Redrawing Africa's map won't deliver power - IOL

(From left) UN Secretary-General António Guterres, incoming President of the UN's 81st General Assembly Khalilur Rahman and outgoing UNGA President Annalena Baerbock at the UN's New York headquarters on September 8. A corrected Africa map cannot unbind its roots, restore its stolen wealth, or manufacture sovereignty, says the writer.

Africa did not supersize itself last week. Its borders were not magically extended. Neither did its mountain peaks rise or its rivers rush into new waters. Only the map changed. The world has been asked to see the continent differently.

On 4 September, the United Nations General Assembly adopted an African-led, African Union-endorsed resolution urging governments, international bodies, schools, and technology institutions to use maps that more accurately represent the comparative size of the world's continents and regions.

The vote was 164 countries in support, six abstentions and a single vote against the resolution: the United States. On a Mercator map, Africa, the world's second-largest continent, appears almost the same size as Greenland. Nonetheless, in the real world of geography, rather than the calligraphy of maps, Africa is almost 14 times larger than Greenland.

Last week's UN resolution asked the world to stop teaching a malformed view of scale. However, it does not forbid using the Mercator map. This Mercator map, with its shrunken image of Africa, has become one of the most recognised illustrations in world geography. Devised by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 for navigation, the Mercator map has since become an instrument of political power.

Maps are not neutral. They determine what generations of children learn about the world's topography and the atlas of global power. The dwarfing of African knowledge and the elevation of European epistemology as the gold standard of universal knowledge is also part of the colonial downgrading of the continent. In this respect, the cartographic correction matters. It challenges colonialism's visual architecture.

Togo's Foreign Minister Robert Dussey said: "A fair map does not change the geography of the world; it changes how we see the world."

While the resolution has been celebrated as an important symbolic victory, it could prove rather meaningless in the harsh terrain of real-life politics. An outsider acknowledging your size does not make you bigger.

The West seeing Africa's true size and scale is not necessarily a game changer. It is when Africa finally looks upon itself as a majestic giant and exercises its full scope of power and influence that it will rise from bonsai to baobab.

The world has never been confused about Africa's importance. The issue is not geographical size and scale but Africa's position in the global economy. Geographical scale means little if Africa continues to occupy little space in the global matrix of power and its value chains. Africa may have a new map, but land remains contested, with ordinary African citizens enjoying little control over how the wealth beneath their feet is used.

Even the most accurate map, drawn with the finest precision, does not return land stolen in the colonial era or restore ownership, sovereignty, or economic control. It does not alter the patterns of economic extraction. Africa supplies a huge share of global cobalt, platinum, and manganese. It derives only minuscule economic value from these minerals, which are processed internationally.

The UN has decided to formally phase out the traditional Mercator map of the world in favour of the Equal Earth map which more accurately displays Africa’s size.

A bigger map of Africa in textbooks and media studios will not boost Africa's power and influence. That power and influence will only come through a continent-wide resolution for undiluted African sovereignty and an expanded Pan-Africanist programme of unity, collective power, and prosperity. What is required is the upsizing of Africa's political imagination, not upscaled Western maps.

Africa's fragmentation is one of the core reasons the continent's enormous potential remains unrealised. Africa negotiates with the world as separate economies and competing countries. While world powers negotiate in blocs, Africa is typically divided. The African continent is geographically massive, resource-rich, and strategically vital.

However, it remains a small player in defining the terms of global economic engagement. In nature, bonsai is not naturally small. Its roots are deliberately restricted, and it is so heavily pruned that its growth is strictly contained. The tree survives, but its development is carefully managed. Like the bonsai, Africa has been pruned and managed—for centuries it has been controlled through borders, external economic imperatives and imposed hierarchies of knowledge.

In many respects, Africa has downsized itself. Poor political stewardship, conflict, poverty, and limited resolve to root out the colonial contours of contemporary Africa have kept the continent trapped, restricted, and punching below its strategic weight.

Africa's urgent task is to turn geographic scale into huge economic scale, natural wealth into tangible industrial power, political independence into genuine sovereignty and continental numbers into collective bargaining power.

To fully upscale, Africa needs to produce its own knowledge, define its own interests and negotiate from the scale of a unified continent. This is necessary if the sleeping giant is ever to rise and take its rightful place in the world. Africa does not need Western permission to act bigger. It does not need to be told it is a major player to behave like one. A baobab does not become a colossus because someone finally projects its scale accurately.

Africa has always been big enough. A corrected map cannot unbind its roots, restore its stolen wealth, or manufacture sovereignty. It cannot turn a continent deliberately contained into a baobab of collective power. A new map will not stop young Africans from climbing into fragile boats and crossing the dangerous waters of the Mediterranean or Atlantic in search of a life they cannot imagine building at home. Africa may finally have a new map.

The big question now is whether it will finally find its way. Africa needs to recognise that Western affirmation is not a growth policy. Africa's majestic rise is an internal job.

* Kim Heller is a political analyst and author of No White Lies: Black Politics and White Power in South Africa.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.