Choice of Map Projections for World Charts by European Cartographers was not a deliberate attempt to falsify the actual size of Africa

What stirred this article was the allegation that Robinson Global Map Projection deliberately falsified the actual size of the Continent of Africa and its Islands. Writing this is my attempt to explain in lay terms the scientific analysis and to calm down what could stem from naivety to further strain an already apparently strained relationship of Europe and North America and Africans. A good number of Africanists and African intellectuals do feel that Africa could have been better off had it not been plundered by colonialists employing various stratagems. This is better explicated by Dr. Walter Rodney in his work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It is true. Nevertheless, a school of thought that is for the fact that Africa was portrayed to look smaller than is apparently is as still European institutionalized attempt to perpetually put Africa in its backward position against other continents is disputed as gross exaggeration that cannot be scientifically backed.


The forum's missive appended below has raised a couple of issues
1. The place of Europe on the Robinson Projection World Chart and
2. The cardinal roles Europeans played or are playing in the domination of the rest of the world.
3. Your analysis is that ideally, Africa should have been playing such a dominant role by virtue of the large size of Africa on the globe.

There are approximately nine cardinal map projections that are used to drawn maps, charts and other representation of part or the entire world on two dimensional formats. A projection is a convenient way to present the entire world or part of the world on two dimensional or even three dimensional formats for the ease of reading the information that is put on the map or chart by the map maker who is generally called a cartographer. It is called a projection for it is assumed that a light source at the center of the globe projects a shadow on to a flat surface. The picture thus projected is drawn to scale. The choice of the projection and scale will depend upon the purpose of the map and the global location of the area, the size and shape of the region or country to be projected.


Many other projections have come up and there are no shortages of more in the pipeline. With the proliferation of computer technology and our ability to carry out mathematical calculations that could not be done with ease in the past, more projections are added or some existing once are modified for various purposes. At the present we have some 144 map projections. This topic is vast and is covered by entire text books. (Interested readers may surf the net to read some of them and their uses). I believe that browsing them is crucial if we are not to return to this topic sometimes in the future because we are not conversant with their use and even their origin. Instead of sounding false alarms that once more Africans and other continents are being cheated by Caucasians we should rather praise, commend, copy and customize the ingenuity of Europeans who came out with these devices that are vitally important in spatial development.


Sadly Africans nation states’ governments do not take scientific mapping seriously and mapping since the departure of Europeans after their independence collapsed in a good number of African countries. The old topographic maps badly need revamping. With the past bitter experience of colonialism and sadly neocolonialism, I am not certain that Africans still want to wait for Europeans and Americans, now the Chinese and Indians to come and help then in this regard. Africans better know that if they do not take the initiatives to work for themselves those they invite will not necessarily do what they expect to be done.


Some African governments are still of the conviction that spatial planning can be done without serious scientific topographic maps or plans. Others are complaisant that with the Google earth maps they assume could solve their problems of planning and development. From personal experience not all areas are covered in high resolutions and conventional mapping are still required as never before. At least they are able to see how badly planned their cities are from these pictures if at all they have time to look at these beautiful satellite covers without politicking.


Neglecting mapping has its repercussion. Politicians who have power to implement geographic projects are incubating planning problems for the next generations. Africans got to accept that they have to marry some European scientific ways of doing things or perpetually remain behind and cry wolf whenever there are economic debacles or when they are getting frustrated. They have to attempt to leave colonial history behind after learning from it as throughout the history of the world no nation had ever lived without being invaded or colonized.


Choice


The choice of the projection to be used will depend on what the map is intended to do or used for. The projection you are interested in is Robinson. That can be seen on the following site http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world_maps/world_rel_803005ai_2003.jpg. If you have time to examine all the suggested 144 projections carefully you will discover that there are some that have portrayed Africa more favorably than Europe. If it is for navigation, it may use the Mercator projection which is cylindrical. Why? It is because it is better in the portrayal of the seascapes unlike say landscapes. This tends to emphasize on the lower and middle latitudes where most of the world main seas or naval activities are concentrated. Therefore sailors ask for this projection to plot in their routes their ocean liners will follow. Since the northern and southern polar zones are not used as such, these zones tend to be exaggerated. It is for this reason that the British Isles tend to look bigger on this projection than say India which is several times bigger than the Isles. When you even look at Greenland on this projection, it is apparently larger than the continent of Africa. In the true specification, Greenland is almost of the same size as the Island of Madagascar to the south east of the continent of Africa. I hope my explanation has started making sense to many of us? If not I will continue further.


