#CorrectTheMap Campaign
Why the push to replace the map with actual scale points to Africa as the Last Frontier.
I wish to start this article by pointing out that, some views might be considered biased due to cultural/religious and historical beliefs in tradition. I always see differing opinions as opposite sides to a river between - I don’t expect one to jump over to the other bank, but it would be of mutual benefit if they both had view and understanding on the flow of the river between them.
AU Supports #CorrectThe Map
Recently, the African Union picked up on an age old discussion that has been ignored by modern historians, educators and learned men alike - on the true size, nature and geography of the world and in particular, Africa!
The #CorrectTheMap campaign has been gaining traction since before the African Union decided to foment a continental political push to correct the world map that ‘cartographically marginalizes’ the African continent.
I found it interesting that the point of reference was the faulted Mercator projection, which is often know to clearly have its assumptions in comparison to other projections like the equidistant azimuthal projection which can be seen inset on the Gleason’s map - and interestingly in the United Nations logo. [As a side note, I did try to generate an image using the function on Substack, but for some reason, the AI could not depict the Gleason’s map or the Equidistant azimuthal projection map when prompted or searched. It did manage to pull the UN logo based off the same projection!]
Do Your Own Research - DYOR
Before any posit is made with fervor, I would suggest every reader takes some time to research the history of how we found ourselves depicting the earth in the same misrepresentation. During my research and study into the subject a few years ago, I identified actual historical maps and names of ancient kingdoms in Africa and the historians who wrote about the earth, its geography and weather. Pliny’s ‘Naturalis Historia’, Strabo in his ‘Geographica’, ‘Periplus of the Erythrean Sea’ and Ptolemy’s ‘Geographus’ being some of the historical books that cover the subject of the natural world through history and gives a fairer depiction of Africa and its geography.
There are a number of maps on Africa, most notably by Sebastien Munster in the mid-16th century in his Cosmographia. Followed by Abraham Ortelius’ in his ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ in 1570 and my personal detailed favourite by Willem Blaeus in 1644. These early maps, as noted by historians, depicted the African continent largely from the descriptions given by their predecessors aforementioned, and Claudius Ptolemy. The maps never tried to fit all continents to scale - I can imagine the cartographic nightmare that would have poised to early engravers and cartographers. Ptolemys’ World map somehow didn’t survive through history (and its obvious why if you look at his depiction) but it was reconstituted from his Geographus (1,875 years ago!).
In Ptolemys’ map, Africa is distinguishably larger in proportion to Asia and Europe and this only factors North & West Africa, relegating any lands south of the equinox as ‘Terra Incognita’ as much of the southern lands were less travelled and unknown in 150 A.D….but even then, almost two millennia before our time, the early astronomers and geographers knew of the earths shape, form and size. So how did those who had less technological tools to assist mapping in the past hold a truer representation of the earth than NASA scientists and astronauts? Is Mercator to blame? Or is the entire western civilization and the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’?
We need to examine our world and reality from a very cultural and historical perspective with the aim of carrying out our own renaissance and reforming customs and traditions for application in todays post-modern world.
But why does Africa's misrepresentation persist?
Did it Stop with Geographical Maps, or is History Misrepresented?
There has been a noticeable change to the modern outlook and representation of our universe and the earth with it. I immediately took concern over the gap that exists in our school-instructed history. We never studied the aforementioned philosophers - studying more about our altruistic colonization and the policies/laws that governed our vassal protectorate - like the Devonshire whitepaper. We were never taught about our culture by our forefathers (just what the colonizers deemed fit to print) and epistemological conceptualization of the world we live in.
#CorrectTheMap campaign provides Africans with a point to reflect upon; how much do we not understand our world, our continent and its history? Its bounds, its reaches? Its fresh waters and deep mines? What happened to our understanding of the same continent we call home today? Did we lose it all when the imperialists colonized our lands, burnt down our libraries in Alexandria, Timbuktu, and took our ancestors for slaves to captivity?
What about religious history? Was the good book weaponized to misappropriate culture and racial identity? So that we still go by their misrepresentation of all of Africa as the Children of Ham - bearing the curse of Ham? In actual scriptural context, the curse was directed at Canaan (Gen 9:25), and Canaan was also cursed for occupying Shem’s portion of land (Jubilees 10:29) - but most Africans are not descendants of Canaan - but of Ham and Shem [why do they think his name was changed to Abra-Ham?]. Even with historical facts pointing to scriptural events all happening in and around Africa, we’re still meant to believe that Africans were cursed, and that the chosen people are emigrated proselytes of Ashkenazi or Khazarian descent - which in no way descends from Shem, but Japhet. To which Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1958 quipped of the Jews: 'They left here black and came back white'.
Judging by the impact religion, both Christianity and Islam, had in the region of Africa - the empires used them to impose foreign ideas and practices that our people never knew about. Religion became a weapon to breakdown our culture, spiritualism/faith and build it up in a false description, depiction and image - their image!
Do Africans hold remembrance of their own epistemology in history, geography, medicine and religion?
From an African futures perspective, I imagine we would be disparaged in the next coming decades (also given the passing generation of our elders) - if we are to completely lose our body of knowledge as Africans - and this speaks to the indoctrination of an entire continent in exchange for tainted and contested history that shapes a biased understanding of our reality today.
Africa as the Last Frontier
David Laitin, in his lectures on Africa as the last frontier for development, concluded that the hopes of negritude were undermined by neo-colonial reality - but I would argue they were preceded by imperial/colonial empires’ taste for slave labour, extraction and debilitation of the indigenous knowledge systems and social structures of the native Africans. His posit ignored the first handmaiden of imperialism, colonialism.
It might not seem apparent, but there is no stronger persuasion than with the use of language and storytelling to influence and shape public opinion. Gustav Le Bon noted the same as it pertains to the crowd - that propaganda tends to imprint an incapacitation to reasoning by appealing to emotions, constructs and illusions thereby substituting individual conscious thinking to unconscious actions of a crowd. I say this because the propaganda didn’t start with Mercator, but with others like Copernicus and Galileo. It was dubbed the Age of Enlightenment, where the scientific revolution was hoisted up its pedestal over historical facts and indigenous knowledge systems…a sort of belittling of what others know to be true with a form of hypnosis and imposed curricula that negates our traditional knowledge.
The same future awaits those who cannot clearly understand their own culture, hypnosis and miseducation against their origins and their arts, which are meant to reinforce some permanence of our beliefs, know-how and practices, at least within the African context. The songs and dances that many of our tribes practiced in former years are slowly being eroded - as with the customs and oral histories thanks to cultural diffusion.
This is not about just correcting the map to increase the size of Africa. This campaign can inform an African social movement that will unearth and correct contested histories.
This campaign has the potential to change completely how Africans view the world - how it has been described to us and the disparity that the European worldview has to indigenous societies and civilizations over time.
This campaign has the potential to wake Africans up to the realization that their continent is the final frontier - that since the late 1800s, the same philanthropic altruism exuded by Leopold II will have been rebirthed many times over with the same foxlike resolve and variable waves of exploitation, extraction and extirpation - as was witnessed historically in the Americas, Asia and Australia!