Reimagining Africa Beyond Mercator in the Geography of Power

By Collins Nweke

I pass a ship almost every working day in Ostend. The Mercator, a beautiful three-masted sailing vessel moored in this Belgian North Sea city, has become such a familiar feature of my daily landscape that I hardly need to look in its direction anymore. Its name, of course, honours Gerardus Mercator, the great 16th-century cartographer whose work would profoundly influence how generations came to visualise the world. I have only recently begun to appreciate the irony.

Flanders, where Mercator was born and where I have made my home for more than three decades, is a relatively small corner of Europe. I was born on the African continent that his famous projection would, however unintentionally, help generations perceive as considerably smaller relative to northern landmasses than it actually is. And now, more than four centuries after Mercator’s death, African countries have successfully persuaded an overwhelming majority of the United Nations General Assembly to support a different way of looking at the world. For someone standing, quite literally, between these two geographies, the moment feels both surreal and fascinating.

Africa Has Not Suddenly Become Bigger

First, Africa did not suddenly become bigger because of a United Nations vote. Africa has always been this big. What is changing is the international community’s willingness to reconsider the lens through which generations have been taught to see it. The Mercator projection was developed in 1569 for navigation. For that purpose, it was ingenious. By letting sailors plot a constant compass bearing as a straight line, Mercator helped solve one of the practical problems of maritime navigation. The problem came later.

A map designed principally for navigation gradually became one of the world’s dominant general-purpose representations of geography. And therein lies the distortion. Because the Earth is spherical, representing it accurately on a flat surface is mathematically impossible. Every projection sacrifices something: shape, area, distance or direction. Mercator preserves direction extremely well but increasingly exaggerates landmasses as you move toward the poles. The consequences are visually striking. Greenland can appear roughly comparable in size to Africa on a conventional Mercator map. In reality, Africa is about fourteen times larger. Europe and North America similarly acquire a visual prominence considerably greater than their actual geographical proportions would suggest.

Technically, therefore, it is not quite correct to say that Mercator “made Africa smaller”. Africa, straddling the equator, is comparatively less distorted. Rather, northern landmasses are dramatically enlarged relative to it. That distinction matters. Historical accuracy should not become collateral damage in the pursuit of cartographic accuracy.

When a Navigation Tool Becomes a Worldview

I find little value in putting Gerardus Mercator himself on trial. He was a 16th-century Flemish mathematician and cartographer solving a navigational problem. Retroactively assigning contemporary geopolitical motives to his mathematical innovation would be historically careless. The more interesting question is what happened afterwards. Why did a specialist navigational instrument become so deeply embedded in classrooms, atlases, newsrooms, public institutions and eventually our collective imagination of the world? That is where cartography becomes something more than mathematics. Maps do not merely describe the world. They help condition how we imagine it.

A child repeatedly encountering a world map in which Greenland appears roughly comparable to Africa is not simply receiving inaccurate information about square kilometres. That child is developing an unconscious mental hierarchy of scale. Who looks large? Who looks small? Who appears central? Who appears peripheral? This is what might be called the politics of cognitive geography.

Correcting the Map

The African-led initiative to encourage greater use of equal-area world maps should therefore not be trivialised as an exercise in cartographic vanity. Equal-area projections such as Equal Earth seek to represent the relative sizes of countries and continents much more faithfully while retaining a visually recognisable world map. They are not perfect. No flat map can be. Nor does this mean that Mercator should disappear. For navigation and particular technical purposes, it remains immensely useful. The more intelligent proposition is simpler: use the appropriate projection for the appropriate purpose. If the purpose is teaching children the relative geographical scale of the world’s continents, there is little justification for knowingly using a representation that significantly distorts those relationships when better alternatives exist.

And here Africa should lead by example. There would be something profoundly contradictory about African governments demanding that international institutions correct their maps while African children continue staring at Mercator projections in their own classrooms. If Africa wants the world to correct the map, Africa should be first to hang the corrected map in its schools.

