Place and Humanistic African Cultural Geography: A Tanzanian Case

Abstract

Humanistic cultural geography studies of the experience and meaning of place in sub-Saharan Africa are fairly rare. The narration of senses of place has occupied a crucial niche in Anglo-American cultural geography for several decades. Yet edited volumes in humanistic cultural geography seldom have Africa-related chapters, and relatively few Africa-based research outcomes in cultural geography are forthrightly concerned with place meaning from a perspective influenced by humanistic thinking. I suggest in this essay possible means by which to construct humanistic cultural geographies of African places, using Jongowe, a small settlement in Tanzania, as an empirical referent. My two emphases are on building from African forms of humanism and on developing a politically and historically grounded yet global sense of African places out of a political ecology lens.