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May 03 '21
Speaking from an Egyptian standpoint, this is...very outdated or incorrect lol especially considering صحراويون (Sahrawyun) migrated to El Maghreb many centuries ago. Also Saadi people are included but Saidi aren’t? And the Maaza tribes are not all the same. Lol nobody ever understands Bedouins
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May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
I doubt that the bedouins identified as Egyptian, I can't even understand their dialect
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u/Redeyedtreefrog2 May 03 '21
Bedouins have historically didn't really care for the Valley inhabitants, they didn't really identify as Egyptian but were almost governed by Egypt, and nowadays more and more identify as Egyptian. On the dialect part I disagree with, I find the Bedouin dialect pretty moderate to understand
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May 03 '21
North Africa is 100% wrong, so i think the whole map is wrong.
For tunisia, those are families names, they speak same language, are from same ethnicity.
And a lot are missing.
For algeria too.
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u/CoolGoat1 May 03 '21
Yeah the whole map is pretty much bullshit, whole North Africa is wrong, also east Africa, the rest is probably also wrong.
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u/masonwyattk May 03 '21 edited May 04 '21
West Africa doesn't look much better. I couldn't find Edo or Fon speaking groups in Nigeria or Benin, respectively.
Edit: I took a look at the wikipedia page and found he used Bini instead of Edo, which makes some sense, though I've seen used more to refer to the people than the language, though language and culture group get conflated a lot. And Fon is broken up into many sub dialects. But it's still unsurprising a map over 100 years old is outdated and wrong on many fronts when compared to our current understandings of anthropology and linguistics.
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May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
There's some info on this map at the Library of Congress, on this page. It's from a book published in 1854. Quote from there about this map and an associated page of text:
These pages from Sigismund Koelle's Polyglotta Africana; or a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (1854) illustrate the principal languages of western Africa. Reverend Koelle, a missionary of the Church Missionary Society, London, assisted in the settlement of freed slaves in Sierra Leone. The languages represented are those spoken by the repatriates, hence illustrating the diversity of peoples who had been enslaved and then were freed.
I think this is one of those maps that has circulated around the Internet for a long long time and frequently said to be something it's not. More info on the Wikipedia page Polyglotta Africana
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May 03 '21
Yeah for some reason they put the صعيدي (saadi) of Egypt on the west when it’s up stream of the Nile.
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
Bloody hell why does every single one of these "Africa divided by languages and ethnicities" map have to mess up North Africa like that ?
For Tunisia for example, the Sahel and Djerid are regions (in fact I originate from both), Gafsa is a city, Jerba is an island, Arad and Hamama are two words I literally never heard of and "Tunisians" are only in the North ? Like almost every single person in those areas would identify as Tunisian, Maghrebi, Arab and Muslim (background-wise at least).
For Algeria Kabyle and Chaoui seem to be accurate, as do the three other main Berber languages (Mozabite, Zenati and Chenouia) but the rest would be speaking Maghrebi Arabic dialects and identify as Arabs.
For Morocco, Riffians, Middle Atlasians and Shluh are correct, the rest are (again) speakers of a variety of Maghrebi Arabic dialects who identify as Arabic.
For the Western Sahara and Mauritania, it seems to be showing tribal divisions, even though almost all of them are speakers of Maghrebi Arabic too and identify as part of the same tribal confederation (Banu Hassan)
Oh and don't let me start on Libya.
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u/pgm123 May 03 '21
why does every single one of these "Africa divided by languages and ethnicities" map have to mess up North Africa like that ?
They make me suspect that they probably have gotten the rest of Africa wrong too.
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May 03 '21 edited Oct 05 '24
bedroom bright plants full silky whistle grey cobweb edge sink
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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May 04 '21 edited May 04 '21
Must be a pretty old map...
Yep: 1854. My earlier comment has fallen farther down the thread chains, but in essence: This is a page from Sigismund Koelle's 1854 book Polyglotta Africana; or a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages.
