How to Eat a Forest: Cartography, Land Grabs, and African Territoriality

In an essay for Afterall Journal 43, Ntone Edjabe explores how cartography and land surveys have been weaponized in postcolonial Africa, focusing on the Mau Forest Complex in Kenya. The Mau Forest, once 273,300 hectares and three times the size of Nairobi, is the largest forest in East Africa. Writer Billy Kahora documented the eviction of so-called 'encroachers'—landless peasants from neighboring tribes—revealing a semantic shift from 'squatter' to 'encroacher' that justified land grabs. Edjabe argues that the abuse of technical land surveys, often directed by political and economic interests, redraws maps to 'eat up' forests, disregarding natural and preexisting boundaries. This contestation over land ownership and identity challenges the nation-state, a colonial construct. The essay calls for a new cartography rooted in lived experience, improvisation, and memory, citing Jorge Luis Borges's fable 'On Exactitude in Science' as a model. Edjabe proposes maps that embrace multiple scales, projections, and symbolizations—where a river can be both water and sacred being—to represent African realities with exactitude on their own terms.