We’ve been fooled

When we think about Africa, when we think about it at all, we have a general impression of its size.  Maybe slightly larger than South America, occupying the same location in the eastern hemisphere as its cousin in the western; or some other comparison.  However, we’ve been fooled by how the earliest world maps distorted size and shape.

Some have claimed that world map projections prepared by the west represent inherent bias by making undeveloped countries look smaller than the developed countries.  However, this ignores the perspective and needs of earlier times.

As the age of Discovery and Exploration evolved, cartographers needed to find a way to project the surface area of  a sphere onto a flat, two-dimensional drawing.  And the need for that was not racist it was pragmatic to solve a problem:  navigate across vast oceans using primitive navigation tools: a compass, a sextant, and a watch.  

The needs of early ship pilots/navigators were for lines of constant bearing (rhumb lines) that are straight.  One of the earliest projections was the Mercator projection from 1569. This map was still in use when I went to school and where most of us were given our impression of the relative size of continents and countries.  This type of map is called a Cylindrical projection.   

Envision a piece of paper wrapped around the equator of a globe and all lines of Longitude, which run N and S from pole to pole, were projected from the center of the earth through the lines of Latitude onto that cylinder. What this does is stretch the land wider and taller as the projection moves from the equator toward the poles.  The land  areas and oceans at the “high latitudes” (toward the poles) are depicted larger than the land  areas at the equator.  Thus Africa, Central and South America, and India between the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn (23 degrees N and S of the equator) look considerably smaller than they  actually are relative to the land at high latitudes. Alaska looks larger than half the US and Greenland looks larger then all South America.  

With our lack of knowledge of Africa, the continent looks slightly larger than the size of South America.  But that is deceiving.  All the area of the United States, China,  Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the UK, India and Japan all fit within the coastline of Africa! 

 Since the late 1500s cartographers and mathematicians have continued to develop many types of projections of the earth for various purposes: to show constant Great Circle Routes, Equal Areas, Equal Distances.  These projections, and multiple derivatives called pseudo - Cylindrical (or whatever the baseline was) gives us multiple ways to look at our planet’s surface.  And some eliminated perceived bias. 

One of my favorites is from the architect/mathematician Buckminster Fuller, the inventor/creator of the Geodesic Dome.  If you fold it along the joining lines you can create a “globe” like a Bucky Ball.

All this is to say Africa is Very Very Large.  How we began to develop a concept for travel to this continent, even in six weeks, then plan and execute it is the subject of my next post.