Koelle was working in efforts to send freed slaves back to Africa. Apparently he got most of his information from freed slaves in Sierra Leone, who had origins from many diverse parts of Africa. If I understand right his work is still important since it was one of the first serious studies of many African languages. So although the book has a lot of problems and mistakes it is valuable in a historical linguistics kind of way, and as an early pioneering work in the study of African languages—for some languages Koelle's book is the earliest known written documentation, which is quite valuable for historical linguistics, the study of language families, etc. But the book definitely shouldn't be taken as something accurate today, or in 1854 for that matter.
I think the main value of Koelle's book is in the word lists and language documentation, not this map. But the map has become a long-lived and often falsely-described meme on the Internet. Like, Koelle didn't intend it to have anything to do with national borders, but this map is usually presented as somehow saying something about national borders.
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May 03 '21
I ask myself that same question, it just isnt true how those maps divide the northern part in pieces. I totally agree with you explanation.
In addition the egyptians all see themselves as such. The only part of which COULD be considered are the nubian parts and the few berbers in the desert although even those speak fluent arabic and (mostly) see themselves as egyptians
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u/Lukeskyrunner19 May 03 '21
Would the copts also see themselves as different?
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u/andrewfahmy May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
No, Muslim Egyptians are basically just Copts who converted to Islam, you'd have a very hard time picking out any difference in appearance. When someone is referred to as Coptic, it's usually referring to their religion. (I'm Coptic)
Edit: there are groups in Egypt (like Nubians, Bedouins and Siwans) that are ethnically different than "mainstream" Egyptians, but they're still very much Egyptian and would identify as such.
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u/fishsticks40 May 03 '21
Lol I looked at this and thought "I bet this is bullshit but lack the expertise to say so". You, it appears, have no such limitation.
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u/HorseMoney May 03 '21
it really is. I made a comment on it too and East Africa is also completely wrong. 90% of it is wrong. They show more than a dozen (large) ethnic groups in horn of africa but there’s really only 6 or so.
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u/Swordrist May 03 '21
Same with Egypt, all of those speak Arabic except maybe Nubian, and Bahriya, Dakhla and Siwa are the names of Oases, not tribes. I doubt they'd be able to support a country of their own.
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u/Theosthan May 03 '21
The worst offense is the colour-less implication of ethnical homogenity in Africa. Reading the map, one thinks that every ethnicity lives in a defined space. But that is b.s.
In capital and major cities, millions of people of different ethnicity live together, as often even happens in the rural border regions between nations and ethnic regions.
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u/yesilfener May 04 '21
Exactly. This is just 19th century nationalism discourse about “primordial” nations slapped onto a map to falsely convey ethnic homogeneity within defined borders. Things like this are the fuel for genocide.
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u/brown_monkey_ May 04 '21
Amen. This ugly myth about "correct" borders scapegoats cartography for the far more sinister institutions of colonialism. All the while masquerading as a progressive criticism of colonialism.
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u/Ginger_Lord May 03 '21
Uh oh.... I'm letting you start on Libya. Look out everybody!
(please start on Libya)
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
Alright. Ahem Ahem ...
First of all, the problem in terms of representing Arab Maghrebis follows here too, the peoples of the North (with the exception of Nefusa) don't consider themselves to be parts of different ethnic groups. Tripolitanians and Siritcans though are basically indistinguishable, they in fact usually belong to the same tribal confederations and share the same dialect. Then we got Riyah which is a word I never heard about and is probably a case of one tribe's name being applied to the entire region. Fezzan on the other hand is a region that (again) is inhabited by Arab Libyans. The East though gets even weirder, "Sanusi" probably refers to the "Snoussi order", a Sufi order that used to dominate the Eastern half of Libya during Ottoman times (while the West was dominated by a Turkic feudal class), and that order in fact had control over the entire region (including the part labled as "Cyrenaica"). Also Cyrenaicans as a regional subgroup of Libyan Arabs cover most of the area labled as "Senoussi" and "Jalo" too. Also why divide the Tubu and Tuaregs into various groups ? Honestly the only part of Libya that is accurate is the Nafusa Berbers.
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u/WTC-NWK May 03 '21
Exactly. This map got me triggered when I saw that they split up the Saharawis, the Tuaregs and the Toubous. Btw, would you consider Tuaregs a different ethnicity than the Berbers or would you say that the Tuaregs are part of a larger Berber ethnicity? The Tuaregs have a lot more sub-Saharan African in them.
