WHAT'S NEXT, MORE BONUS ARMIES FOR HOLDING AFRICA?

When you start fretting about the Mercator Projection, you've probably run out of Third World Problems, or perhaps, you'd rather not deal.  "African Union Wants End to Mercator Projection Map Use Over 'Disinformation'."  For the reasons that anyone with a smattering of geographical knowledge is long familiar with.

“It might seem to be just a map, but in reality, it is not,” AU Commission deputy chairperson Selma Malika Haddadi told Reuters, saying the Mercator fostered a false impression that Africa was “marginal”, despite being the world’s second-largest continent by area, with over a billion people. The AU has 55 member states.

Such stereotypes influence media, education and policy, she said.

Criticism of the Mercator map is not new, but the ‘Correct The Map’ campaign led by advocacy groups Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa has revived the debate, urging organisations to adopt the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which tries to reflect countries’ true sizes.

“The current size of the map of Africa is wrong,” Moky Makura, executive director of Africa No Filter, said. “It’s the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

Fara Ndiaye, co-founder of Speak Up Africa, said the Mercator affected Africans’ identity and pride, especially children who might encounter it early in school.

It's not that other projections haven't existed.  My grade school political geography book used the Goode homolosine projection with interruptions in the oceans to keep the major land masses together.  The front matter in that book explained the construction of the map as comparable to peeling an orange and keeping the skin flat.  It would not be useful as a map to plot a course from Alameda to Hong Kong by way of Midway, Wake, and Manila.  "On a Mercator projection, a meridian bears true (rather than magnetic) north and it appears as a straight line. On other projections, straight lines pose challenges, particularly where variation of longitude is concerned."  A Mercator projection preserves the orthogonality of east-west and north-south, at the expense of distortion of space away from the equator.  South America and Africa straddle the equator, thus their projection is to a smaller scale than Greenland or Australia.

We have other equal-area projections available that don't conjure up orange peels.

The Equal Earth map projection is a new equal-area pseudocylindrical projection for world maps jointly developed by Bojan Šavrič (Esri), Tom Patterson (US National Park Service), and Bernhard Jenny (Monash University). It was created to provide a visually pleasing alternative to the Gall-Peters projection, which some schools and socially concerned groups have adopted out of concern for fairness. Their priority is to show developing countries in the tropics and developed countries in the north with correctly proportioned sizes.

Which is to say, there's no reason the African Union could not adopt that map, or any of the other equal-area projections, for their conference rooms and elementary schools.  The Mercator projection was intended for navigators, not bureaucrats.  If you're using a navigation application on your car's readout or Handy, though, it has Mercator embedded in it.  The symbolism of some other map is thus a bit much for Leslie Eastman.

When I took my geography class at Wayne State University, I began to appreciate the navigational component of Mercator maps. If I needed to assess the scale of continents, I would refer to a globe.

Perhaps it is time for officials to stop racializing crucial technologies and embrace the power of effective mapping systems…even though white men invented them.

If you are basing your pride on the relative size of the landmass of your continent rather than the accomplishments of your people, then something is wrong with your approach to life….no matter your race, creed, culture, or ethnicity. Teach your children from both a globe and a Mercator map, as that is the best way.

Or perhaps there's even more for African Union types to grouse about.  I vaguely remember the original version of Risk! as having a game board based on the Mercator projection.  My recollections are a little off, or perhaps all those original version boards have long since gone to the landfill.  There was a connector from Siam to Indonesia, and if you were picking first, occupying Siam was a way to block Australia once you'd secured it.  Holding Australia got you two bonus armies per turn.  Holding Africa or South America got you three.  I suppose we'll know the African Union types are dealing with their First World problems when they complain about such a large continent only providing three bonus armies per turn.