Africa was always this large
The UN General Assembly has voted 164–1 to move the world away from Mercator. It is a legally modest resolution and a historically significant African diplomatic victory. Both are true, and the distance between them is the story.
The deepest story is not that the continent suddenly became larger. It was always this large. What changed is that a coalition of African governments, working through the African Group at the UN, persuaded the international system to admit that its familiar visual language was misleading.
On 4 September 2026 the General Assembly adopted a resolution known as Correct the Map, introduced by Togo on behalf of the African Group — the 54 African member states — alongside the Bahamas and with the backing of the African Union. It passed 164 in favour, one against, six abstentions. The single no came from the United States.
Read narrowly, this is a non-binding text about graphics. Read properly, it is a rare case of African states writing a global standard rather than being measured against one. It deserves to be presented as neither a miraculous redrawing of the world nor a trivial argument about pictures.
It corrects a visual hierarchy
The Mercator projection was created in 1569 for navigation. It preserves angles and directions — invaluable to a sailor holding a compass bearing — and pays for that by enlarging territory increasingly toward the poles. It was not invented as anti-African propaganda.
The political problem arose later, when a specialised navigation instrument became the default image of the world in classrooms, newsrooms and institutions. Generations learned a planet on which Europe, North America and Greenland loom, while the equatorial latitudes — the African continent, South America, South and Southeast Asia — recede.
The African continent is roughly fourteen times the area of Greenland. On many Mercator maps the two look comparable.
Map size is not political power. But repeated visual scale shapes intuition. It quietly teaches what seems central, peripheral, vast or insignificant.
It reverses the direction of representation
Historically, European institutions surveyed, classified, divided and represented the societies of the continent — each on its own terms, and rarely on their own terms. Maps accompanied colonisation, border-making, taxation, extraction and administration.
This resolution does not undo that history. It does not alter colonial borders, redistribute wealth, reform the Security Council or change trade relationships. It is not the Berlin Conference in reverse, and it should not be sold as such.
But the direction of authority matters. African states — 54 governments with distinct interests, agreeing here on one narrow point — defined the problem, wrote the proposal, mobilised the coalition and secured an overwhelming global vote. They were no longer only the subject being mapped; they helped establish the standard by which the whole world is now asked to see itself.
The African Union describes the outcome as representation grounded in objective, scientifically established realities, and points explicitly at schools, publishers, international institutions and digital platforms — the places where a projection actually lives.
It demonstrates African agenda-setting
The 164–1–6 result is an unusually clean demonstration of coalition-building. Its significance cannot be attributed to cartography alone.
Togo and the African Group transformed a concern voiced across the continent into a proposition most of the international community could accept as universal: if relative area is what a map communicates, it should communicate relative area honestly. Togo's foreign minister was careful to say the aim was not to condemn Mercator, whose navigational usefulness he acknowledged, nor to impose a single projection.
That is not a bloc asking for a courtesy. It is a group of states advancing a scientifically defensible norm — and winning the argument on its merits.
It turns decolonisation into an institutional question
Decolonisation is often discussed abstractly. This resolution identifies a concrete piece of infrastructure and asks who owns it.
- Which maps appear in textbooks?
- Which projection accompanies television news?
- Which maps hang in international organisations?
- Which visual defaults ship inside software and publishing tools?
- Who decides what the world looks like?
The resolution makes those choices visible. Once a supposedly neutral convention is recognised as a choice, institutions can be asked to justify continuing it.
Where do we stand now?
The UN did not ban Mercator and did not impose one compulsory world map. The resolution is non-binding: it encourages governments, schools, international organisations and technology companies to use Equal Earth and other equal-area projections where relative size matters, and to teach the limits of any flat map.
Mercator remains appropriate for navigation. Equal Earth — designed in 2018 — is more appropriate when comparing the areas of continents and countries. No flat map can preserve area, shape, distance and direction at once.
Nor was opposition uniform in kind. The United States dismissed the initiative as ideological. Of the six abstentions — Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine — Ukraine's objection was to how the Equal Earth map it was shown depicted occupied territory, not to equal-area cartography as such. Meanwhile France announced it would move away from Mercator in its own materials.
- LEGAL
- No country, school or technology company is compelled to change.
- SCIENTIFIC
- Strong justification for equal-area projections when relative size matters.
- DIPLOMATIC
- A 164-vote majority establishes an exceptionally strong international norm.
- EDUCATIONAL
- Governments, publishers and educators face pressure to review their defaults.
- TECHNOLOGICAL
- Mapping and media platforms are encouraged, but not required, to change.
- GEOPOLITICAL
- Borders, sovereignty and territorial claims remain completely unaffected.
A map is not power. But a map is a habit, and habits are where power stores itself. AfroSwissters reads this resolution as a small, real win with a large, unfinished obligation — the obligation now sits with whoever prints, teaches, broadcasts and ships the next map.
AFROSWISSTERS EDITORIAL · THE SHIFT № 001And in Switzerland?
A General Assembly resolution becomes real in ordinary rooms. These are the questions we intend to follow, and that readers can put to their own cantons, schools and employers.
- 01Which projection do cantonal geography curricula and Swiss school atlases use, and who reviews that choice?
- 02Which world map appears behind Swiss news graphics and explainers?
- 03Which maps hang in Geneva's international institutions — the bodies that speak for the whole world?
- 04What will Swiss publishers and mapping companies do with a norm that asks rather than requires?
A STORY QUALIFIES FOR THE SHIFT WITH AT LEAST THREE OF THESE
- Meaningful African authorship or agency
- Structural rather than merely symbolic consequences
- Clear relevance to Switzerland or the diaspora
- Enough evidence to explain what changed and what did not
- A useful question about implementation or accountability
That keeps THE SHIFT selective and authoritative. Broader day-to-day coverage of African geopolitics sits more naturally with TheSwissPanAfrican; here we stay with consequential change.
UN News and the UN General Assembly record of the «Correct the Map» resolution, 4 September 2026 · statements by Togo's Minister for Foreign Affairs Robert Dussey · African Union Commission communiqué · Reuters, AP, NPR and Al Jazeera reporting on the vote · Equal Earth projection (Šavrič, Patterson & Jenny, 2018) · base geometry: Natural Earth, public domain.