The African Union, an intergovernmental organization of 55 African countries, is supporting the Correct the Map campaign to phase out the widely used Mercator map in favor of the Equal Earth projection first proposed in 2018. Advocates for the change argue that the Mercator map misrepresents and diminishes the world’s perception of the African continent. First devised in 1569 by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator, the ubiquitous Mercator projection features longitude lines that are equally spaced vertically across the globe. Latitude lines, however, are unevenly spaced, with the gaps between them growing wider the further out they are from the equator. This scaling creates a distorted, stretched-out effect at the top and bottom of the Earth. As a result, Greenland appears about equal in size to the entire African continent, when in reality the latter is about 14 times larger, according to some estimates. “This distortion isn’t just a cartographic error — it’s a narrative failure,...