Cartographica Helvetica

Summary

Imre Josef Demhardt:

Cartography of the Imperial Protectorate of German East Africa

Cartographica Helvetica 30 (2004) 11–21

Summary:

In the middle of the 19th century the central part of East Africa was still unknown to Europeans. It was not until the German colonial rule in 1885 that cartographic surveys were made, mostly by officers of the troops. Due to insufficient personnel and funding, surveying was carried out in a rather evolutionary fashion, proceeding at first from general route descriptions up to complete coverage of economically important areas by means of triangulation, plane table and photogrammetry. Even so, from 1894 to 1911 the Colonial Cartographic Institute in Berlin was able to produce official topographic maps at the scale 1:300,000 from the evaluation of the field observations.