The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) took a long-overdue step toward correcting distortions in commonly used world maps, particularly the Mercator projection, which is seen as misrepresenting the relative size of continents and diminishing the perception of Africa and other equatorial regions.
The Chairperson of the African Union (AU) Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, welcomed the UNGA resolution that encourages the use of the “Equal Earth cartographic projection” in maps globally to replace the widely used Mercator projection.
In a statement, the AU said adopting the resolution, sponsored by the West African country of Togo, marks an important step forward. According to reporting by the Chinese news agency Xinhua, the Mercator projection.
Which was designed in the 16th century primarily for navigation, does not accurately reflect the relative surface areas of different regions of the world and significantly understates the true size of the African continent. “A map is never merely a map.
It reflects how the world is imagined,” noted the article, headlined, “Opinion: The map was wrong, but the perception problem is real,” by Xinhua and published on English.news.cn.
The UNGA measure passed 164 to 1, with the United States, not surprisingly, casting the only vote against it. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia, and Ukraine abstained, the UN reported.
“Every flat map lies because the Earth is a sphere and no projection can flatten it without distorting something: shape, area, distance or direction,” noted an article published on Al Jazeera.
“Gerardus Mercator, a cartographer and geographer who published the world map in 1569, chose to preserve angles and straight bearings, a trade-off that made sense for 16th-century ships but has kept shaping perceptions of the world for nearly 500 years since.
Equal Earth makes the opposite trade-off, preserving true area so continents can be compared honestly, at the cost of slightly bending their outlines,” according to aljazeera.com.
Equal Earth projection shows countries and continents in their true relative size. “Maps shape our understanding of the world,” Togolese Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said, reported UN News.
“A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world,” he said, adding, “And when our perspective becomes more just, it paves the way for greater understanding, respect and peace among nations.”
In foreign affairs reporter Tim Marshall’s 2015 book, “Prisoners Of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics,” he writes, “The world’s idea of African geography is flawed.
Few people realize just how big (Africa) it is. He adds, “Africa is far, far longer than usually portrayed, which explains what an achievement it was (in past history) to round the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa).”
“Many Africans,” wrote Marshall, “are now partially the prisoners of the political geography the Europeans made … .” He was referring to the divvying up of Africa by Europeans during the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference. The colonial powers drew artificial borders on paper, ignoring the region’s physical realities.
To show students how Europeans divided Africa, this writer once stood in front of my son Equiano’s sixth-grade class in Philadelphia. Armed only with a magic marker, I drew “artificial borders” on a map of Africa, devoid of its current nation-states. I projected it from the internet onto an erasable board.
According to the documentary “Scramble for Africa,” the 1885 Act of Berlin did the same thing—carve up Africa by simply drawing lines on a map. “Places where they had not even been yet. Between 6,000 and 10,000 political units were carved up. People … were just cut off from (water sources) … it was complete geographical madness,” the film noted.
Marshall explains that after fighting for and achieving independence from their colonial rulers, many African states “encompassed the same divisions they did when first drawn, and those formal divisions are some of the many legacies colonialism bequeathed the continent.”
He also explained that “modern civil wars (in Africa) are partially because the colonialists told different nations (a product of artificial borders) that they were one nation in one state, and then after the colonialists were chased out, a dominant people emerged within the state who wanted to run it all, thus ensuring violence.”
As the side effects of some medication, the aftereffects of imposing artificial borders, explained Marshall, “can lead to a weak and divided state, ravaged by internal conflict, and whose mineral wealth condemns it to being exploited by outsiders.”
The UNGA vote matters even though the resolution is nonbinding; it does not ban the Mercator projection but, according to UN News, “simply encourages wider use of the Equal Earth projection.”
As the Iraqi-based news site Kurdistan24.net noted, “the significance of correcting the centuries old map inaccuracy lies less in declaring one map universally correct than in challenging the assumption that a navigational projection should remain the default representation of the world in classrooms, media and digital platforms.
The vote gives broad international support to an argument African governments and campaigners have increasingly advanced: maps do more than show geography.” Follow Jehron Muhammad @africawatchf
