Did They Shrink Africa? The Map, the Mathematics and the Colonial Question
There is a moment when a familiar world map suddenly stops looking familiar.
Greenland, which can appear enormous on a conventional Mercator map, turns out to be tiny compared with Africa. Europe, which often seems to occupy a commanding position, suddenly looks much smaller. Africa stretches across the page with an imposing scale that many people never learned to appreciate in school.
It raises an uncomfortable question.
Were we taught a distorted picture of the world?
And if so, was Africa deliberately made to look smaller?
The internet has turned that question into a provocative accusation: that Europeans designed the Mercator projection to exaggerate Europe and diminish Africa.
The historical evidence tells a more complicated story.
Gerardus Mercator did not create his 1569 projection with the stated intention of making Africa look insignificant. He was solving a very different problem how to help sailors navigate across a spherical Earth using a flat map.
But the story does not end there.
Because maps are not simply pieces of paper. They influence what people see, what they remember and, sometimes, what they believe matters.
And that makes the history of Mercator's map worth investigating.
1569: The Flemish cartographer who changed the map
Gerardus Mercator was born in 1512 in what is now Belgium and became one of the most influential cartographers of the 16th Century.
In 1569, he published his famous world map.
It was designed specifically for navigation. The US Geological Survey describes Mercator as a conformal projection whose major navigational advantage is that a constant compass bearing can be represented as a straight line, a route known as a rhumb line or loxodrome.
That was a major breakthrough for mariners.
But there was a catch.
The Earth is curved. A sheet of paper is flat.
You cannot transfer the entire surface of a globe onto a flat rectangle while simultaneously preserving area, distance, direction and shape.
Something has to give.
Mercator chose to preserve angles and local shapes because that made the projection exceptionally useful for navigation.
The consequence was increasing distortion toward the poles.
The further north or south you travel, the more the map stretches the Earth's surface.
And that is where Africa's strange appearance begins.
The Greenland test
There is perhaps no better way to understand the problem than to compare Africa with Greenland.
Africa covers about 30.3 million square kilometres.
Greenland covers roughly 2.2 million square kilometres.
Africa is therefore around 14 times larger.
Yet on a Mercator world map, Greenland can appear astonishingly large visually approaching the apparent scale of Africa.
The USGS warns that the Mercator projection produces severe area distortion at high latitudes and says its use as a world map can create a misleading impression of the world.
This is not because Africa has been physically shrunk.
It is because northern regions have been mathematically enlarged.
The map is doing exactly what its projection requires.
But to someone who does not understand cartography, the result can look like a statement about the size of countries.
That is where mathematics becomes perception.
But was this colonial propaganda?
This is the point where the investigation has to separate historical evidence from a compelling modern narrative.
There is no good evidence that Mercator sat down in 1569 and deliberately decided that Africa should appear smaller than Europe.
In fact, his purpose was fundamentally navigational.
The USGS identifies the projection's origin as Mercator's 1569 world map and explicitly describes it as being designed for navigation.
That makes the simple conspiracy theory difficult to sustain.
But there is another question worth asking.
What happened after the map was created?
Because a map can acquire political meaning even when its original creator did not intend it to have one.
Europe and the age of empire
Mercator was working during a period when European maritime powers were expanding their reach across the globe.
Maps were becoming increasingly important tools of exploration, trade, territorial claims and administration.
Other European cartographers built upon one another's work.
In 1564, Italian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi produced an influential eight-sheet map of Africa. The Library of Congress notes that his work became an important source for later cartographers, including Abraham Ortelius and Mercator.
Then, in 1570, Abraham Ortelius published Africae Tabula Nova in the first edition of his famous Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.
The Library of Congress describes Ortelius's map as drawing on Gastaldi's 1564 map and Mercator's 1569 world map.
This is important because it reveals something about the history of maps.
Cartography was not created in isolation.
Maps were copied, adapted, corrected, circulated and incorporated into atlases.
And eventually, European geographical knowledge became deeply embedded in the institutions through which much of the world learned geography.
That is where the story begins to intersect with colonial power.
