Africa Is Big, and It Wants the World's Maps to Show It
Bunmi fatoye-matory
Africa Is Big, and It Wants the World’s Maps to Show It
A campaign is underway to replace the world’s most popular map, which the effort’s supporters say promotes a false view of the continent and its size.
By Weiyi Cai
Reporting from Dakar, Senegal
Africa is roughly three times as large as Europe, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the world’s most popular map, the 16th-century Mercator map.
Last week, the African Union, a continental group of 55 countries, endorsed a campaign to have organizations around the world replace the Mercator map with alternatives such as the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which supporters say more accurately reflects the true size of Africa.
In the Equal Earth map, Africa, shown in its true proportions, dwarfs Europe.
“It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” Selma Malika Haddadi, the deputy chairwoman of the African Union’s executive arm, said this week in an interview with Reuters. The Mercator projection fosters a false impression that Africa is “marginal,” she said.
That map, created by a Flemish cartographer, Gerardus Mercator, has been under fire for decades. It was drafted to help European explorers navigate the seas more easily, but ended up warping landmasses as a result.
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In some versions of the map, Greenland, an island of less than a million square miles and fewer than 57,000 people, appears nearly as large as Africa, which has an area of 11.73 million square miles and a population of 1.5 billion.
The inaccuracy was spoofed in a 2001 episode of “The West Wing” where a nerdy group of cartographers campaigns for the United States to make the change. Now, campaigners with a similar mission hope to have your attention.
A Correct the Map campaign, led by civil society organizations like Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, has pushed for the African Union to call for the switch. The African Union is expected to make an official decision to adopt the Equal Earth map in February, when the group’s leaders meet in Ethiopia.
In a petition circulating online, the campaign also asks the United Nations and the BBC to adopt the Equal Earth map as a way to “set a new standard and encourage others to follow suit in ensuring Africa is represented accurately as a critical driver of global growth and development.”
The African Union is the largest body to sign on to the campaign so far, a move campaigners described as a major milestone.
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“It is more than geography, it’s really about dignity and pride,” said Fara Ndiaye, co-founder and deputy executive director of Speak Up Africa. “Maps shape how we see the world, and also how power is perceived. So by correcting the map, we also correct the global narrative about Africa.”
In an internal document shared with The New York Times, the African Union said the campaign aligned with its 2025 theme of “Justice for Africans and people of African descent through reparations,” adding that the campaign challenged false narratives about the continent and helped Africa reclaim its rightful place on the world stage.
But as of Monday, several agencies associated with the African Union still had the Mercator map displayed on their websites.
An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the nationality of Gerardus Mercator. He was from what is now Belgium, not Germany.
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Saikou Jammeh is a reporter and researcher for The Times based in Dakar, Senegal.