This article traces the development of the colonial cartography of Freetown, Sierra Leone across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of colonial cartography has centred the surveyor and the map in the capture and control of land. This article, instead, describes colonial cartography in the accretion of a variety of forms of spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries in the colonial project. The chronology begins with the cartographic anxiety of two Colonial Office circulars in 1869 and 1871. Following this emergence of a nascent cartographic governmentality, three mappings of Freetown over a forty-year period, by an itinerant West African photographer, John Parkes Decker, a Wesleyan missionary, John Thomas Frederick Halligey, and a Freetonian photographer-entrepreneur, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, are examined. Visual analysis of the photographs, maps and postcards that were the products of these respective mapping projects shows the ideologies and ambivalences that undergirded these representations of the city. At once, following the processes through which this visual material did work for the colonial state, this article shows how the cartographic governance of a segregating colonial Freetown was produced in the entanglements of geographic knowledges.

本文追溯了 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初塞拉利昂弗里敦殖民地制图的发展。殖民地制图学的史学将测量员和地图集中在土地的捕获和控制上。相反，这篇文章描述了殖民地制图学在殖民项目中由不同中介创造的各种空间表现形式的积累。年表从 1869 年和 1871 年殖民地办公室的两份通告的制图焦虑开始。随着新生制图政府的出现，在四十年的时间里，由西非巡回摄影师约翰·帕克斯·德克尔 (John Parkes Decker) 绘制的三幅弗里敦地图，卫斯理教徒传教士 John Thomas Frederick Halligey 和弗里顿摄影师兼企业家 Alphonso Lisk-Carew，被检查。对作为这些各自绘图项目的产品的照片、地图和明信片的视觉分析显示了支撑这些城市表现的意识形态和矛盾心理。紧接着，通过这种视觉材料为殖民地国家工作的过程，本文展示了一个隔离的殖民地弗里敦的制图治理是如何在地理知识的纠缠中产生的。