Maps are supposed to tell us what the world looks like – the names, shapes and sizes of landmasses and water bodies. Though they are considered neutral depictions of land and sea, they can be sites of contention. Nations sometimes vie with one another to imprint their vision on how the landmasses they occupy, or wish to occupy, are perceived.
In fact, Africa is approximately 30.3 sq million – larger than the United States, China, India and much of Europe combined.
Not surprisingly, Southern nations support movements that demand equal-area geographic representations that challenge the dominant Eurocentric size distortions. The most successful campaign to date is the “Correct the Map” campaign.
On September 4, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted the Correct the Map resolution, led by Togo and the African Union, calling for world maps that represent the relative size of regions – particularly Africa – more equitably. The initiative directly challenges the dominance of the Mercator projection, which was developed in 1569 for navigation purposes.
The politics of cartography has been unusually visible since US President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. On his first day back, he directed federal agencies to replace the historic name Gulf of Mexico with “Gulf of America” under an executive order entitled “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness”.
The cartographical provocations did not end there. Trump subsequently directed that Lake Ontario, shared by the United States and Canada, be called “Lake America” for US federal purposes. He also repeatedly suggested that Canada should become America’s 51st state.
Whatever one thinks of these interventions, they vividly demonstrate the central point: maps are not merely names and labels on a page but are assertions of history, identity, sovereignty and power.
It is therefore significant that India joined the overwhelming majority of nations supporting the United Nations Correct the Map resolution. New Delhi has also made an important distinction: support for fairer, more accurate global cartographic representation does not amount to accepting any particular map’s depiction of national boundaries or sovereign territory.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs has stressed that the resolution does not endorse one mandatory map. That distinction is itself an illustration of the central argument: maps involve both mathematical projection and political representation.
The United States altering a centuries-old geographic name to promote a political claim of “American greatness” was treated as a legitimate exercise of national power, but an African-led effort to correct a centuries-old factual and mathematical distortion in the size of continents was dismissed as ideological.
The Equal Earth projection promoted by the Correct the Map campaign was developed in 2018 by cartographers Bojan Šavrič, Tom Patterson and Bernhard Jenny. Unlike Mercator, Equal Earth is an equal-area projection: the relative sizes of regions remain proportionate. It deliberately gives up some accuracy of shape in order to avoid grossly misleading viewers about area. Its curved appearance also visually reminds us of something the familiar rectangular Mercator map can make us forget – that the Earth is a globe.
The Equal Earth Project promoted by Correct the Map is not the first attempt to challenge the Mercator projection. In the nineteenth century, Scottish clergyman James Gall developed an equal-area projection that was revived and popularised in the 1970s by German historian Arno Peters. The Gall-Peters projection preserves the relative sizes of landmasses but produces striking distortions of shape: equatorial regions appear vertically stretched, while areas toward the poles appear compressed. Its provocative appearance helped revive the debate about the politics of world maps, but it never displaced Mercator as the dominant popular projection.
Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa have advocated for Equal Earth to become a primary world map for education and institutional use. Moky Makura, Executive Director of Africa No Filter, has been committed to shifting harmful and stereotypical narratives about Africa that affect not only how outsiders perceive the continent but how Africans perceive themselves.
France has gone further institutionally, announcing that its foreign ministry will abandon Mercator in its official world maps in favour of the Eckert IV projection – another equal-area projection which, like Equal Earth, represents the relative sizes of continents far more accurately.
The UN resolution encourages educational institutions, international organisations, governments and technology companies to adopt more equitable cartographic representations. Makura knows that the resolution alone is not enough; political will must now be built so that these changes reach the maps used in classrooms, governments, international institutions and the digital platforms through which billions of people see the world.
The continued use of Mercator as an ordinary world map is an important illustration of how narratives of power and domination can survive long after the empires that produced them have formally disappeared.
This is why correcting the map matters to African nations, to India and to the entire Global South. Decolonisation is not complete merely because the colonial flag has been lowered. It also requires us to examine the categories, images, measurements and assumptions through which the colonised were taught to see themselves and the world.
A map can make a continent and all its nations appear smaller without removing a single square mile of its land. But if generations absorb that diminished image as reality, the distortion has done political work. Correcting the map is not about enlarging Africa or the Global South. It is about ending the centuries-old practice of making them appear smaller – on the map, in the global imagination, and ultimately in the distribution of economic power.