A map does not need to be propaganda to have power
Imagine a child growing up seeing the same world map every day.
Europe is large.
Greenland is enormous.
Africa appears less dominant than it actually is.
The child is not studying the mathematical equations behind the projection.
They simply absorb the image.
After years of seeing it, the distorted proportions become normal.
This is why cartography can have cultural consequences even when the original mapmaker had no political agenda.
The map becomes part of the mental picture of the world.
And once that mental picture becomes familiar, correcting it can feel almost unnatural.
The issue therefore isn't necessarily that Mercator created a colonial map.
The more defensible argument is that maps existed within a wider system of European exploration, knowledge production and imperial power and some of those maps became enormously influential.
That distinction matters.
VISUAL INVESTIGATION: MERCATOR VS EQUAL EARTH
THEN: The Mercator World
Imagine the traditional Mercator map.
The parallels of latitude spread progressively farther apart as they approach the poles. Northern territories expand dramatically.
Greenland looks gigantic.
Antarctica stretches toward infinity and is normally cropped or excluded.
Africa, much closer to the Equator, does not receive the same visual enlargement.
The map is excellent for preserving angles and showing constant compass bearings as straight lines.
But it is a poor choice if your question is:
“How big is Africa compared with Europe?”
The USGS specifically advises against using Mercator as a general world map because of its excessive area distortion.
NOW: The Equal Earth map
Fast-forward nearly 450 years.
In 2018, cartographers Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič introduced the Equal Earth projection.
Their goal was very different.
Equal Earth is an equal-area projection, meaning that land areas maintain their correct relative proportions.
The project emerged partly from renewed debate about which world maps should be used in schools.
Patterson, a cartographer who had worked with the US National Park Service, began looking for a more visually appealing equal-area alternative after the 2017 controversy surrounding Boston Public Schools' decision to use the Gall-Peters projection. He eventually worked with Jenny and Šavrič to develop Equal Earth.
The result looks radically different.
Africa looks enormous.
Greenland looks much smaller.
Europe loses some of its visual dominance.
The continents suddenly seem to occupy proportions that feel unfamiliar to anyone raised primarily on Mercator.
And that visual shock is precisely the point.
What Equal Earth gets right and what it sacrifices
Equal Earth is not a perfect map either.
No flat map can be.
The USGS explains the fundamental problem: representing a spherical Earth on a flat surface inevitably introduces distortion. Different projections simply choose different properties to preserve.
Equal Earth prioritises area.
Mercator prioritises angles and local shape, making it particularly valuable for navigation.
So when someone says, “Mercator is wrong,” the technically accurate response is:
Wrong for what?
For ocean navigation, Mercator has a very specific and important advantage.
For comparing the actual sizes of continents, it is a poor choice.
That distinction is often lost in the argument.
The strange power of a picture
Perhaps the most fascinating part of this story is not Mercator himself.
It is the psychological power of repetition.
Maps teach us geography before we understand cartography.
A child does not look at a world map and think about projection equations. They see shapes and sizes.
They remember where countries are.
They develop an unconscious sense of what is large and what is small.
And when the same distorted representation appears in classrooms, books, offices, television graphics and websites, it can become visually authoritative.
The map begins to feel like reality.
But it isn't reality.
It is a model of reality.
And every model makes choices.
So, did they shrink Africa?
No, not in the way the popular conspiracy suggests.
Mercator did not create his projection in 1569 as a scheme to make Africa look small. The historical record points to navigation as the central purpose of the projection.
But something more subtle happened.
A projection designed for sailors became one of the most recognisable ways of depicting the entire world.
Its mathematical distortions became familiar.
European-produced maps became deeply influential during centuries in which European states were expanding their political and economic power.
And generations of people learned to visualise the world through those representations.
So the real investigation is not simply about whether Mercator had an anti-African motive.
The deeper question is:
Who gets to decide what the world looks like?
Because whoever controls the map does not necessarily control reality.
But they can influence how millions of people imagine it.
And perhaps that is why putting Africa back into its true proportions feels so powerful.
The continent was never small.
The map was.
Comments
Post a Comment