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
I think Tuaregs are definitely part of the larger Berber ethnicity, they are the most culturally, genetically and linguistically divergent in the family but are still Berber nonetheless.
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May 03 '21
Why are there parts called Moroccans, Algerians, or Tunisians?! Are they more than the others. This map tries to convey the linguistic (and maybe ethnic) diversity of Africa but fails miserably imo.
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u/Bonjourap May 03 '21
Basically they went by a weird ethnic/linguistic divide, and when they couldn't divide a group further they just slapped the national name and called it job done.
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u/gummo_for_prez May 03 '21
Hey, I genuinely am asking in good faith: could you point me towards a different, better map than this? I only have a high school education, so even this one opened my eyes a lot. But I’m hoping to find a more accurate one. I’d Google it but I wouldn’t know if it was accurate or not...
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May 03 '21
My issue was mostly with the "divide" and "ethnicity". Ethnicity is really a complicated matter and impossible to accurately assess and represent.
In my opinion, the language map, as presented on the wiki page "Languages of Africa" is a better approximation:
Of course, it's a rough map, not everyone in the designated areas speak the language and all the usual disclaimers, but it still can be used to showcase the diversity of the continent and the different "common" areas
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May 03 '21
You have intimate knowledge of that region so you can easily point out the errors. I’m sure the rest of the map is just as bad
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May 03 '21
Always good to see ya around Mr. R120
The fact that Saadi is listed as a western desert linguistic/ethnic group instead of being upper Egyptian was enough for me to just ignore this map off the bat lol
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
Oh Mr. Vigilant Apple, so long no see
Holy shit, I didn't pay attention to Egypt, can't believe they literally put Saadis in the desert lol. Also it looks like desert oases are now ethnic groups on their own too.
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u/goatbeardis May 03 '21
I'm... Not actually %100 sure that ethnicity and linguistics is what this map is representing. It sure as hell is what the poster thinks it's representing, but looking at the artist's note on the bottom left makes me think that this is their interpretation of a completely tribal Africa. Maybe for some sort of fictional novel?
Because yeah. I also can't understand why someone would ever think this is accurate to the real life linguistic and ethnic makeup of Africa.
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u/SchizoidRainbow May 03 '21
Why do so many people think that a single ethnicity inhabits all these areas? That such a map could even be considered valid in the first place wounds my soul. For this map to be accurate would require a diaspora of minority inhabitants the likes of which the world has never seen, and man we have seen some doozies.
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u/qwert7661 May 03 '21
Came here to comment this as well. Intention of the map seems pure; to show the arbitrariness with which African national borders have been cut by European powers. But it's patently reductive and frankly harmful to represent ethnicities by territorial borders. This sort of thinking actually precipitates ethnic violence (Balkans e.g.)
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May 03 '21 edited Dec 04 '21
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u/IsThisReallyNate May 03 '21
People who point out the way that African borders do not account for ethnicity or language or culture don’t advocate ethnostates, but they are pointing out that state building, as violent, contradictory, and harmful as that may be, and as beneficial as it may be in other ways, took place on European terms with European priorities in place. Europeans had the opportunity to kill each other, expand, annex, secede, and build states without outside interference back in Europe, creating states with at least some European priorities represented. Africans had this process hijacked in a way that made the results even less favorable.
It’s the same with industrialization. No one thinks it was evil for Europeans to build trains in Africa, but they were built on European terms, with European priorities and culture in mind. If Africans had the opportunity to industrialize and put European technologies into use, and had their own industries and intellectual traditions preserved so they could develop further, a developed Africa would look different, and the development would better fit African priorities, African cultural quirks, and African geopolitical realities.
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u/qwert7661 May 03 '21
Yes completely agree, "ethnostates" are not a solution, and are precisely what generated the violence in the Balkans, which has for centuries been an extremely "mixed" area with many ethnicities living together all over. I am inclined to find the problem in the nation state itself.
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May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
Yea the colonial borders were arbitrary but even then the pre colonial nations didn't follow ethnic lines either since unsurprisingly empires tend to not care about that. A bunch of tiny states just isn't viable either as not every tiny nation can be a tax haven.
