When the question on the distortion of the world map was put to the ICA president, Professor Menno-Jan Kraak, he didn’t deny it. He told CNN: “Somehow this map projection came to be used on most world maps, especially those produced for classrooms since the beginning of the 1900s. Most of us have grown up with this world image.”
Professor Kraak adamantly argued that the map of the world we see today is nothing more than a propaganda tool. Using Russia as an example, Kraak said “If you take the Mercator projection (bottom), where Russia looks huge, give it a bright red color and then compare it to the rest of Europe, you see how dangerous it can look.”
Canada, Russia, the United States and Europe are greatly enlarged, while Africa has been significant reduced. On the Mercator map, Greenland looks almost the same size as the whole of Africa, but in truth, Greenland is no bigger than the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country in Central Africa.
Professor Kraak believed the enlargement of Europe and North America is not an accident, but a clear case of bias against Africa.
Marianne Franklin, a professor of Global Media and Politics at Goldsmith’s University of London said the map we see today was made to display the power of the West as the ruler of the world, during the era of European Imperialism.
“The term ‘power of representation and representation of power’ sums up quite well how maps and the rise of the Western nation-state system, and with that, empire and colonialism are linked. The world maps that prevail today have been embedded in Western imaginations since the British Empire. They continue (to prevail) despite many challenges to their fairness and accuracy because they underpin the ongoing Anglo-Euro-American presumption that the world belongs to them, and pivots around these geo-cultural axes,” professor Marianne said.
