews the fifth edition of the Gold Coast Atlas, published by the Gold Coast Survey Department in Accra in 1949 and recently acquired by the Library of Congress Map Division. He highlights its new gazetteer of 1,083 towns and villages, 161 rivers, and 62 high hills, alongside minor map revisions since the 1945 fourth edition. Of its twenty maps, seventeen cover the Gold Coast, two Africa, and one the world. Topics include administration, population, tribes, languages, physical features, geology, minerals, rainfall, forestry, agriculture, cattle areas and routes, and railways. The atlas also includes plans of Accra, Kumasi, and Takoradi and statistics on utilities, roads, railways, and administrative areas. Comparing it with another atlas previously noted in the Information Bulletin, Bondy identifies missing explanatory texts and disease-distribution maps, and directs medical-geography readers to other mapping of sleeping sickness and tropical diseases.
Ena L. Yonge · 1957
In a survey of national atlases, Yonge notes that the Gold Coast Survey Department issued five editions of its national atlas, the first in 1932 and the latest in 1949. She records that, with two minor exceptions, the maps are at 1:1,500,000 and cover administrative areas, physical geography, population density and tribal distribution, languages and dialects, forest reserves, mineral deposits, and agriculture. She calls the atlas a useful small beginning and hopes the Ghana government will expand it into a more detailed volume.