Symbolism Is Not Development

Nevertheless, a legitimate criticism deserves engagement. Africa faces wars, poverty, unsustainable debt burdens, infrastructure deficits, unemployment, climate vulnerability and enormous development financing requirements. Against that background, does changing a world map really matter? Yes. And no.

Correcting a map will not build a railway. It will not create a factory, resolve Sudan’s conflict, finance Africa’s energy transition or create employment for its rapidly expanding youth population. We should therefore resist transforming a symbolic victory into evidence of material transformation. But the choice between representation and development is false. Societies can correct cultural and educational conventions while confronting economic and political problems. The more useful distinction is between symbolic achievement and structural achievement. Africa should welcome the first without mistaking it for the second.

The More Important African Victory

Indeed, perhaps the most consequential part of this episode has received less attention than the map itself. African states identified an issue. They organised around it. They articulated a case. They built an international coalition. And they secured overwhelming support within the United Nations. That is African agency. And it is considerably more interesting than a narrative of African victimhood.

The lesson should therefore travel beyond cartography. Imagine similar levels of African coordination being deployed consistently around reform of the UN Security Council, sovereign debt architecture, climate finance, critical minerals, international taxation, trade negotiations and reform of global financial institutions. The map campaign shows what African diplomacy sometimes forgets: numbers matter when they are organised. Fifty-four countries acting individually are voices. Fifty-four countries acting strategically can become leverage.

From Geographic Scale to Performed Power

Yet the corrected map confronts Africa with an uncomfortable truth. The continent is geographically enormous. Its economic and geopolitical influence remains disproportionately small. Africa possesses around 30 million square kilometres of territory. It contains extraordinary mineral resources, immense agricultural potential and the world’s youngest population. It occupies strategic maritime corridors and will account for an increasingly significant share of humanity during this century. But endowment is not power. Population is not power. Resources are not power. Even geographical scale is not power. They become power only when converted through capable institutions, productive economies, technological competence, integrated markets and strategic diplomacy. This is the distinction I have increasingly described as the journey from asset endowment through conversion capacity to performed power. The new map may represent Africa’s asset endowment more accurately. It cannot manufacture its conversion capacity. That responsibility belongs to Africans.

Two Maps to Correct

Perhaps, then, Africa has two maps before it.

The first is the physical map. That correction is relatively straightforward. Replace an inappropriate projection with one that communicates relative geographical scale more accurately. Change classroom maps. Update institutional graphics. Encourage publishers, broadcasters and digital platforms to adopt more appropriate projections.

The second map is infinitely more difficult. It is the geopolitical map. On that map, Africa remains smaller than its population, resources, geography and strategic importance should permit. Correcting that map requires factories, not resolutions. It requires regional value chains rather than declarations. It requires functioning institutions, infrastructure, technological capability, integrated markets and disciplined execution. It requires transforming the African Continental Free Trade Area from an agreement into commercial behaviour. It requires turning critical minerals into industrial ecosystems, agricultural potential into food security and exports, demographic scale into human capital, and diplomatic numbers into negotiating power. Cartographers can correct one map. Africans must correct the other.

A Flemish Reflection

Which brings me back to the Mercator ship in Ostend, my adopted hometown. Tomorrow, as I ride my bike to work through it again, I suspect I will look at it slightly differently. Not with resentment. Quite the opposite. There is something remarkable about the intellectual reach of Gerardus Mercator. A man born in tiny Flanders more than five centuries ago developed a mathematical solution so consequential that the world is still debating its legacy.

Perhaps that itself contains a lesson for Africa. Physical size does not determine intellectual influence. Flanders is tiny beside Africa. Yet one Flemish cartographer helped shape how humanity visualised the planet for centuries. Africa’s challenge, therefore, cannot simply be to insist that the world acknowledges how large it is. It must be to become as consequential as its size suggests it could be.

The corrected map can finally show the world something closer to Africa’s true geographical proportions. But the more consequential redrawing will occur when Africa closes the distance between its enormous endowment and its performed power. Africa did not become bigger when the world corrected the map. The real question is whether Africa will now become bigger in world affairs.