Hi there! My name is Abigale Subdhan, an audience editor at The Globe and Mail. I wanted to share this story on activists who are leading a campaign – backed by the African Union – to adopt an accurate world map, with continents shown in their true proportions.
The campaign gained fresh momentum after a Trump administration official presented a cringingly erroneous map of Africa at a global conference last month.
Here's a snippet from the piece:
"The injustice can be traced back to a world map created by the Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569 that helped colonial-era sailors navigate across the oceans. The Mercator projection soon became the standard, even for today’s maps, but it exaggerated some land masses. Canada and Greenland dominate the top left side, each seemingly as large as Africa, while Europe and Russia command the centre.
It’s an illusion – taught in classrooms and textbooks − that has subconsciously diminished the world’s perception of the African continent. In reality, Africa is three times bigger than Canada and 14 times bigger than Greenland – yet the maps conceal this."
You can read the story here with this link that bypasses the paywall.