Disarming Narratives: Mercator, Equal Earth and Africa

On September 4, 2026, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution that drew international media attention. Entitled "Correct the Map," it challenges the cartographic representation of the world inherited from centuries of European expansion and conquest, beginning in the 16th century. Adopted by an overwhelming majority - 164 votes in favor, 6 abstentions, and only 1 against - the resolution calls for a more equitable representation of the world's regions, with particular attention to Africa. (https://docs.un.org/en/A/80/L.104)

For more than a century, this colonial vision of the world has been contested and even corrected. And yet it has remained deeply embedded across Global Africa - in government institutions, educational systems, media, and classrooms - long after independence.

Why, despite decades of criticism, have African states, educators, artists, and social actors continued to reproduce maps whose distortions carry such profound cognitive, educational, cultural, geopolitical, and socioeconomic consequences? Why have these representations not yet been consigned to the dustbin of history?

In 2024, AFROSPECTIVES published an article examining the roots of this persistent failure, and the urgent need to rethink - and reimagine - the ways in which we see, and picture, the world.

We are publishing here a more comprehensive version of that reflection, originally included in a 2025 collective volume on the "decontamination of narratives" - a process that still needs to be pursued beyond the correction of maps, to emancipate ourselves from the representations, categories, hierarchies, and vocabulary that perpetuate the different forms of coloniality.