UNGA Resolution A/80/L.104: The Cartographic Crime and Its Rectification

Many Africans remain blissfully oblivious that maps are not innocent; they are weapons wielded by empire builders.

Like most tools Europeans have used to maintain their hegemonic stranglehold on the world, geographic maps have compressed Africa into a speck while inflating Europe and its progeny beyond measure. And, like everything else they do, it was a deliberate act.

For Africa, therefore, the United Nations General Assembly's recent decision to jettison the notorious Mercator projection is not merely a technical adjustment in cartography; it is a long-overdue act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation.

That is why Africans should give a big shoutout to the 4 September 2026 vote at the United Nations General Assembly, where 164 countries endorsed a Togo-sponsored resolution (A/80/L.104), known as the “Correct the map” initiative.

Only the United States voted against, while six countries abstained.

While it did not abolish the discredited Mercator map, the resolution encourages governments, schools, international organizations and technology companies to use the Equal Earth projection, or other equal-area maps, when relative size matters,

This essay is a polemical elaboration of my earlier contribution to the African Factbook (AF), a landmark African Union project edited by the inimitable and irrepressible Baffour Ankomah, my former editor at the New African magazine.

It is a call to arms, a demand for the total decolonization of the mind and the map.

As I argued in the Factbook, a map is a narrative with a political purpose, a story with a psychological agenda, as John Rennie Short so profoundly put it.

Contrary to what we in Africa believe, maps are not neutral transmitters of universal truths; they are biased, partial, and selective, containing silences as well as articulations, lies as well as truth.

When Gerardus Mercator, or Geert de Kremer as he was known in his native Flanders, devised his planisphere in 1569, he solved a practical navigational problem by representing meridians and parallels as straight lines crossing at right angles.

As a tool, the Mercator map was brilliant for 16th-century sea captains. But for Africa, it was a catastrophe because it completely distorted the continent's true size and importance.

By preserving local angular relationships for navigation, Mercator committed a grand act of geographical distortion. His map massively inflates landmasses as they approach the poles while shrinking those near the equator.

Mercator’s map should not be considered an innocent mathematical quirk; it was a deliberate projection shaped by the politics and hubris of its time, a map made for Europe by a European as it inflated Europe and North America’s sizes disproportionally, granting them undue prominence, while squeezing Africa, the cradle of humanity, into a visual afterthought.

The repercussions have endured and are still felt today, seeping into the consciousness of a world raised on this cartographic lie.

We should consider the Mercator map as the intellectual precursor to the physical Scramble for Africa. This distorted projection justified and enabled the invasion, occupation, and colonization of our continent by European powers driven not by altruism, as they claimed, but by an insatiable greed for raw materials: palm oil, rubber, gold, diamonds, ivory.

The Mercator map came in handy at the subsequent Berlin Conference of 1884-85, where European cartographers and bureaucrats, with little to no knowledge of the people they were dividing, used it to draw pencil-straight lines across Africa's map arbitrarily. They paid no attention to history, culture, or ethnicity.

As Lord Salisbury cynically remarked, they were "giving away mountains and rivers and lakes" without knowing exactly where they were.

This cartographic crime irreparably damaged Africa's social fabric. Ethnic groups were mercilessly divided between different colonial powers, while traditional enemies were herded into the same artificial garrisons called colonies. Indigenous governance systems were uprooted, replaced by the violent totalitarianism of colonialism. The economic effects were no less devastating, as Africa was de-industrialized, its agriculture diverted to cash crops priced in Western capitals, and its people turned into indentured laborers serving European factories.

The legacy of this map is one of alienation, conflict, and a deep-seated psychological complex.

The reality that the Mercator map so skillfully hides is that Africa is not a tiny appendage to the world. The continent is a gargantuan colossus, spanning 30.37 million square kilometers (11.73 million square miles).

Mercator hid the fact that Africa is bigger than the contiguous United States, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, and Europe combined!

Africa is almost twice the size of Russia and 14 times larger than Greenland, which on the Mercator map appears to be its equal. The demographic weight is equally staggering; India alone has a population greater than the entire continent of Africa.

This visual diminution of Africa, of course, has had profound geopolitical and psychological implications.

By using mathematics, the Mercator map created and reinforced a narrative of African insignificance, making it easier for the world to dismiss its needs and plunder its resources. The claim that Africa is overpopulated, a common trope of Western Malthusianism, stems directly from this catastrophic cartographic distortion.

It is a convenient fiction to blame the victims of imperialism for their own underdevelopment.

As we argued in the Essay, “The Bogey of Over-population,” the only charitable thing one can say about those who propagate this lie of an overpopulated Africa is that they are profoundly ignorant of the geographical realities they claim to discuss.

The truth, hidden by the map, is that Africa is a vast, sparsely populated continent with immense potential.

The distortions and the need to rectify them are why the UN General Assembly's recent resolution, championed by Togo and backed by the African Union, is so historically significant for Africa and Africans.

Changing to an “Equal Earth” map is not merely a technical change. It demands cognitive justice, a rectification of a centuries-old wrong. It refuses to let a 16th-century European navigational tool continue shaping 21st-century perceptions of global power.

It tells the world, and more importantly, it tells our children, that Africa is not small, not marginal, and not insignificant in the scheme of things.

Now that the world has taken this symbolic step, what must we, as Africans, do? We must fully embrace this victory, not as an endpoint, but as a beginning. We must aggressively market our true geographical centrality.

Thank ye gods; the math is simple: the closest land settlement to the intersection of the Equator and the Greenwich Meridian, the so-called Null Island, is Tema in Ghana. Ghanaian officials should promote Tema without hesitation as the "World's Heartbeat," a central hub for shipping and aviation.

That is why we in Africa must quickly learn to use this newly-found geographical confidence to confront the other monstrous legacy of European cartography: our artificial borders, the colonial boundaries, drawn with no regard for history or culture, have fueled endless conflict on our continent.

While African leaders, perhaps unwisely, chose to keep them at independence to avoid prolonged decolonization, we cannot continue to be prisoners of these colonial lines.

We must expedite our actions to create the United States of Africa we dream of, or at least a federation of our regional blocs, with relatively open borders that allow the free movement of people, goods, and ideas.

The UN has given us a new map; while we remain grateful, we must move fast to use it to redraw the future. We must be confident enough to chart our own independent course, using our gigantic size and immense resources to serve Africans' interests first.

Let us create an Africa in our own image, an Africa that is finally, and accurately, seen for what it truly is: a giant, rising to claim its rightful place at the center of the world.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com