The African Union supports the Correct The Map campaign to replace the Mercator projection with the Equal Earth model, which is more accurate in terms of surface area, in order to correct a biased perception inherited from colonial history.
On the Mercator map, Africa appears barely larger than Greenland, when in reality it covers 30.37 million km² compared to 2.16 million for Greenland, or fifteen times more. According to Selma Malika Haddadi, vice-president of the AU Commission, who spoke to Reuters on 14 August, this distortion feeds a false impression of Africa as ‘marginal’. This is despite its status as the world’s second largest continent, with 54 countries and more than a billion inhabitants.
The Correct The Map campaign, led by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, promotes the adoption of the Equal Earth model unveiled in 2018 in African school curricula and by international organisations. It should be noted that the World Bank already uses Equal Earth for certain static maps and has begun to reduce the use of Mercator on its web maps.
The Mercator projection, designed in 1569 by Gerardus Mercator to facilitate maritime navigation during the era of triangular trade, preserves the shapes of the continents but distorts their areas. Areas near the poles are enlarged, while those located at the equator, such as Africa and South America, are reduced.
Today, this distortion remains present in school textbooks and the media. The AU wants the cartographic reform to become a tool for ‘restoring Africa’s rightful place’ on the world stage and to work with its member states and major international institutions to promote it.
Nevertheless, the change in narrative sought by this initiative will depend on its adoption by African ministries of education, decisions by international organisations and the updating of online mapping tools, where Mercator remains the norm, particularly on mobile devices, in this case Google Maps.
