The Fight For A New Map Reflecting Africa's Actual Size

The Fight for a New Map Reflecting Africa’s True Size Challenges Centuries of Western Dominance WORLD/ AFRICA When Nigerian-born Abimbola Ogundairo joined a campaign in 2024 to change the world map, she found that many people had no idea how misleading the prevailing version could be. The widely used Mercator projection, created in 1569, enlarges landmasses farther from the equator. On it, Africa, which is 14 times larger than Greenland, looks roughly the same size. “We live in a world where size is often equated with power,” Ogundairo, advocacy and campaigns lead at African advocacy group Africa No Filter, told Al Jazeera last year. “It has a damaging impact on the way we make decisions in our everyday lives, on how we make business decisions, the way we dream, and even the way non-Africans view the continent as a tourist destination and an investment destination. It’s the most lingering lie about Africa.” On Sept. 4, West African nation Togo took the “Correct the Map” campaign to the United Nations, where the General Assembly voted 164-1 to promote more accurate world maps. The initiative, launched by Africa No Filter and fellow advocacy group Speak Up Africa in 2024, had won African Union backing. Though nonbinding, the resolution encourages countries and international organizations to use the Equal Earth map, developed in 2018 (and pictured above), or other maps that accurately show continents’ relative sizes. Supporters say showing Africa at its true relative size could help change perceptions of its geopolitical importance. “Maps are not innocent drawings,” Carlos Lopes, a University of Cape Town professor, told South African radio station CapeTalk. “They influence what investors value, what policymakers prioritize, what journalists consider important.” The debate over Africa is part of a much older relationship between maps and geopolitical power, say observers. And as history is written by the victors, maps are drawn by the powerful. “Countries use maps to depict their real or imagined territorial reach,” wrote World Politics Review. “The map question relates to how countries of “the West” think about themselves. One must ask, of course, “west of what?” The answer depends on where you center a map.” Meanwhile, the United States, the only country to oppose the resolution, called the campaign part of a “much larger and more radical ideological project,” linking it to efforts to promote reparations for slavery and colonialism. Others wonder how much changing a map can accomplish when many of the continent’s political and institutional challenges, including legacies of colonialism, run far deeper than cartography. “You can fix a map, you can fix narratives and global credit rating agencies, but it doesn’t absolve African countries from also having to do the hard work of fixing their own problems,” Kenyan academic Ken Opalo, a professor at Georgetown University, told the Financial Times. Yet maps have figured in US President Donald Trump’s own geopolitical thinking. Trump’s interest in acquiring Greenland was reportedly fueled in part by how “massive” the island appeared on a map – on Mercator, landmasses near the poles look much larger than they are. “Anyone who looks at Greenland with a Mercator projection, thinking that it is huge, needs remedial training in geography,” Mark Serreze, a geography professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told Newsweek. Another target of Trump’s territorial ambitions, Canada, similarly looks much larger than it is. Meanwhile, the US reference to reparations comes as African countries are increasingly using international institutions to challenge longstanding Western interpretations of history and global power. The map resolution followed another African-led UN vote this year that declared the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparatory justice. “These interventions in how we make sense of the world may be symbolic – but they are meaningful, and they are gaining ground,” the Guardian wrote, with its West Africa correspondent believing such victories could contribute to a “multipolar world order.” As global power shifts, the debate over who gets represented where – and at what scale – is unlikely to end with Africa. “To the extent that maps come to shape the way that we think about different places and people who inhabit them, maps structure our politics in ways that then have consequences,” Alex Moulton of Hunter College in New York City, told the Associated Press. “It is apprehending our world as we observe it and then putting that down as the truth of those things and that is an inherently political practice.”