9:28 AM 4/27/2007

I borrowed "The Last King of Scotland" yesterday. I left the last fifteen minutes or so for later. Suspense!

Of course, it doesn't make me want to go to Africa any time soon.

When I was a kid, I had a knack for geography, and I would occasionally get National Geographic maps to put on my wall. One time I decided that Africa was a neglected area in my knowledge of the world, so I put up a map of Africa, and studied it long and hard so that I could name all the countries. Some of them have changed names since then. I memorized the spatial relationships among countries, and the city names when I could. These days someone will say "I'm from Ghana" or "I'm from Malawi" and I know exactly where they're talking about. On a map.

Uganda, along with Rwanda and Burundi was particularly interesting for how it was wedged in the middle, caught between much bigger countries. What was it about those interior places that they should be officially so distinct. Were there no such distinctions in Zaire? Sudan? Tanzania?

If you think about it, maps are a strange bargain for the knower. So much information there, but not nearly enough for real understanding. You get more than you can handle if you really scrutinize a good map, but it's so flat (literally and figuratively), because the arrangement of things on the surface of the earth is just one way of looking. The harder you look, the less you see of other truths. And, yes - you could produce other maps - sheet after sheet of alternate views. But there we go with more information. Are you sure that would be better?

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