The African Union has thrown its weight behind a projection system for rendering maps that shows Africa’s true size better than the much more popular Mercator system.
Most educated people know that popular world maps don’t do justice to the sheer humongousness of the African continent. I personally learnt about this around age 9 when reading Chrichton’s novel, Congo. Standard world maps make it look as if Africa is the same size as Greenland, when the continent is actually nearly 14 times larger.
Source: Kuztown University
I have described the issues here.
As I try to explain in my social media posts, this concern about popular maps shrinking continents that have a large portion of their landmass in the tropics has been around for a very long time until things came to a head in 1989-1990 leading to a kind of quasi-settlement in Academia.
That settlement simply advises that because different mapping projections are better and worse for different things, the choice of projection should really be dictated by the purpose for which the projection is required. If the hope was to quieten the tempests roused by activists like Arno Peters and their “my map is right” dogmatism, well, that obviously didn’t happen.
Since writing that post, my attention has been drawn to the fact that the projection actually preferred by the African Union is the Equal Earth Projection. A system created by an Australian professor and two Americans, a software developer and retired cartographer.
I wish that there had been a detailed policy discussion around the continent before this choice was made. It may well be that the consensus would still have pointed in the direction of Equal Earth. But my first rough and dirty run-through of the literature shows that like all projections, Equal Earth also has its limitations.
Transforming the spherical surface of the Earth to any flat plane, like a map, is like flattening the peels of an orange. There will always be stretchmarks. Removing them would always come at some the expense of some other feature.
Source: Belfast Telegraph
A cost-benefit analysis is thus inevitable in any serious evaluation.
I focused on the digital environment, where all mapping navigation today mostly manifests. Even my quick sifting effort reveals reasons why the Mercator system despite its obvious limitations still prevail.
Some of that is just sunk costs, but there are some accuracy advantages similar to what drove Gerard Mercator to invent it in 1569 in the first place.
Equal Earth takes inspiration from the Robinson projection, which sacrificed some navigational accuracy rigour for better size-representation. Whilst Equal Earth has improved upon Robinson, it cannot remove all distortions. No projection system can.
I have a view that “policy accountability” requires sizeable “policy audiences”, and is rather different from “political accountability”, which is often driven by interactions between elites and the masses at large. I describe the gap that often emerges between the two forms of accountability using my still emerging theory of “Katanomics”.
My view is that continental strategy, including in respect of economic integration, in Africa today is hobbled by katanomics, to the extent that there are so few policy audiences that very limited policy accountability happens. I have discussed the same problem in a very different context: internet governance.
I simplify the situation by arguing that for African elites, geo-POLITICS often trumps geo-POLICY.
At the same time, the shallowness of the available policy audiences means that it is hard to aggregate the “policy constituencies” that can drive forward collective action policies in pan-African sense.
In such a context, even where there is political will to harmonise continental systems, the underlying operational plumbing, ever so critical, fails to connect due to the lack of policy momentum.
In the case of mapping, it is very clear to me that the real opportunity would have been to focus on the deep-plumbing that advances specific African interests in the digital navigation space.
As I mentioned on social media, I do not know of a single mapping projection system effort focused on Africa led by Africans. Yet, there are several specialty projection methodologies that address the special interests of much smaller interest groups around the world. Including those with thematic focuses.
I don’t dispute the reality of “standards geopolitics”. It is not for nothing that the World Geodetic System itself is a standard developed by the United States’ National Geo-spatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), a military affair. America is an undeniable cosmo-hegemon that controls the GPS network, another military affair, that many of our apps and lives depend upon in Africa.
But there is still an International Union of Geodesy & Geophysics, as well as two UN specialised entities (UN-GGCE and UN-GGIM) where the rules of engagement are somewhat more neutral and meritocratic. The African Diaspora has thousands of specialists that could be mobilised to influence the agenda, if only geo-policy was as important as geo-politics to African elites.
Until a better way is found to link up the politics of continental integration with the policy networks that can deep-dive into the undergirding policies within and across countries and elevate their political significance, there will always be motion by the likes of the African Union, but not much progress in tangible, transformative, outcomes that enrich the lives of ordinary Africans.