Did you know Africa is more than 14 times the size of Greenland?

Perhaps, like me, you’d never really thought about it.

You’d be right to ask: so what?

It turns out quite a bit.

Looking at the world map most of us grew up with, Greenland can appear almost as large as the entire African continent. It isn't. Greenland is roughly only seven percent of Africa’s size.

The reason is the Mercator projection, familiar to many of us as the world map from school classrooms, atlases, and news reports. It was designed for navigation and is good at preserving direction, but it distorts size. The further you move from the equator, the larger countries and land masses appear. Greenland, Canada, and Russia are therefore shown much bigger in relation to Africa than they really are.

Another way of understanding the scale is to start putting other countries inside Africa. The continent covers about 30 million square kilometres. The United States (US) (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), China, and India could all fit inside it, with space left over. Yet that’s not how most of us instinctively picture the world.

Here’s another way of thinking about it. Greenland is less than twice the size of South Africa. Looking at a Mercator world map, that’s not the relationship most of us would guess.

Distortion

This does not make Mercator a bad map. No flat map can reproduce a round Earth without distorting something. But land size matters when you’re trying to understand everything from population density and agriculture to natural resources, climate change, and the geographical scale of a conflict. A map that distorts size can therefore give you a misleading impression of more than simply which continent is bigger.

On 4 September, 164 countries at the United Nations (UN) backed an African-led resolution called Correct the Map. It encourages governments, schools, international organisations, and technology companies to use Equal Earth or other equal-area projections when relative size matters. Six countries abstained. The US was the only country to vote against it.

Last week, the issue reached South Africa. Joy Maimela, chairperson of Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Basic Education, said she first wanted to establish exactly which maps South African children were using in textbooks, atlases, classrooms, examinations, and digital resources before deciding whether anything needs to change.

In South Africa, the discussion carries particular weight. Education has been one of the main battlegrounds in the country’s wider debate about decolonisation: what is taught, whose perspective it is taught from, and how much of the way Africa is understood still comes through frameworks inherited from Europe. A map might seem a long way from those arguments, but it brings them up in an unusually literal way. If African children are learning about their continent from a map that makes it appear substantially smaller than it really is, it seems reasonable to ask why.

Age of Exploration

To try to understand, it helps to go back to where the Mercator projection came from. It was created in Europe during the age of European maritime expansion and went on to become one of the dominant ways of representing the world. It was not designed to make Africa look smaller so that Europe would look more powerful. But that is one of its visual effects.

What is perhaps more interesting is how a map designed for 16th-century sailors became so deeply embedded in the way the rest of us picture the world. Over time, the Mercator projection found its way from navigation into atlases and classrooms and, centuries later, into digital mapping. Even today, many online mapping systems use a version of Mercator because it works extremely well technically.

There is probably another reason too: familiarity. Once a particular version of the world becomes the one we grow up seeing, it starts to look normal. An alternative can look strange even when it represents relative size more accurately.

The campaign behind the UN resolution began last year and is being spearheaded by Africa No Filter, a Johannesburg-based organisation that works to challenge stereotypical narratives about Africa, and Dakar-based Speak Up Africa. The African Union endorsed the campaign earlier this year, and Togo subsequently took it to the UN.

Campaigners argue that the distortion matters because maps do not only tell us where countries are. They may also influence how we think about their importance.

The campaigners also point to the historical context. Whatever its original purpose, Mercator became widely used during the centuries in which European powers were colonising large parts of Africa. A map that enlarged much of the northern world while reducing Africa’s relative size fitted remarkably easily into a wider picture in which Europe was at the centre and Africa at the margins. The argument is that repeatedly seeing the world represented that way may have helped reinforce the idea of Africa as less significant.

This, however, is to easy to prove.

A 2020 study by geographers at Belgium’s Ghent University, involving more than 130 000 people worldwide, found no clear evidence that people had internalised Mercator’s distortions. Their estimates of continental size were generally closer to reality than to what Mercator showed them. A separate 2024 study, published in Communication Reports, did find that the projection people saw could affect judgements about the geopolitical importance of different places, but only in certain contexts.

In other words, it is easy to prove that Mercator makes Africa look smaller. It is much harder to prove what that has done to the way generations of people think about the continent.

The distinction matters. The US’s objection was largely to the political framing around the campaign. The UN resolution refers to ideas including “cognitive justice” and “memorial reparation”, and Washington argued that the initiative formed part of a broader ideological project around colonialism and reparations.

Reasonable Argument

There is a reasonable argument in there. Africa has far bigger problems than its size on a map. Changing the map in a South African classroom isn’t going to create jobs, improve schools, or fix failing infrastructure. But that’s not a reason not to ask whether the maps we use are giving us an accurate sense of Africa’s size relative to the rest of the world.

The resolution itself is non-binding. It doesn’t create a reparations programme, ban Mercator, or force countries to use a particular map. France’s foreign ministry has already moved away from Mercator for its official world maps, while Togo plans to introduce new geographical materials in its schools.

Perhaps the most interesting lesson here isn’t that one map is right and another is wrong. It’s that even something we regard as completely objective can depend on how the information is presented. We know Mercator distorts the size of Africa. What is much harder to know is whether that has also changed the way people think about the continent.

Most of us grew up looking at a world map without ever asking what choices went into making it. I certainly didn’t. Once you know that Africa is more than 14 times the size of Greenland, though, it’s difficult to look at that familiar map in quite the same way.

Paula Slier is an international journalist, war correspondent, and speaker whose work focuses on geopolitics, modern conflict, and information warfare.