Size matters: Why India has a stake in the African-led campaign to decolonise world maps
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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.
The map of the world that is most familiar to us is the Mercator map from the sixteenth century, named for the Flemish cartographer who created it. It has shaped our view of the world and, despite its well-known distortions, is widely used.
The Mercator map is inaccurate because it distorts the size and landmass of Africa, Latin America, South Asia and Oceania and inflates landmasses towards the poles. For example, Africa and Greenland appear to be roughly the same size, when in reality Africa is approximately 14 times larger than Greenland.
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...