Marie Huber · 2022
Marie Huber examines the 1981 preliminary and final National Atlas of Ethiopia within the history of state cartography and nation-building. The article generally dates the final edition to 1987, while the linked publication is dated 1988. The 1981 edition contained 90 black-and-white maps, sold out its print run of 600, and explicitly acknowledged the provisional character of its data. More than twenty maps addressed population and social conditions, including birth and death rates, household size, health and education. The final edition contained 75 colour thematic maps and was completed with Canadian International Development Research Centre assistance. Huber highlights its greater reliance on Ethiopian institutional data and census results, its more differentiated treatment of language distribution, and its extensive depiction of state enterprises, collectivized agriculture and infrastructure planning.
Huber interprets these maps as instruments of a state-sponsored Greater Ethiopian identity. She argues that territorial classifications supported bureaucratic control, while the final edition’s eleven historical maps presented a continuous national history. Her examples include portraying nineteenth-century southern conquests as reunification and omitting conflicts over Eritrea, Somalia and Ogaden from a map of postcolonial neighbours. She also traces a shift towards locating Ethiopia within Africa. The article leaves the atlas’s actual reception and its use in planning and education as questions for further investigation.
