Discarding an Old Map and Seeing Africa With Fresh Eyes

Since the advent of social media a couple of decades ago, hardly a week has gone by when I haven’t noted, often with a smirk or a shrug, some poster’s belated discovery of a long-known fact: The most commonly used cartographical representations of the world drastically understate the size of southern land masses, especially Africa, giving it an appearance far short of its true dimensions.

Now, even the United Nations seems to have caught up. With one notable holdout, the United States, a recent vote by that body to recommend that future mapmakers correct this distortion has brought this somewhat obscure factlet out of the shadows, prompting a renewed wave of online commentary.

The cynic in me briefly objected that no measure by the United Nations can alter the conditions of life on the world’s second-largest continent or any other objective facts. Indeed, a vote such as this may not even ensure that the publishers of school textbooks and online atlases change their graphical representations of the world. But my skeptical reflexes soon gave way to a more positive sentiment.

In an era when the Trump administration has repeatedly gone out of its way to signal its lack of consideration for Africa and to demean its people as well as the continent’s large diaspora, this move toward what might be called map justice seems like the sign of a dawning recognition: After more than seven decades since the start of its independence era, the continent is finally becoming a place that the rest of the world has to reckon with and, indeed, increasingly count upon.

Acknowledging Africa’s geographic size goes hand in hand with the spreading understanding of the continent’s ballooning demographic weight in the world. Somewhat predictably, politicians in the West are behind the curve, still devoting remarkably little intellectual and policy capital to what will be one of the biggest drivers of global change for the remainder of this century. In fact, what little attention they do devote to Africa is of a largely reactionary nature. In the case of Europe, this means trying to figure out how to raise ever-higher dikes to hold back feared tides of African migration. The United States of President Donald Trump takes this one step further, actively pursuing means of deporting Africans, as well as dumping citizens from non-African countries on a continent publicly scorned as a “shithole.”

Eventually, though, the West will learn that this isn’t just futile—it’s also harmful to its own interests and counterproductive. Just as drawing up maps in ways that graphically diminish Africa does nothing to reduce Africa’s true dimensions, actively shunning African migrants will do nothing to change the hard demographic realities that will radically shape our collective future.

The wealthiest and most economically productive regions of the world, beginning with East Asia and including Europe, the United States, and Canada, share a grave, and as best we can presently understand, unsolvable problem: historically unprecedented fertility decline. China, which was recently surpassed by India as the world’s most populous country, is being slammed by this even harder.

Many naïve techno-optimists seem to believe that the rapid advance of robots will offer a fix, replacing dwindling human labor with legions of automated and untiring smart machines. But even if this solves production issues, it does not reckon with the loss of human consumption, which drives every model of organized economic life on the planet today.

In its simplicity, it also totally neglects vital questions about civilization: What are the essential ingredients of human society? The answer, I want to suggest, runs directly through Africa, but to see why, it helps to first look at the crisis now facing the world’s wealthiest societies from an entirely different direction.

A question like this can seem overwhelming, especially in the confines of a column like this. Fortunately, it can be broken down into smaller and more easily digested pieces. Just in the past few days, headlines have been dominated by dire warnings about the runaway prowess of artificial intelligence, which some of its smartest designers say could soon escape human control and indeed eliminate us as a species. Even stopping well short of a doomsday such as this, it is already not hard to imagine AI rendering human intelligence, human ingenuity, and human management, along with much else, irrelevant.

How do the rich countries of the world manage their bulging populations of elderly people? At some point, will they resort to stockpiling them in thinly staffed warehouses where they will be largely tended to by machines? What would doing so say about us? And if not, where would the workers required for a more humane treatment and social environment come from?

One can flip this problem on its head to consider the other end of the human lifespan. In a world of radically fewer children, there will paradoxically be radically fewer people to engage with and look after them. Do we passively give in to the dehumanization of these environments? Do we rely ever more on computers and machines to engage with and supervise children instead of the far richer personal socialization that for so long has been dominated by full classrooms and peer-group activities? Already, there are villages in Japan that are grappling with this issue, and it is sure to spread far more widely in the decades to come.

How, then, does this relate to Africa? Africa stands out as a kind of final frontier: a test of our fellow humanity that will measure the relative power of human selfishness and racial bigotry easily mobilized by far-right populists versus rational, collective human self-interest.

This, too, deserves breaking down further. Just as relatively unconstrained, or so-called “free” trade has been understood since Adam Smith to strongly benefit both parties in international commerce, most economists today believe that liberalizing the movement of people across international borders broadly favors international growth, including in both the countries of origin and adoption. The work of Branko Milanovic and Lant Pritchett constitutes two prominent examples of this among many.

What stands in the way of this is mostly prejudice, which is projected most of all toward people from the poorest parts of the world, and people of African descent, in particular. Each in its own way, both Europe and the United States are in the grips of this at present, with Germany’s ascendant far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, advocating the exclusion of migrants from the global south, and Trump publicly applauding.

The anti-immigration populists seem unlikely to win out in the long term, and that is because the alternatives to embracing Africa more deeply, in both present-day economic engagement and in migration, will be so much more unpleasant for all but the most racially prejudiced among us in the rich world. I have limned some of the dystopian aspects of this just above.

But there are other gauges of the growing importance of the continent that ill-informed politicians and racial holdouts have probably never considered. Africans are far less “foreign” than they imagine. Colonial rule and subsequent history have meant that people from that continent have been steeped in Western culture. More of them speak English and French than Europeans or Americans do. More Africans practice Christianity, too. With the sharp demographic rise of African youth, more Africans are capable and willing to produce the much-needed labor required by the West, along with the consumption that aging rich societies are rapidly losing. On a fast-urbanizing continent, where school attendance and university enrollment are booming, so is African intellectual output.

By itself, a new map of the world clearly won’t change any of this. The question is whether the door is finally being pried open to let the rest of the world see Africa with fresh eyes and a new sense of our collective interests in mind.