Representing Freetown: Photographs, maps and postcards in the urban cartography of colonial Sierra Leone

This article traces the development of colonial cartography Freetown, Sierra Leone across late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography has centred surveyor map in capture control land. article, instead, describes accretion a variety forms spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries project. chronology begins with cartographic anxiety two Colonial Office circulars 1869 1871. Following this emergence nascent governmentality, three mappings Freetown over forty-year period, an itinerant West African photographer, John Parkes Decker, Wesleyan missionary, Thomas Frederick Halligey, Freetonian photographer-entrepreneur, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, are examined. Visual analysis photographs, maps postcards that were products these respective mapping projects shows ideologies ambivalences undergirded representations city. At once, following processes through which visual material did work for state, how governance segregating was produced entanglements geographic knowledges.