By Nana Karikari, Senior Global Affairs Correspondent
The African Union has taken a bold step, backing a campaign to replace the 16th-century Mercator map with a more accurate representation of the world. At first glance, this might seem like a simple cartography lesson, but it is a profound move that holds deep meaning for Ghana and the entire continent. The campaign, aptly named “Correct The Map,” isn’t just about an old piece of paper; it’s about perception, power, and psychology. It’s about reclaiming a visual truth that has been denied for centuries.
The Map and the Mind
For centuries, our mental image of the world has been shaped by the Mercator projection. Created by cartographer Gerardus Mercator for navigation, this map has a major flaw: it stretches out the landmasses near the poles. As a result, Greenland, with an area of about 2.1 million square kilometers, appears roughly the same size as Africa, which spans over 30 million square kilometers. To put that in perspective, Africa is so vast it can contain the United States, China, India, Japan, and most of Europe all at once. This visual distortion, where continents near the equator look far smaller than their true size, has a powerful psychological effect.
The problem isn’t that Mercator was malicious; he simply needed a flat map where a ship could follow a straight line and get to its destination. The real issue is that this navigational tool became the standard classroom map. As AU Commission deputy chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi told Reuters, the Mercator map fosters a “false impression” that Africa is “marginal” and small. “It might seem to be just a map,” she said, “but in reality, it is not.”
Correcting the Narrative
For ordinary Ghanaians, this campaign might feel far removed from daily life. But the effects of this visual misrepresentation are not. The distorted map has subtle but real consequences for education, foreign policy, and our national identity.
Our school books and classrooms have long used the Mercator map, teaching generations of Ghanaian students a distorted view of their continent’s scale and importance. This is a human issue. It affects our pride and our confidence. Imagine being a child taught from your earliest years that your home is small and insignificant compared to others. As Professor De-Valera N.Y.M. Botchway of the University of Cape Coast puts it, whatever is taught in the classroom must “free them from the bonds of colonial mentality and neo-colonialism.” Replacing this map with a more accurate one, like the Equal Earth projection, is a powerful act of decolonization in the classroom. It’s
about giving our children a more truthful foundation for understanding their identity and their position in a global context. This isn’t just a symbolic change; it’s an educational one.
In the world of global power dynamics, perception is a form of power. A visually “smaller” Africa can feed into subtle biases in negotiations, policy-making, and media coverage. When world leaders or journalists subconsciously see Africa as marginal, it can affect how they treat its nations and its people. This campaign is a way for the African Union to assert Africa’s true size—and by extension, its true political and economic weight. Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, calls the Mercator map “the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”
For Ghana, a leader in West Africa and a nation with a proud history of championing pan-Africanism under founding father Kwame Nkrumah, this campaign is about reclaiming our narrative. It is a demand to be seen as we truly are: a key player on a massive, vital continent. It’s about reminding ourselves and the world that our land is vast, our population is growing, and our influence is undeniable. As Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, a prominent Ghanaian statesman and founder of the Africa Prosperity Network, wrote, “The 1569 Mercator map did not merely misrepresent Africa’s size—it mutilated its dignity and incapacitated its destiny.”
This is a struggle we know well. While the Mercator map was being used to shrink Africa, a pioneering Ghanaian cartographer, George Ekem Ferguson, was meticulously surveying and mapping the borders of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in the late 19th century. His work laid the foundations for our modern state, and his legacy is a testament to our ability to define ourselves against external forces.
A Call for Balance and Action
Of course, not everyone agrees on the urgency of this issue. Critics might argue that replacing a map is a symbolic gesture that distracts from more pressing problems like governance, economic instability, or corruption. They might say, “It’s just a map; our real problems are more serious.”
But the two ideas are not mutually exclusive. The map is a symbol of a deeper issue. Changing it is a visible, public statement that says, “We see ourselves, and we demand that the world see us, as we are.” For Ghana, the “Correct The Map” campaign is an opportunity. It’s a chance to champion a change that goes beyond our borders. It’s an opportunity for our educators to bring a new, more accurate tool into the classroom. It’s an opportunity for our leaders to leverage this momentum to talk about our continent’s size, population, and influence in a new light. This is not a trivial debate. It is a strategic move to correct a historical bias and empower a new generation of Africans who understand that their home is not just a place on a map, but a central force on the world stage.
This is a fight for our narrative, our identity, and our collective destiny. Correcting the map is the first step in a long, but essential, journey toward correcting history itself.
