A National Atlas of Uganda

Summary

W. B. Banage reviews the 1962 Atlas of Uganda, compiled in nine months for independence through cooperation among government departments, the Lands and Surveys Department and Makerere University College geographers. Its 37 pages of maps, mostly at 1:1,500,000, are accompanied by explanatory texts, diagrams and photographs. Banage praises the generally effective design and printing, especially the relief map, tribal-composition and railway-freight cartograms, and climate section. He criticizes map grouping, some colour choices, inconsistent base maps and place-names, historical errors, spelling and taxonomy, and weak correspondence between maps and text. He also questions the differing land-area exclusions used for cultivation and population maps and the coarse sub-county basis of population density, while commending McMaster's explicit caution about unreliable crop data. The fisheries account omits the Nilotic–Victorian faunal division and the controversy over Nile perch in Lake Victoria, and inadequately explains the replacement of Tilapia by carp in fish-farming experiments. Despite these defects and some opaque trade diagrams, Banage judges the atlas a clear, well-rounded reference on Uganda's physical and cultural landscape, particularly useful to teachers and students lacking a national geography textbook.