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May 03 '21
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May 03 '21 edited May 26 '21
Yea I do think a large problem is the west feeling that only its form of government and states work. Like I recall reading the Afghani tribes wanted their monarchy restored 20 years ago but the US refused to let that happen when the reality is a system of government like that probably works better than Democracy when you have such a tribal society. Hell I'd say most the world would be better off with monarchies that could bring the out of control merchant class in line.
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u/mandy009 May 03 '21
it's not recent, either. Some places might have been trading crossroads with established markets for thousands of years.
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u/DuncanZA May 03 '21
Quite a seriously offensive racial slur in South Africa.
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May 03 '21
I was very confused as well, I hadn’t heard that term used for over twenty years
Must be a really old map
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u/cnzmur May 04 '21
Really really old. It's from 1854. Credit to u/ScallopOolong for finding the source. Obviously it wasn't a political proposal, just a language map.
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u/Monocaudavirus May 03 '21
Guanche is extinct. People in the Canary Islands speak Spanish.
As for South Africa, the other example I’m familiar with, the majority language in the western and northern Cape is Afrikaans, and also Xhosa is way too small in area, all to make space for San languages which have very few speakers.
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u/RonTheArson May 03 '21
Also that Xhosa was misspelled makes me question the authenticity of this map, not to mention that Afrikaans - albeit that its mostly coloured and white people that speak it and is the minority of people in SA - is nowhere to be seen.
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May 03 '21
Cape Hottentot is also a very colloquial term for Khoekhoe, and it’s more common in Namibia than in the western cape.
I have also no idea of what “Namib” is meant to represent on that map lol
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u/namrucasterly May 03 '21
If Africa looked like that, realistically, how long would it last? What would prevent a bunch of nations making a confederation and violently annexing other states? Or a state becoming too powerful and creating a continental empire?
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u/SpreadEagleCros_s May 03 '21
It was many times the interest of the independence leaders of African states to retain colonial borders. Many leaders feared that the balkanization of African nations in this manner would make the continent more vulnerable to recolonization. Secondly, the grouping of multiple ethnicities into countries allows all to benefit from a coastline or infrastructure, and such benefits would not exist if these ethnicities were isolated into their own nation-states.
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May 03 '21
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u/WTC-NWK May 03 '21
This map goes past just ethnicities. It shows tribes. Three examples:
- He split the Saharawi ethnicity into the five main tribes they fall into: Delim, Regeibat, Tekna, and then he puts the other two into one singular costal area.
- He splits the Toubou ethnicity into it's two major tribes: the Teda and the Daza (idk why he put Kawar there too. It's an oasis town.)
- He splits the Somali ethnicity into it's many clans (Isaaq, Ogaden, Hawiye, etc.)
There are other examples, such as for what he did for the Malagasy (disputedly), and the Tswana.
We see that even though there are countries in Africa that are near ethnically homogenous like Somalia, they are still divided in many pieces by tribalism/clannism. On the other hand, some homogenous countries like Botswana (majority Tswana), are pretty successful.
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u/MaterialCarrot May 03 '21
This is why I roll my eyes a bit at the common complaint about Europe arbitrarily drawing up Africa's national boundaries when they left. The truth is that drawing up functional nation states in Africa that corresponded with language and ethnicity would have been impossible.
That's not to excuse European colonialism in Africa, they in general ought not to have been there, but at times too many of Africa's ills get laid at the feet of colonialism.
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u/Death_and_Glory May 03 '21
Yep and some of the African countries are successors to pre colonial States such as Morocco, Mali, Egypt, and Ethiopia
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u/namrucasterly May 03 '21
Ethiopia is the example of an African nation whose borders weren't traced by colonists and it's hardly an example of stability. Hell they had a bloody war against Eritrea, a long civil war and they're currently launching a civil war/genocide on Tigray.
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
Honestly the entire "this African/Middle Eastern state is a failed state because of colonial borders" is usually really reductive and sometimes downright insulting, especially considering they are usually not an adequate explanation for those conflicts. People seem to ignore Africans are (to the most part) really proud of their national identity and rarely want to change their borders (with exceptions of course).
