The ever-changing face of world maps
The UN has called for the traditional world map to be replaced with one more accurately reflecting Africa’s size. How has colonialism affected cartography and our perceptions of the planet?
Image credit: Equal Earth projection map by Strebe , using imagery derived from NASA’s Blue Marble summer composite. Cropped by Sky HISTORY. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
We all know what the world map looks like, right? It’s an image that has surely been firmly imprinted in all our minds since childhood. However, what if we told you, Matrix-style, that the global map you thought you knew is actually wrong? The United Nations (UN) is now offering you the red pill, so to speak, that will let you see the error of your ways.
In September 2026, the UN adopted a new world map – one you may well have never seen before. It’s called the ‘Equal Earth’ map, and represents the differing sizes of the planet’s various countries much more accurately than the standard map. Especially crucially, it makes the long-overlooked Africa much larger and more visually prominent.
The more traditional go-to map, the ‘Mercator projection’, has held sway in the cultural consciousness for almost five centuries – but yes, it’s wrong. Dead wrong. So, how did it come about in the first place? Is it really, as you might have heard, an archaic product of long-gone colonialist times? And why, as we at Sky HISTORY were shocked to learn, has the United States rejected the Equal Earth concept?
The patchy history of mapmaking
Long, long ago, well before satellites captured large swathes of the world in high-resolution imagery, mapping the planet was very much a guessing game. Put simply, you couldn’t always trust what a map told you. Many maps in the 19th century, for example, included a nonexistent West African mountain range called the ‘Mountains of Kong’.
It wasn’t always just an innocent case of someone accidentally getting things wrong, either. In the 1820s, Scottish conman Gregor MacGregor produced a map of ‘Poyais’ – a supposed Central American country that never actually existed. It had merely been invented to swindle money out of Brits keen to start exciting new lives abroad.
However, it was important for seafarers to know exactly where they were going. Hence, in 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator came up with the map projection now commonly named after him. The Mercator projection enabled sailors to get their ships to where they needed to be without having to keep recalibrating their compasses. Still, it carries a number of significant cultural drawbacks…
How colonialists have been lying to you
In a BBC interview, University College London professor James Cheshire explains what Mercator himself sought to achieve with his map. ‘He wanted a straight line to be drawn on a map to look like a straight line in reality if you followed a compass bearing.’ This entailed shrinking the appearance of those countries near the equator. Conversely, those further out would look much larger than they really were.
These size distortions are unavoidable in a map designed primarily to aid maritime and aerial navigation. Nonetheless, African campaigners have argued that when maps are used for other purposes, there is no excuse not to represent Africa’s size more equitably. On the Mercator map, Africa looks around the same size as Greenland. In reality, it is about 14 times larger.
This discrepancy has led the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution promoting the Equal Earth map’s use in place of the customary Mercator projection. Historically, colonial powers have redrawn maps to suit their own ends, such as by defining borders to claim specific parcels of land as their own. Now, the West African nation of Togo has blamed colonisation for the Mercator map’s widespread use.
Is Equal Earth the right step forward?
At the General Assembly, 164 UN member states voted in favour of the new resolution, which is not legally binding. Nonetheless, Selma Malika Haddadi of the African Union has reacted with enthusiasm. The AU commission deputy chairperson warned that the Mercator projection unjustly gave the impression that Africa was ‘marginal’. This, she added, had implications for media, education and policy.
France has played a particularly active role in pushing for a map that represents African nations more fairly. As a result, France will now be smaller on maps. Though six UN member states abstained from the vote, the United States was the sole country to vote against embracing the Equal Earth map.
The US argued that the resolution’s ’ideological agenda’ did nothing to tackle ‘genuine problems of international peace, prosperity or good relations’. This stands in sharp contrast to Togo foreign minister Robert Dussey’s voiced stance that ‘a fair world begins with a fair map’.
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