Discarding an Old Map and Seeing Africa With Fresh Eyes

Africa Offers Solutions to Some of the West's Most Vexing Problems

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Discarding an Old Map and Seeing Africa With Fresh Eyes

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Argument

An expert’s point of view on a current event.

Discarding an Old Map and Seeing Africa With Fresh Eyes

The continent offers solutions to some of the West’s most vexing problems.

!Howard French

*Howard French*

*Howard W. French*

By **Howard W. French**, a columnist at *Foreign Policy*.

!An equal-area world map projection showing global landmasses and oceans against a black background. Land features are rendered in natural shades of green, brown, and tan to indicate terrain topography, while light blue denotes ocean depths and white covers the polar ice regions. The southern continents appear larger than they often do in the Mercator projection often used in school textbooks.

*An equal-area world map projection showing global landmasses and oceans against a black background. Land features are rendered in natural shades of green, brown, and tan to indicate terrain topography, while light blue denotes ocean depths and white covers the polar ice regions. The southern continents appear larger than they often do in the Mercator projection often used in school textbooks.*

The 2018 “Equal Earth” map projection. Tom Patterson/Equal Earth

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September 11, 2026, 2:05 PM

Since the advent of social media a couple of decades ago, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t noted, often with a smirk or a shrug, some poster’s belated discovery of a long-known fact: The most commonly used cartographical representations of the world drastically understate the size of southern land masses, especially Africa, giving it an appearance far short of its true dimensions.

Now, even the United Nations seems to have caught up. With one notable holdout, the United States, a recent vote by that body to recommend that future mapmakers correct this distortion has brought this somewhat obscure factlet out of the shadows, prompting a renewed wave of online commentary.

Since the advent of social media a couple of decades ago, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t noted, often with a smirk or a shrug, some poster’s belated discovery of a long-known fact: The most commonly used cartographical representations of the world drastically understate the size of southern land masses, especially Africa, giving it an appearance far short of its true dimensions.

Now, even the United Nations seems to have caught up. With one notable holdout, the United States, a recent vote by that body to recommend that future mapmakers correct this distortion has brought this somewhat obscure factlet out of the shadows, prompting a renewed wave of online commentary.

The cynic in me briefly objected that no measure by the United Nations can alter the conditions of life on the world’s second-largest continent or any other objective facts. Indeed, a vote such as this may not even ensure that the publishers of school textbooks and online atlases change their graphical representations of the world. But my skeptical reflexes soon gave way to a more positive sentiment.

In an era when the Trump administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to signal its lack of consideration for Africa and to demean its people as well as the continent’s large diaspora, this move toward what might be called map justice seems like the sign of a dawning recognition: After more than seven decades since the start of its independence era, the continent is finally becoming a place that the rest of the world has to reckon with and, indeed, increasingly count upon.

Acknowledging Africa’s geographic size goes hand in hand with the spreading understanding of the continent’s ballooning demographic weight in the world. Somewhat predictably, politicians in the West are behind the curve, still devoting remarkably little intellectual and policy capital to what will be one of the biggest drivers of global change for the remainder of this century. In fact, what little attention they do devote to Africa is of a largely reactionary nature. In the case of Europe, this means trying to figure out how to raise ever-higher dikes to hold back feared tides of African migration. The United States of President Donald Trump takes this one step further, actively pursuing means of deporting Africans, as well as dumping citizens from non-African countries on a continent publicly scorned as a “shithole.”

Eventually, though, the West will learn that this isn’t just futile—it’s also harmful to its own interests and counterproductive. Just as drawing up maps in ways that graphically diminish Africa does nothing to reduce Africa’s true dimensions, actively shunning African migrants will do nothing to change the hard demographic realities that will radically shape our collective future.

The wealthiest and most economically productive regions of the world, beginning with East Asia and including Europe, the United States, and Canada, share a grave, and as best we can presently understand, unsolvable problem:historically unprecedented fertility decline. China, which was recently surpassed by India as the world’s most populous country, is being slammed by this even harder.

Many naïve techno-optimists seem to believe that the rapid advance of robots will offer a fix, replacing dwindling human labor with legions of automated and untiring smart machines. But even if this solves production issues, it does not reckon with the loss of human consumption, which drives every model of organized economic life on the planet today.

In its simplicity, it also totally neglects vital questions about civiliza