For generations of students, the world map has looked roughly the same. Europe sits near the center, North America stretches across the upper half, and Africa appears surprisingly similar in size to Greenland. But there is a problem with that picture: Africa is not remotely the same size as Greenland. In reality, Africa is about 14 times larger.
On Sept. 4, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to promote a different way of representing the world. The resolution, led by Togo and supported by the African Union, received 164 votes in favor, with the United States was the only country voting against and six countries abstaining. It encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the 2018 Equal Earth projection, or other maps that more accurately represent the relative sizes of continents as reported by The Guardian.
The map many people grew up with is called the Mercator projection. Created by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569, it was designed primarily to help sailors navigate. Its usefulness for navigation came with a major tradeoff: the farther a location is from the equator, the more its size is exaggerated. This makes places such as Greenland and northern Europe appear much larger than they actually are, while areas closer to the equator, including Africa and South America, appear smaller, according to the BBC.
The distortion becomes especially obvious when looking at Greenland and Africa. On a traditional Mercator map, the two can appear roughly comparable in size. In reality, Africa covers approximately 30.4 million square kilometers, while Greenland covers about 2.2 million. Africa could fit the United States, China, India, Japan, Mexico and much of Europe within its borders and still have land remaining.
The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by an international team of cartographers, was designed to preserve the relative area of landmasses. Africa therefore appears much closer to its actual size. The shapes and sizes of continents can never be represented perfectly on a flat map because Earth itself is three-dimensional, but equal-area projections provide a more accurate comparison of how much land each continent occupies.
That difference matters beyond geography class.
“[W]e have to understand that Africa as a continent has been minimized, devalued, and misinterpreted for hundreds of years,” said Ms. Heather Panahi, African Studies teacher. She said she discusses the Eurocentric biases that have shaped how people understand African history and governments in her classroom.
“Restoring Africa on the map to its actual size, it does make a difference,” Panahi said. “Because it really shows that this is a place that shouldn’t be minimized.”
Maps are one of the first ways many people learn what the world looks like. They influence how students visualize countries, continents and distances before they ever have the opportunity to visit them. When the same distortion appears repeatedly in classrooms, textbooks, news coverage and digital maps, it can shape people’s understanding of the relative size and importance of different parts of the world.
Ms. Panahi said she believes even seemingly small changes in representation can affect how people perceive a place. “Sometimes how you see things, sometimes how things are presented, becomes how you see,” she said.
She pointed to a recent example of inaccurate geographic representation beyond the classroom. This summer, the U.S. State Department displayed a map of Africa with countries in the wrong locations at an international AIDS conference in Brazil, she said.
“Now think about that. Like, this is the US Department of State,” Panahi said. “And they’re putting a map up at an international conference, and they don’t even know where, like, Nigeria is.”
Panahi questioned what such mistakes communicate to people from the countries being misrepresented. Although the department attributed the map’s errors to artificial intelligence, she said the incident demonstrated the importance of recognizing inaccuracies rather than accepting them without scrutiny.
The United States claimed that this resolution was a “radical ideological project” and argued that resolutions similar to this one were the reason that the United Nations is losing credibility. The United States believes that the focus of the United Nations should be “international peace, prosperity, or good relations.”
The issue also has a historical dimension. The Mercator projection was created during a period of European exploration and expansion, and its original purpose was closely connected to European maritime navigation. Critics of the map argue that its continued dominance has helped maintain a visual representation of the world in which Europe and other northern regions appear disproportionately large. Others emphasize that Mercator was created for a specific navigational purpose rather than as an attempt to make political or cultural statements about the importance of different countries.
Panahi connected the history of mapmaking to the assumptions that mapmakers have sometimes brought to their work. She referenced a passage by Jonathan Swift, the 17th-century writer of Gulliver’s Travels, that criticizes geographers for filling gaps in their maps of Africa with stereotypical images and elephants where they lack knowledge of the region.
“When they’re mapping Africa, if they don’t know something, they just drop an elephant or they fill it with their stereotypes or prejudices,” Panahi said.
She added that these representations can have lasting effects. “If they’re bringing biases into their own interpretation, then the people who learn from those will also inherit their biases,” she said. “They’re hard to break. They really are.”
This distinction is important. The UN resolution does not mean that the Mercator projection is suddenly an incorrect map in every situation. It remains useful for certain types of navigation because of the way it represents directions. Instead, the UN is encouraging people to use maps according to what they are trying to show. If the goal is to compare the sizes of continents, an equal-area projection makes more sense.
The resolution itself is also not legally binding. Countries, schools and companies are not required to immediately throw away every Mercator map. Instead, the vote is an international recommendation to reconsider which map is being used and why. Togo has said it plans to work with UNESCO, the African Union and technology companies on implementing the change, including in educational materials, as reported by The Guardian.
In her own classroom, Panahi said she continues to use Mercator maps because they remain widely available in textbooks and other educational resources. However, she makes a point of reminding students that the projection does not accurately represent Africa’s size.
“My hope is that as new maps are generated, I will switch to those that highlight Africa more effectively,” she said.
For Panahi, the maps themselves are only part of the lesson. “I think more important is understanding why those things happen in the first place and what the consequences have been,” she said.
For Africa, the change represents more than a different shape on a classroom wall. Africa is the world’s second-largest continent by both area and population, following Asia, and its countries play an increasingly significant role in global politics, economics and culture. Seeing the continent at its actual scale can help correct a basic geographic misconception that has been repeated for centuries.
A map cannot change the physical world. Africa was always much larger than Greenland, whether or not a classroom map showed it that way. But maps do influence how people picture the world.
The UN’s vote asks a simple question: if a map is supposed to show us the world, shouldn’t it show the world as accurately as possible?
Image Source: The Guardian