Скачать или смотреть Why Africa looks smaller than it is on the world map

The world map you grew up with is wrong. It makes Africa look small and Europe look huge. The African Union now wants to fix it.

The problem comes from the Mercator projection, a type of world map invented in 1569. It takes the round surface of the Earth and flattens it into a rectangle. To do that, it stretches areas near the poles and shrinks those near the equator.

This made navigation easy for sailors because compass directions became straight lines. But the trade-off was distortion. On Mercator’s map, Africa, which is 14 times bigger than Greenland, looks almost the same size. Europe looks as big as Africa even though Africa is three times larger. Canada and Russia look enormous, while Africa, South America and India look much smaller than they really are.

These distortions went far beyond cartography. For centuries, people saw Africa as small and less significant. As one economist said, the map made Africa look conquerable in the past and irrelevant in the present.

That is why the African Union has endorsed the Correct the Map campaign.

Replacing Mercator will take time, because it is so entrenched in classrooms, textbooks and news graphics.

But for the African Union, this is about more than geography. Correcting the map is also about correcting history, and restoring Africa to its rightful place in the world.