Look at a familiar world map and something feels obvious: Europe looks substantial, Greenland looks enormous, and Africa appears large but perhaps not that large.
Now imagine being told that the picture is giving you the wrong impression.
Africa has always occupied roughly 30 million square kilometres. Nothing has been added to the continent. No borders have moved. Yet the way its size is displayed on many of the maps used around the world can make it difficult to appreciate its true scale.
That is why the United Nations’ recent action has attracted attention.
On September 4, the UN General Assembly backed an Africa-led resolution encouraging the wider use of maps that represent the relative size of the world’s landmasses more accurately.
Togo led the initiative, with support from the African Union. The resolution passed by 164 votes to one, with six countries abstaining.
At the heart of the issue is the Mercator projection.
It is one of the world’s most familiar ways of drawing the globe on a flat surface. Created in the 16th century, it was particularly useful for navigation because of the way it represents direction.
But there is a price for that usefulness.
The farther land is from the Equator, the more its apparent size can be enlarged. Africa, much of which lies around the Equator, does not receive that same visual expansion.
This creates some striking comparisons.
Greenland, for example, can look surprisingly close to Africa in size on a Mercator map. In reality, Africa is about 14 times larger.
The same problem becomes clearer when Africa is placed beside other major land areas. The continent is large enough to contain the United States, China, India and much of Europe.
For someone who has spent their entire life looking at the conventional map, that can be an unsettling realization.
Not because the continent has suddenly become larger.
Because the picture was never telling the whole story.That does not make the Mercator projection a bad map.
A map cannot reproduce a spherical Earth perfectly on a flat surface. Every projection has to choose what it will preserve and what it will distort. Some prioritise direction. Others prioritize distance. Others, such as the Equal Earth projection, prioritize the accurate representation of land area.
The important question, then, is not whether one map is universally “right” and another is “wrong.”
It is which map is being used for which purpose.
A navigation chart has different requirements from a map hanging in a school classroom.
And that is where this discussion becomes bigger than cartography.
Maps are among the first tools through which children learn the world. Before they know the history of colonialism, international trade or geopolitics, they learn where countries are and how continents relate to one another.
Repeated images become familiar. Familiarity can become perception.
That does not mean generations of people were deliberately taught that Africa was unimportant.
The Mercator projection was not designed as an anti-African map. Its distortions are mathematical consequences of converting a globe into a rectangle.
But accurate representation still matters.
Africa is the world’s second-largest continent by both area and population. Its physical scale is fundamental to understanding its climate systems, natural resources, ecosystems, economies and political geography.
A map that represents that scale more faithfully gives people a better starting point.
The UN resolution does not mean every Mercator map will disappear. It is not a global prohibition, and Mercator remains useful for purposes for which it was designed.
What is changing is the conversation about which picture of the world should become the default.
Perhaps that is the most interesting part of this story.
Africa does not need a new size.
It needs no correction to its geography.What is being corrected is the distance between the Africa that exists and the Africa people have been accustomed to seeing on a map.
And sometimes, seeing something accurately for the first time is enough to make us question how we learned to see it in the first place.
