2 days ago
Why Africa wants to ditch popular world map
The African Union (AU) has backed a campaign to replace the 16th-century Mercator map of the world with one that more accurately depicts Africa's size. The projection of the map — used by many governments and international organisations, as well as schools and tech companies — distorts the size of some continents, enlarging North America while shrinking Africa and South America.
In 2017, schools in Boston introduced the more accurate Peters projection from the 1970s (also called the Gall-Peters projection) in classrooms.
An episode of the American political drama TV series The West Wing (1999-2006), showed a group of socially minded cartographers in the White House explaining the bias implicit in the Mercator map.
Gerardus Mercator (1512-94), a mathematician and engraver, created the map in 1569 to help sailors navigate their way around the globe. The map's first version was a set of 18 sheets, which formed a wall-size mosaic 48 inches high by 80 inches wide (Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection, Mark Monmonier, 2004).
Mercator projected the Earth's surface as if unwrapped from a cylinder around the globe. It had a grid pattern with longitudes (or meridians) and latitudes (or parallels) at 90-degree angles. The lines of longitude were evenly spaced, but the distance between the lines of latitude increased away from the equator, which was placed at the centre of the map. This allowed a straight line between any two points on the map to be the correct direction for sailors to follow using their compasses.
The Mercator map revolutionised travel and became the standard world map for atlases and wall maps by the 19th century. 'Wall-map publishers readily embraced the Mercator map's rectangular format… [and] schoolbooks and classroom atlases also promoted the Mercator worldview,' wrote Monmonier.
In recent years, however, the Mercator map has been criticised for distorting the sizes of the world's continents.
When Mercator displayed the near-spherical Earth as a rectangle on a flat surface with the equator at the centre, it left large, confusing gaps near the poles. So, he stretched out the northern and southern ends of the globe to fill them — and thus produced a usable map.
However, as a result of this manoeuvre, areas closer to the poles — such as Canada, Russia, the United States, and Europe — appear bigger than they are. And Africa — which straddles the equator — looks smaller than it is.
Even tropical countries like India appear smaller than they actually are. And Greenland, which is about the size of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, seems to be of the same size as the whole of Africa.
Mercator's projection helped Western cartographers to easily mark towns, cities, and roads in their part of the world.
'In some situations centering a map near the viewer's location is good design. But if you're a humanist well versed in European imperialism's harsh imprint on the Third World, the traditional Greenwich-anchored world map becomes a clear example of Western cultural hegemony, and all the more so when a Mercator projection inflates the size of western Europe,' wrote Monmonier.
Critics have argued that the diminution of Africa on the map contributed to its exploitation by the colonial West.
'The standard projection was a political tool that contributed to the scramble for Africa, also known as the partition of Africa when Western European powers colonised the continent. Just as making Africa look small and conquerable then, the Mercator projection makes the continent look small and irrelevant now,' Rabah Arezki, former economist at the World Bank, wrote in Le Monde.
The Correct the Map campaign, which was endorsed by the AU last week, urges organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection. Selma Malika Haddadi, deputy chairperson of the AU, told Reuters that Mercator map's rejection would help reclaim 'Africa's rightful place on the global stage'.
