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This richly colored, large-format German map of Africa captures the continent at a crucial and fleeting moment during the late 19th-century Scramble for Africa. Published by Carl Flemming of Glogau and cataloged as No. 38 in his General-Karten series, it was prepared by the respected cartographer Friedrich Handtke and later revised by O. Herkt. Although undated, internal cartographic and geopolitical evidence place the map squarely in a very narrow window between August 1888 and early 1889. It is an exceptional record of the fluid and often unstable boundaries that defined the colonial enterprise in this period, and especially of Germany’s brief flirtation with privatized empire in East Africa.
Across the map, European possessions are color-coded according to a printed legend: German (red), British (rose), French (pink), Portuguese (brown), Italian (orange), Spanish (green), and the independent Congo Free State in outline orange. Boundaries are carefully delineated to show both firm control and looser zones of interest or spheres of influence, while overland trade routes, telegraph lines, and undersea cables weave a network of economic and strategic ambition across the African landmass and surrounding seas.
The map’s clearest geopolitical message is the prominence it gives to German imperial expansion, reflecting both nationalist pride and the aggressive pace of colonial acquisition under Bismarck’s government. German Southwest Africa, Kamerun, Togo, and German East Africa are all shown in bold red, and each territory is accompanied by a detailed inset map—clearly meant to impress upon a domestic audience the scale and coherence of Germany’s African empire. Perhaps most telling is the inclusion of comparative insets of the German Reich and Saxony, helping viewers relate faraway holdings to familiar European spaces.
Yet the true historical value of this edition lies in its depiction of German East Africa at the moment just before the imperial government took direct control. The main map and the inset at lower left still show the coastline as governed by the Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft (German East Africa Company), a private trading enterprise chartered by the Kaiser. A caption in the inset near Zanzibar states explicitly that, as of 15 August 1888, the Company held coastal rights from the Sultan of Zanzibar for a term of fifty years. This was the precise arrangement that triggered the Abushiri Revolt later that year—an event not yet reflected on the map—strongly suggesting that the cartographic data predates the revolt’s escalation and the March 1889 transition to direct imperial administration.
This dating is further corroborated by the presence of Deutsch-Wituland, a small protectorate along the northern Kenyan coast under German control from 1885 until it was ceded to Britain in the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of July 1890. The fact that Witu is still shown as German confirms that the map predates that diplomatic shift. At the same time, Zanzibar is still labeled as a sultanate, not yet clearly marked as a British protectorate, indicating that although the British presence was increasing, the map reflects a moment just before these arrangements were formalized.
The rest of the continent is similarly instructive. In the south, Matabeleland is shown as independent, predating the 1893–94 wars of conquest by the British South Africa Company. The Südafrikanische Republik (Transvaal) and Oranje-Fluss-Freistaat (Orange Free State) appear as untroubled, sovereign Boer republics, with no sign of the looming British interference that would erupt into the Second Boer War a decade later. In the interior of the Congo Basin, the Congo Free State is clearly delineated, reflecting Leopold II’s personal empire following its recognition in 1885 but before the international outcry of the 1890s.
The map was originally designed by Friedrich Handtke, who (along with Carl Flemming) died in 1879, evidently with at least some of his output going to Otto Herkt. Herkt’s contributions are especially significant here, as they reflect rapid updates made in response to shifting colonial arrangements in real time. His revisions bring the map in line with the moment of German expansion between 1885 and 1889, before the colonial enterprise had yet been fully stabilized or bureaucratized by imperial authorities. It is, in a sense, a map of colonial improvisation.
Carl Flemming's (or maybe more accurately Friedrich Handtke's) maps of Africa, published in the same format and consistently updated, provide a great series of snapshots of rapidly changing cartography in Africa around the time of the Berlin Conference.
Ideally, one could compile all of the editions of these maps to form a very interesting cartographic evolution.
