For generations, we’ve looked at the world through maps and accepted what we see as reality. Europe appears enormous, Greenland looks almost as big as Africa, while the African continent often appears smaller than it actually is. But what if the map we grew up with has been giving us a distorted
picture of the world? The United Nations has now backed a push to promote map projections that represent Africa’s size more accurately, reigniting a much bigger conversation about how the continent has been portrayed to the rest of the world. Because this is not only about geography. Maps are powerful. They influence how we understand countries, continents and their importance in the global order. And for a continent with more than 1.4 billion people, vast natural resources and 54 countries, the question is whether Africa has also been made to look smaller in our minds than it really is.
So, if the map has distorted Africa’s physical size, have we also underestimated its political, economic and geopolitical significance? And perhaps the bigger question is: has Africa been made to feel
small for far longer than it has actually been?