Our Future is African: Africa is big, really huge
Updated: 3 hours ago
Africa is big.
How big?
Like, really, really big!
Africa is big, like covering 11.7 million mi² (30.4 million km²), roughly the size of 30 countries, including some of the world’s largest, such as the (contiguous) United States, China, and India. That sort of big. Mapped: Visualizing the True Size of Africa gives us a visual idea of what this means.
The distance from Africa’s northernmost point to its southern tip is about 8,000 kilometers, comparable to the distance from London to Bangkok.
Africa is big; like every year, an ancient lakebed in Chad fertilizes the Amazon basin as 27.7 million tons of dust cross the Atlantic — big. This nutrient-rich dust delivers vital phosphorus and other nutrients to depleted Amazonian soils. In just the right amounts. That kind of big. Big enough to replenish the nutrients of a 7-million-square-kilometer (2.7-million-square-mile) basin, the world's largest drainage basin. It takes the dust 5-10 days to travel the 2,600 to 4,800 kilometers across the Atlantic Ocean to reach the Amazon basin.
Big enough that the Nile, the world's longest river, having a drainage basin of 3.2 million km2, represents only 10% of the African continent’s total landmass. The Congo River is Africa’s largest river. Its Basin spans six countries, contains a quarter of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest, yet covers only 13% of the continent. That is how vast Africa is.
Another way to think about how big Africa is is to consider that the continent was large enough for seven greedy European countries to partition nearly the entire continent during the so-called Scramble for Africa between the 1880s and the onset of World War I in 1914, reducing independent African control of their territory from 90% to just 10% by the end of that period.
Africa is big enough to satisfy all these European imperialists. And for the invaders not even to know the depth and breadth of the territories they had divided up — big.
Cartography, Power and (mis)representation
But we shrunk Africa. Commentators argue that it is because we continue to use a map invented by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 – the world map.
For 500 years, we accepted this distorted representation of the Earth. We were told that the Mercator map was practical. And there is no satisfying way to place 3D onto 2D. Something, somewhere, was going to be distorted. Ok, so how come it fell to Africa? That is a political decision. Even though you might tell me that Africa sits directly on the equator, therefore there is almost no stretching, and that it has nothing to do with politics and power. Not so.
Maps are tools of power. They help us imagine the world we will never be able to see. We may know and remember that Africa’s landmass is distorted on a Mercator map, and we continue to work with the shrunken version, but most people do not question that distortion. It is a representation that seems ‘official’. Consistently seeing Africa depicted as small creates a profoundly false impression that the continent is geographically and culturally peripheral.
UN tells the world: stop making Africa look small
Africa is huge!
Two African thinkers, Grovogui and Mbembe, help us to rethink this cartography.
Mercator Map is an example of Plato’s cave metaphor.
Drawing on Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Grovogui explains that Europeans never left the cave, remaining trapped in Western thought and failing to see beyond their own biases and assumptions. This cave, created by colonial perspectives and Eurocentric biases, prevents a fuller understanding of the world's broader, more nuanced, and multiple realities.
The wretched irony, Grovogui highlights, is that this limited worldview, seen from within the cave, was imposed on others because they were colonizers of the world. ‘European conceit,’ presuming that others, non-Europeans, do not think about their own conditions or those of larger collectives, condemned the rest of the world to use a map that clearly mirrored imperial greed and political strategies to carve up the world.
The paradox, Grovogui adds, is that Europeans never left the cave. They remain trapped within Western thought and their narrow representations of the world.
The question is: how do we know whether we are inside or outside of the cave?
To know whether you are inside or outside of the cave, you must recognize the concept of plurality—the existence of multiple perspectives, deeper layers of reality, and truths beyond your immediate perception. This needs to be the starting point, as a supposition.
Thank you, Republic of Togo, for pointing out that the shadows are not reality.
Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.
In Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive, Mbembe tells us that ‘Human history, by definition, is history beyond whiteness’.
Whiteness’, Sabaratnam clarifies, is not an identity but a social and political position, a worldview, rooted in structural power.
In the same vein, whiteness is not the same as geography. Human geography is, by definition, beyond the distorted world defined by white structural power. There is a fundamental distinction between the world portrayed through whiteness and the expansive, plural reality existing beyond the restrictive frameworks or distortions created by colonial or white structural dominance.
The Mercator map is rooted in the structural power of whiteness. Eurocentric, the map overemphasizes the North and shrinks the South. The issue is not that navigators need to preserve clear angles and direction. The issue is that this map became a map of power, the standard classroom map in Western education, transported to classrooms worldwide through intellectual domination. And that while there has been criticism and attempts to replace it, it has taken until 2026 to get this onto the global arena.
The map is still there, being used by Google. It will not disappear tomorrow.
For Mbembe, the decolonizing project has two sides.
The first is a critique of the dominant Eurocentric academic model. This echoes Grovogui’s argument about the limits of European conceit developed in the cave and imposed worldwide.
The second is an attempt to imagine what an alternative to this model could look like.
What alternatives to the Mercator map exist? Should we have several maps that reflect our pluriversal world? We don’t actually need to flatten our 3D world onto a 2D surface to navigate the globe. There are many exciting, innovative, and plural ways the world is being mapped: the Equal Earth Projection, We are not Above, and open-access resources.
The essential is this. When it comes to decolonization, we haven’t even really started. We are only just adopting a motion at a global level to question and revoke a map that was fundamentally Eurocentric, political, and unscientific. Accurate maps do exist, and we don't need to work with the distorted Mercator view. Different map projections prioritize different types of accuracy.
Changing the visual and geographic templates of our world—like the maps we use every day—is part of a much larger, structural process of decolonization that will define this century.
