ABSTRACT
On November 15, 1884, the Congo Conference convenes in Berlin. Otto von Bismarck invites representatives of fourteen nations into the banquet hall of the imperial chancellery. In the background: a sixteen-foot-high map of Africa. The conference convenes to regulate the European rivalries on the African continent and to continue the system of free trade; the fourteen nations negotiate on the basis of a cartographic representation and intend to create a new, political map. The diplomats, however, fi nd themselves in a perfectly “nasty situation,” as the coordinator of colonial cartography put it:1 While the contours of the African continent were clearly delineated, cartographers had only insuffi ciently and incompletely reconstructed the interior. The proverbial white spaces had not been fi lled.
