The Map Projection
The room was small. Duisburg in 1569 was a small city on the banks of the Rhine, and Gerardus Mercator’s workshop was not much larger than the maps it produced. It was there, working as cosmographer to the Duke of Cleves, that Mercator published a world map using the projection that would carry his name for over four centuries. The projection solved a single, elegant problem: it allowed a sailor to draw a straight line between two ports, hold a constant compass bearing, and arrive. For navigation, it was brilliant. For everything else, it lied.
The Mercator projection preserved angles at the cost of area. Greenland ballooned to the apparent size of a continent. Europe sat fat and centred. The equatorial world shrank. Africa, fourteen times the size of Greenland, appeared roughly its equal. It was not designed to diminish anyone. It was designed to get sailors home. But the map left the workshop and never came back. It ended up on the classroom wall, and the classroom wall is where most people form their image of the world.
For centuries, the distortion went largely unchallenged, not because nobody noticed but because those who benefited from the inflation had little reason to correct it. Now the African Union has decided to challenge it formally. Earlier this year, the AU adopted a resolution promoting the Equal Earth projection and encouraging all 55 member states to move away from the Mercator map. Togo, tasked with leading the effort internationally, has been preparing a draft resolution for submission to the United Nations General Assembly. Its Foreign Minister, Robert Dussey, confirmed in April that a vote is likely at the September session. If the resolution is tabled and carried, it would be the strongest formal endorsement yet for moving beyond the projection that left Mercator’s workshop in Duisburg and found its way onto every schoolroom wall on the planet.
The AU’s argument is straightforward. When the second largest continent, home to 1.4 billion people and 54 nations, appears on that wall as roughly the size of a Nordic island, something beyond geometry is being communicated. Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, has framed it plainly: accurate representation is not just about maps, it is about agency. The “Correct The Map” campaign, led by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, has already nudged major institutions in the right direction. The World Bank is phasing out the Mercator in favour of Equal Earth. NASA and National Geographic have adopted it. Google Maps made the Mercator optional on its desktop version in 2018.
The Equal Earth projection, developed in 2018 by cartographer Tom Patterson and his colleagues, was designed to do something deceptively simple: show countries and continents at their actual relative sizes. Africa appears as it is. South America appears as it is. Europe appears smaller than generations raised on the Mercator might expect. It is not a radical proposition. It is a correction. And corrections, by their nature, make people uncomfortable. They rearrange furniture that nobody remembered choosing.
No country understands the politics of cartography more intimately than Israel. Every map of the region is a contested document. The Green Line is drawn or omitted. The Golan Heights are shaded Israeli or Syrian. East Jerusalem is labelled or left ambiguous. United Nations Resolution 242, the foundation stone of decades of negotiation, turned on a single cartographic word: “territories” or “the territories.” The definite article, present in the French text and absent in the English, has been argued over longer than many of the settlements it was meant to address. When advocates on either side of the conflict sit down to talk, the first question is rarely about borders. It is about which map is on the table. Israel learned long ago what the African Union is now telling the General Assembly: maps are never neutral. They are arguments made in ink. Every line on every contested map carries something of that workshop in Duisburg, where a man decided what to preserve and what to sacrifice, and the world accepted the trade without reading the terms.
Dussey suggested that how countries vote on the resolution would reveal their “true colours.” He is probably right. A map that shows the world as it is will always be threatening to those whose authority rests on the world as it was drawn. Whether the resolution passes or not, the campaign has already shifted the terms of the conversation. The question is no longer whether the Mercator distorts. It is whether the distortion still serves anyone’s interest honestly enough to defend.
The oldest surviving cartographic depiction of the Holy Land is a mosaic on the floor of the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint George in Madaba, Jordan. It was laid sometime in the sixth century. It placed Jerusalem, golden and walled, at the centre of the world it knew. The city was destroyed by an earthquake in 746 and subsequently abandoned, the mosaic forgotten for over a thousand years before its rediscovery in 1884. Much of the mosaic is damaged. Tiles are missing. Borders have crumbled. But Jerusalem is still there, at the centre of a broken map, in an emptied room a thousand years older than the workshop on the Rhine.