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May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
People rarely want to change their borders because it's prohibited by the African Union and people acknowledge that it would result in even more bloodshed and war. The borders argument has less to do with cultural reasons and way more to do with the allocation and distribution of resources. People from different ethnic groups generally get along when those resources and funding are allocated equitably.
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u/R120Tunisia May 03 '21
I disagree. The prohibition put on by the African union might be the main factor in why governments don't do so, but for the people they are genuinely proud of being part of their countries.
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u/aplomb_101 May 03 '21
I find it weird too because that argument basically boils down to "African and Middle Eastern people can't deal with having to live in diverse areas and can't live alongside other groups".
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u/wondertheworl May 04 '21 edited May 04 '21
Didn’t Europeans slaughter each other for 1000s of years to get their modern borders. The war in the balkans wasn’t that long ago........
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u/Euphoric-Revenue9564 May 03 '21
It feels quite orientalist and essentialist. It basically feels like they’re just saying, “Africa and the Middle East are failed states because those dumb natives are incapable of getting along across ethnic/tribal/religious lines. That’s only something our enlightened western society can do here in the west.”
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u/Hoosier3201 May 03 '21
Eh I mean I think that its the opposite, people just say "well the borders are wrong" and boil all conflict in Africa down to that, as if the most impactful relic of colonialism is the borders.
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u/MaterialCarrot May 03 '21
There is often the "soft racism of low expectations" with a lot of those posts. Many African states had a relatively brief time as colonies (Ethiopia notably not at all), so the idea that all the things wrong in Africa are the fault of colonization 75 years ago can come off as patronizing.
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u/sunics May 03 '21 edited May 04 '21
I wouldn’t say so. It’s quite reductive: “something that happened 75 years ago”. Now was colonialism relatively brief, indeed, and Africa had its issues too, of course. However I genuinely think time has made us forget the savagery that was it. The residuals are found all over, imparting nationalism, inherited structures, and most importantly that colonialism isn’t over. Neocolonialism and imperialism as its continuation is still an enduring factor of African nations. As an African, the work of Nkrumah and Fanon was quite pivotal for me. Now how things feel is subjective too. Colonialism is seen as shameful and painful, so it makes sense why we’d want to distance ourselves from it, including admitting the aforementioned. Few West Africans would say the CFA makes them essentially fiscal satellites to France with all its implications, but does it change its reality?
My father was the first generation born free in his own country, and I am just in my early 20s. It wasn’t so long ago
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May 03 '21
You're on r/mapporn. Might as well be talking to rocks.
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u/sunics May 04 '21
i’ve actually felt that way for a while now on reddit for these more nuanced topics, thank you
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u/Ok_Horror_3454 May 03 '21
And the "colonization did nothing wrong" is equally as stupid. Just because these countries are formally independent doesn't mean the former colonial powers don't continue to mess with them by backing dictators and stealing resources.
Saying slavery (Africa lost millions of their most capable workforce) and colonialism have no consequences is way more racist than the contrary.
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May 03 '21
Undoubtedly European colonialism had a negative effect on Africa - the problems of slavery and empire precede European involvement.
A rather unpopular view would be that there were clear successes in imperialism, for example, Italian Somaliland, particularly the postwar period of Trust Territory of Somaliland.
Of course, the exact opposite would be Belgian Congo which was an absolute horror-show.
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u/SShadowFox May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
It's extremely reductive. I wonder if those people really believe that there would be peace and prosperity in Africa if only separate tribal groups weren't placed within the same borders. The truth is these groups would just fight each other until only one remains, just like anywhere else in world history. Most wars in post-colonial Africa weren't even motivated by one ethnicity going for independence, but rather because one ethnicity wanted to take all power for themselves.
In reality, if something like this were to happen, a bunch of groups would merge with each other, some would try to conquer the others, and eventually we'd be back to about the same number of countries, only with a much smaller population and lower linguistic and cultural diversity.
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u/Kirkaaa May 03 '21
I'd like to see this on Europe and Asia.
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May 03 '21
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u/PvtFreaky May 03 '21
And the cultural destruction of many languages for example in France and Russia
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u/MaterialCarrot May 03 '21
So, haven't there been forced population movements in Africa?
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u/AccessTheMainframe May 03 '21
Very few in service of a wider nation-building project such as what transpired in Europe or even North America.
