The dispute is not really over whether the Mercator projection distorts Africa. It does. The argument is over whether that distortion is simply a technical flaw in a 16th-century navigation tool or part of a political inheritance worth correcting.
When the United Nations General Assembly voted on September 4 to back wider use of maps that represent continents in closer proportion to their actual size, the result was almost unanimous.
A total of 164 countries voted in favour. Six abstained.
The United States was the only country to vote against it.
That lone vote has become the most provocative part of the story. But the US did not argue that Africa is shown accurately on the Mercator projection. Its objection was to the political meaning African states attached to correcting it.
To understand that dispute, it helps to start with the map itself.
Africa was not deliberately made smaller
Gerardus Mercator created his projection in 1569 for sailors.
Its advantage was practical. It preserves local angles and allows constant-bearing routes to appear as straight lines, which made it useful for navigation.
The cost is distortion.
As a Mercator map moves away from the equator towards the poles, land masses appear increasingly larger than they really are relative to places nearer the equator. Africa straddles the equator. Greenland sits far to the north.
That is why the familiar rectangular world map can make Greenland look vaguely comparable to Africa.
It is not.
Africa is about 14 times larger than Greenland by area.
The distortion was not designed to diminish Africa. It is a mathematical consequence of the projection Mercator chose.
The more consequential question is why a map created for navigation became one of the default ways generations learned the relative size of the world.
That is where the argument moved from cartography into politics.
What African states want changed
Togo led the UN resolution on behalf of the African Group, with support from the African Union.
The preferred alternative is Equal Earth, a projection developed in 2018 that preserves relative land area much more accurately. Africa therefore occupies a larger share of the page, while Greenland, northern Canada and Russia shrink relative to their familiar Mercator appearance.
The African Union says the change matters because maps do more than help people locate countries. They also shape how people understand scale.
In its statement after the UN vote, the AU said Mercator “significantly understates” Africa’s size and urged schools, publishers, international institutions and digital platforms to use representations that better reflect actual land areas.
Togo’s foreign minister, Robert Dussey, made the argument more explicitly at the UN.
He said the continued use of distorted maps had contributed to the “symbolically minimising” of Africa and linked the campaign to what he called cognitive justice, historical memory and the dignity of peoples.
That is the point Washington rejected.
Why the US voted against it
US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz did not dispute the geometry behind Mercator.
Instead, he argued that the resolution had become part of a broader political project.
“This initiative is presented as an anodyne effort to update cartographic proportions,” Waltz told the General Assembly, before saying the US believed it was tied to what he called a “more radical ideological project.”
Washington objected specifically to the resolution’s framing around reparations, colonial legacies and cognitive justice. Waltz argued that the UN should be concentrating on international peace and security rather than debating the political meaning of a 16th-century map.
So the disagreement was not really about whether Mercator distorts Africa.
It was about what follows from accepting that fact.
African states argue that repeated visual distortion has consequences for how the continent is understood.
The US position was that correcting the technical problem did not require adopting the political interpretation attached to it.
Those are different arguments, and they should not be blurred.
What changes if Equal Earth is adopted?
Less than some headlines suggest, but more than nothing.
The UN resolution is non-binding. Mercator has not been banned, and there is no order requiring every mapmaker to adopt Equal Earth. Mercator also remains useful for navigation.
The immediate consequences would be most visible in places where relative land size matters more than navigation – school textbooks, classroom maps, atlases, news graphics and some institutional or digital maps.
A child seeing Equal Earth would get a very different sense of the continent’s scale.
Africa covers close to 30 million square kilometres. Greenland is a little over 2 million.
That does not make Africa richer, more powerful or more influential. It does make the picture more accurate.
Togo has already said it plans to change the maps used in its geography teaching materials by the end of 2026, while the African Union is encouraging other governments and institutions to follow.
The bigger question is whether the campaign’s political claim can ever be measured as neatly as the geography.
It is easy to prove that Mercator enlarges Greenland relative to Africa.
It is much harder to prove exactly how much that image has shaped attitudes towards Africa over centuries.
The UN vote does not settle that argument.
What it does settle is that a map built for 16th-century navigation has never been a neutral picture of relative land size.
Most of the world has now agreed that, where scale matters, there is little reason to keep pretending otherwise.
