from the author of the map:
"Alkebu-lan: If Africa Was Never Colonized By Europe
Alkebu-lan is the oldest name for Africa. In Arabic, it means “The Land of the Blacks.”
Hi, my name is Nikolaj Cyon and I am an artist from Sweden who has worked with precolonial Africa as a theme in my art for over a year. I have, as a mind experiment, made a map of what Africa could have looked like in the mid 19th century if Europe had never become a colonizing world power. In order to do this I have tried to construct an alternative historical time-line in which Europe was much harder struck by the plague in the 1350’s and never recovered. Therefore African nations would have gotten the opportunity to flourish unhindered.
But the project is really about real historical precolonial African nations, and I have tried to form a map of the most prominent of those that existed between the 15th and mid 19th century, by looking at historical maps like the one found in UNESCO’s “A General History of Africa”, linguistic regions and natural boundaries."