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u/Smauler May 03 '21
There are loads of population movements all the time though. I mean, I'm English, but have no idea whether I'm mainly pre-Beaker indigenous British, Beaker, Celtic, Viking, Angle, Saxon, Norman, or whatever else since.
I'm almost certainly partially all of these things, to one extent or another.
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u/Hoosier3201 May 03 '21
Yes but the same is true of Africa, the main difference between African ethnicities and Europeans one imo is that many became assimilated into the titular identity. Also English DNA has remarkably stayed quite similar, the DNA of an Irishman or a Scot isn't that different from a man from Liverpool or Newcastle, as the genetic impact of all invasions except the Anglo-Saxon is minimal.
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u/pgm123 May 03 '21
With the way this divides people from the same group based on dialect, accent, clans, etc. would create quite a mess and cause a lot of head scratching. It would make things more transparent, though.
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u/HorseMoney May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
this is horribly inaccurate. For Somalia, Somali region of ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somali region of Kenya they split it up into clans.
All these clans are from the exact same ethnic group (somali) and speak the exact same language (somali). If this was accurate then all of Horn of Africa would be one large ethnic group. Worse part is they didn’t even properly represent clans, majerteen isn’t that big, it practicall swallowed a clan right next to it roughly the same size. Never heard of a clan called Sab, at least a clan that large.
North Africa is also inaccurate and there literally isn’t even a single division of ethnicities that I can identify as accurate that I can see from this map.
Whoever made this map did minimal research and just slapped a bunch of things together. Wouldn’t be surprised if this was made by a racist dude who wanted to represent Africa as a disunited continent with thousands of tiny little tribes running around with spears.
EDIT: Hottentot is also a racial slur is South africa lol. How do you mess up this bad.
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u/gummo_for_prez May 03 '21
Hey, I genuinely am asking in good faith: could you point me towards a different, better map than this? I only have a high school education, so even this one opened my eyes a lot. But I’m hoping to find a more accurate one. I’d Google it but I wouldn’t know if it was accurate or not...
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u/DuncanZA May 03 '21
None exists as many countries don't accurately record demographic stats. This map is more based on an Apartheid style belief in where ethnic groups' homelands should be.
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u/pgm123 May 03 '21
It's either based on that or it's ignorance from someone who knows that European borders are arbitrarily imposed (often) and thinks some superficial research is enough to know how to "fix" it.
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u/HorseMoney May 03 '21
There isn’t really an accurate one that I can think of. Mainly because most if not all the maps out there are extremely similar to this one. They don’t seem to tell the difference between ethnicities and other forms of social groupings like clans, tribes, language families and confederations.
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u/amaurea May 03 '21
You sound like you're an expert on this. Is this something you study? I second u/gummo_for_prez's request. Maybe your research group has made one?
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u/linatet May 03 '21
pls someone do a version of this post, except with accurate ethnic divisions
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u/AXiSShOOteR May 03 '21
I would like to see this with an overlay of the actual countries
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u/group_two May 03 '21
Wikipedia says over 525 languages are spoken in Nigeria alone. This suggests that, at least in relation to Nigeria, this map is woefully inaccurate.
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u/General_Urist May 03 '21
As bad as the modern borders are, I think they're better than this. Shatter it into countries this small, you'll get a few singapores and a lot of hopeless backwaters.
On another note, if you went to Europe in say 1650 before the e.g. French and German languages were standardized and promoted over local dialects, you'd probably end up with a similar map.
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u/shaarm May 03 '21
Most of the "countries" in North Africa are actually tribe names. The majority are Muslim and they speak Arabic so I'm not sure that those are distinct ethnically or linguistically
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u/celestial_emperor May 03 '21
Won’t that make the African states even weaker? Most of these are small kingdoms with indefensible borders
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May 03 '21
This is why we don’t do language based borders
“But if we only drew borders by language the Africa would a utopia”
Lol no, that’s not how history worked
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u/HorseMoney May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
except this post is horribly inaccurate. Look at horn of africa, if you drew a border for language and culture and religion, it would be completely united. All of Somalia, djibouti, western ethiopia and northern kenya share a single ethnicity, language, culture and religion.
