Colonialism Also Drew the Map
“For centuries, we were taught where Africa was. The problem is that we were also taught how much space it was supposed to occupy.”
For generations, millions of children walked into a classroom and found the world hanging on a wall. Europe at the top, Africa below it, the Americas to one side, Asia stretching toward the Pacific, and an enormous Greenland occupying an area that appeared comparable to the African continent.
The map seemed innocent. It was not quite so innocent.
On September 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly approved, by 164 votes to one, with six abstentions, a resolution promoting the abandonment of the traditional Mercator projection for general use and a shift toward representations such as Equal Earth, which are capable of showing the relative size of the continents more accurately.
The only vote against it was the United States.
The irony begins with an extraordinarily simple figure: Africa is approximately fourteen times larger than Greenland. Yet on many Mercator maps, the two appear to be similar in size.
Gerardus Mercator did not design his projection in 1569 to humiliate Africa. He created it primarily to solve an extraordinarily important navigational problem. His map made it possible to represent constant compass bearings as straight lines, a formidable advantage for navigators of his time.
The problem came later.
An extraordinary tool for navigation eventually became an extraordinarily imperfect way of imagining the planet.
The projection progressively enlarges land areas as they approach the poles. Europe, Canada, Russia, and Greenland grow visually larger. Africa and other regions closer to the equator appear comparatively smaller.
And for centuries, that image accompanied precisely the era in which European powers explored, conquered, divided, and administered vast areas of the planet.
“Empires did not merely occupy territories. For centuries, they also had the privilege of deciding how much space everyone else appeared to occupy.”
That is why the debate that has now reached the United Nations is far deeper than a dispute among cartographers.
Togo led the African initiative. Its Foreign Minister, Robert Dussey, summed it up with an idea that is difficult to improve upon: a fair world begins with a fair map.
This is not about erasing Mercator from history. It is simply about not confusing a tool with reality.
Africa covers more than 30 million square kilometers, has 54 states recognized by the United Nations, and contains some of the world’s largest deposits of strategic minerals. There are cobalt, manganese, copper, uranium, bauxite, gold, oil, gas, and enormous reserves that remain insufficiently explored. It is also the continent whose population will carry increasing weight throughout this century.
Yet our mental image remains, to a considerable extent, that of a continent smaller than it actually is. That matters.
Maps do not merely describe territories. They also construct perceptions. They teach us what appears central, what appears peripheral, what appears enormous, and what may appear secondary.
Changing a map will not return the resources extracted over centuries. It will not alter borders drawn in European offices. It will not eliminate poverty, wars, or inequality. Nor will it automatically turn old colonialism into a museum piece.
But it can correct something far more elementary: the way a child begins to imagine the world.
Perhaps that is why it is so interesting that an apparently small discussion ended up before the General Assembly. After centuries of debating who owns the land, who controls its resources, and who writes its history, Africa is posing a much simpler question.
How much space does it really occupy?
And this time, all that is needed to obtain the answer is to unfold the map correctly.
“Perhaps decolonizing the world does not begin by tearing down statues.”
“Perhaps it begins with something much simpler: allowing every people to reclaim, even on paper, the space it has always occupied.”
Brief Bibliography
UNESCO — General History of Africa.
For African history before and after colonization, its civilizations, political structures, economies, cultures, and the impact of European domination.
Walter Rodney — How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972.
To analyze how slavery, colonialism, and resource extraction contributed to transforming African economic structures
