Why Africa’s size on the world map is reduced

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi,

03 December 2023

I recently came across a post on X [formerly know as Twitter] pointing out that, at 30.37 million square kilometres, Africa larger than China (9.6 million sq km), USA (9.8 million sq km) and Europe (10.18 million sq km) put together! The author went ahead to note that, on world maps, Africa’s size is “deliberately downsized to create a visual effect of a small Africa to manipulated, brainwash and deceive Africans wherever they are”.

Those are very strong and angry words, but they are far from the truth. The sizes of the land masses given in the X post are accurate but the reason for Africa appearing smaller than the Northern continents has nothing to do with brainwashing or manipulating people.

It is all the result of transforming physical features from a 3-dimesional spherical object to a 2-dimensional flat plane. When doing such a transformation, we have to choices: either distort the shapes of the continents and retain their relative sizes or distort their relative sizes and retain their shapes.

There are some maps that take the first option of distorting the shapes. The result is an African continent that looks unusually elongated from top to bottom. Compared to the shape of the continent of the globe of the world, this one looks rather awkward.

Consequently, the popular type of flat plane map is one where the sizes of all things on the equator (not just the African continent, but all the oceans, and lands – including South America, etc) are compressed in order to retain their true shapes. On the other hand, features near the poles (not just Europe and North America but Antarctica, Australia, etc) are stretched in order to fit on the 2-dimensional surface.

So, the truth is that this distortion of sizes is simply a consequence of geometry; not of political ideology. Incidentally, the reduction in size is done gradually such that, areas around Mt Kenya (where the Equator passes) are more reduce than those around Moyale in the North and Lunga-Lunga at the southern tip of our country.

Also, for being on the equator Kenya and Uganda are more reduced than Tanzania, which is more reduced than Zambia, which is more reduced than Zimbabwe… So, now ask yourself this: who would go to such great technical lengths just to propagate a hateful political agenda? I suspect that, if the author of that X post sees this article, he will claim that I have been brainwashed completely!