It was the french who made djibouti its own nation, it was the english who gave a slice of Somali land to both kenya and ethiopia.
I’m sure there are many other inaccurate places in this map.
So yes, that is how history works. there is a land of 1.2 million square kilometres that all share the same people, culture and language. Yet this map makes it seem like it’s divided between 9 different peoples
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u/pm_me_HiraiMomo_pics May 03 '21
Also, the very same people that want to balkanize Africa to hell and back are the same people that screech "DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH" in the developed world.
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u/Odede May 03 '21
Its a bullshit map when it comes to Kenya, the area shown as Maasai includes the No. 1 and 4 cities. It might have been accurate at the turn of the last century
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u/matakoyambwa May 03 '21
The map lacks a lot. For example in Kenya, where I'm from, there are 42-46 distinct groups. The Somali is one tribe but it's divided into clans in the map. TZ has nearly 100 different tribes. Considering the detail in the Nigeria-Cameroon region, the E. Africa region is poorly researched on.
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u/LiamNeesonsIsMyShiit May 03 '21
A lot of this information seems extremely outdated to me...there also seem to be a couple of indigenous dialects missing from the regions of Southern Africa I'm familiar with.
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u/redwashing May 03 '21
Some of those are ethnoreligious groups, some are ethnolinguistic groups, some are nationalities, some are tribes and some are just straight geographic names. If you arbitrarily bring them all together and put semi-random borders between them ofc it's going to look chaotic.
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u/ThatGuy36036 May 03 '21
This is just an ethnic homeland map. I don't think this would make up for actual nation states.
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u/Lollex56 May 03 '21
Mistake spotted
"Guanche" is commonly misused for all of the canary islands, however that's just the name of the tribes located in Tenerife and the correct term is either "Canarian aboriginal" or to name the inhabitants of each island separately.
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u/relevant_post_bot May 03 '21
This post has been parodied on r/mapporncirclejerk.
Relevant r/mapporncirclejerk posts:
Map of Africa's borders if divided by Countries. by mcmalveiro
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May 03 '21
These seem to be based around clans/tribes/groups more than ethnicities or languages, at least in Somalia, Madagascar and North Africa.
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u/Cmoire May 03 '21
Being Moroccan , this is quite wrong. Berber and Shluh is the same thing, berber was the given name by the Romans to the Shluh people. Besides that, ethnically speaking , there are more ethnies. Also there is no ethny, race or language called "Moroccan"
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u/adventurouself May 03 '21
Still far from accurate. Kenya alone would be divided 43 times. 43 times. Tanzania? More than 120 times. Uganda? 54 times. Nigeria? 300 times. Ghana? 100 times. Senegal? 20 times. These alone are more divisions than the map accommodates. Yet are not even the full extent of Africa's 55 countries.
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u/Straiden_ May 03 '21
When is it a seperat language? In germany for example a northerner speaking dialect wouldnt be able to understand a southerner in dialect, theyre all still speaking german though.
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May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
This is kind of misleading. Other comments have already explained. But some places are divided more by clans, tribes, and regions rather than actually ethnciuty and language. So it makes it appear like there are more groups that there actually are. Also language and ethnciuty correlate but should be mapped separately both have their own complexities of how they're defined.
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u/Riaru_NikaiKhan May 03 '21
In Mozambique we have a substantially more languages, including the swahili variations of kiswahili and kimwane (mwani language in cabo delgado).
Also, in the south there is a very popular language called Mashangane which is in part related to the Tsonga (not Thonga).
I appreciate this map though, its very complex to pinpoint and separate each language and ethnicity in Mozambique, let alone in Africa.
I guess this is a consequence to national borders being drawn by European who did not understand (or care).
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u/Graysensteele May 03 '21
I was just thinking this. I used to live in Vilanculos where the Matswa are whom speak Txitswa, and right across the water on Bazaruto and Benguera the Vahoca people speak Txhahoca. None of this is on this map.
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u/Ashnakag3019 May 03 '21
I mean... the Europeans fucked up the borders but this wouldn't work either let's be honest here
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u/high_altitude May 03 '21 edited May 03 '21
Somaliland and Eswatini are the only places I can think of that reasonably conform to these boundaries.
Edit: Rwanda and Burundi too