The United Nations recently voted to recommend that the world maps that should mostly be used are the ones that show the correct relative sizes of continents. This was supposedly a triumph for Africa which has traditionally been shown as smaller than North America, about equal to Greenland and much smaller than Antarctica. The UN motion was introduced by Togo, supposedly because the evil white man wants to always diminish the black man and keep him mentally enslaved. It passed overwhelmingly at the UN. I think the debate in Africa has been reduced to dishonest arguments with zero context or history so let us set the record straight.

The most popular world map, the so called “Mercator Projection” which shows distorted continent sizes and diminishes Africa was not created due to white supremacist or imperialist ideas. It was created to solve real sea navigation problems by a brilliant Flemish Geographer and map-maker called Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This was long before European nations had colonies in Africa, long before the first white Dutch settlers landed in South Africa in 1652, long before imperialism or the Berlin Conference of 1884-85.

The Mercator map was created to solve the difficult problem of finding the shortest distance between two points while navigating in a ship. The earth is a sphere and the shortest distance between two points on the globe is a curve created by slicing the earth between the points going through the centre of the earth. A flat map cannot accurately represent this, so Mercator projected the world onto a cylinder with the earth at the centre and he then unrolled it. This led to large distortions of land masses at the poles, but it meant there were no more complex calculations to find the shortest distance between two points.

By the 1600s, it became the world standard but it was used mainly by ship captains on the sea. When European governments introduced mass education programmes, the map was incorporated into their school curricula and later transplanted into African colonies where the same education systems were set up. And no, the African education system was not introduced to mentally enslave the black man but it was a copy and paste of what the whites themselves were using back home in Europe. The Mercator Projection is used in Google Maps and all digital map systems in the world on our smartphones.

Contrary to popular belief by black people, there was nothing sinister about the Mercator map. Other map projections were in fact created by the same white people and used in the 19th century and these show a more realistic size for Africa. But even these other maps still fail to show correct relative sizes of all continents because you cannot accurately project a sphere into a flat sheet.

We are so obsessed with useless things that add no value in Africa. Majoring on minors. We would rather scream about the so called white imperialists and how they want to keep us poor and mentally enslaved with distorted maps instead of us simply working hard and becoming wealthy. We want to force white people to print maps showing a big Africa so that we can boast about it, despite having no hand in the size of the continent. Why all this hullabaloo about maps as if accurate globes do not exist in shops? Does Asia constantly complain about maps? Has anyone stopped us from creating our own maps and printing them by the millions!

In the same vein, we are constantly boasting about all the vast minerals in Africa but we do nothing much about them and remain poor like hell. Why are we always seeking validation from the white man and always playing victim with what I call “Grievance Politics”?

MORE INFORMATION

UN tells the world: Stop making Africa look small
https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/09/1168284

What Exactly is Mercator Projection? The Map That Quietly Distorts Reality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtT09GLUwbY

Why the UN Voted on a World Map (And Why the US Voted No)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZB9tAUFbnw

Why Some Circles Are Greater Than Others
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QpuLS_vOXs