Jay Foreman

It stretches Scotland, it stretches Norway to be enormous, it makes Canada twice the size it really is.

And the African Union pointed out that this is an unhelpfully sort of colonialist way of looking at the world.

When you have a map on a classroom wall, you've got to ask yourself, what's the job of that map?

Is it so that people can navigate the world using lines?

Does it have to be an accurate shape?

Or is it perhaps more accurate to learn something like Africa is huge?

So that's why they're pushing for the Mercator map, the Mercator projection.

to be retired after hundreds of years of imposing itself on the world, and for it to be swapped with something that better acknowledges that any flat map of the round earth is a distortion.

And it shouldn't always be distorted at the expense of Africa, which in real life is massive.