You will see from the list of projections that there are principally, there are three types of projection surfaces: the plane, cone and cylinder. With the plane you have to imagine and orange that is placed on a rectangular surface. Now peel the part that is torching the center of a rectangle so that you are able to straighten the peel to lie flat on the flat rectangle. The area that touches the orange when you had not peel it will be the equal area of the orange. As you move from that center to the top or bottom after opening the peel, the peel will not give the true picture of the original orange. Why? It is because it does not take the original shape since it has been straightened. The area from the center to the bottom or top of the orange will give an exaggerated size of the original orange but the area at the center will constantly given you the exact surface of the orange before it was peeled. This is the basis for the Mercator’s Projection. This projection is necessary and good for navigation because at the equatorial zone or the area of the 35 degree north and south of the Equator were the areas mostly used by the ship in the past and even today. They needed the exact measurement in this zone and that is why this is ideal for navigation.


The next is the cone. Under conic shaped ones we have eleven projections to chose from. I will continue to use my citrus fruit for illustration. Imagine that your orange is capped by a cone and it is sitting on your dinning table. If you peel that orange now from the lower end torching the table to the sharp or conical end and attempt to place it on the ground flat, you will see that the areas at the topmost end will be smaller and from there going down to the table it will expand until it is so broad. Which area will produce the exact size of the orange as it appears in reality? It will be the area that is lies between latitudes 40 and say 60. Climbing up to the topmost end, the North Pole will give a highly squeezed or reduced size than the original size. Conversely, if you descend from latitude 40 degree above the Equator to the bottom, you will have very exaggerated areas. Those areas here will be bigger than those in the north of the Equator.


Now imagine your citrus fruit now to be a proper flexible globe. The area to the north of latitude 40 degree will be European land. Why would Europeans need this sort of projection? It is necessary to portray the exact sizes of their landscape. If they take the Mercator, it will exaggerate their landscape and that could not be used for navigation, be it used as air or navigational sea charts. Therefore Europeans would need this for producing special maps of their regions and this will not be necessary for say Africa or regions lying to the south of the Equator.


The last and not the least is the cylindrical projection. We have up to seventy of these types and must of them are under pseudo-cylindrical. That means they are not necessarily exact. You are still going to imagine our orange harvested say from Calabar and is put in a cylindrical transparent plastic jar. Imagine that you have place that orange at the center of the jar. The areas of say the equator will be the area that will touch the circular side of the cylinder. It will be like our first case of the orange touching only one side of a rectangle. In this case it will touch all the sides of the cylinder. Carefully open it up and spread it to touch all parts available of the cylinder. This type is equatorial. There areas around our imaginary equator of the orange will touch the jar and we will not need to cut it or straighten it to take shape. However, as soon as we move away from that zone and either move up or down, the areas being shown does not show the exact size as on the orange shell. The farther away we go from our imaginary equator either to the south or north, the larger the areas will become. Therefore, we will not have the true picture of the area the original shell of the orange portrayed when it was still attached to the orange shell. This was the basis for the Mercator projection. In that case, it was not the northern area that was only exaggerated it was also the south. Remember that it is still the same shell of the same orange that was peeled. If this was the basis for the Mercator that we see in our Atlases and on our wall or sea charts many of us had never seen unless we had to go to the admiralty offices of our country or the naval offices. This will give to untutored eyes the picture of Europe, northern Asia, that is, Russia and Northern America, that is Canada exaggerated areas.

Armed with this information , the question we like to ask Africans and Africanists who have the feeling that Europeans exaggerated there countries so as to show Africans that they were coming from bigger countries and were therefore more important than Africans has not scientific underpinning.


Peter’s Projection was not indicated on our list above. This was a projection that was published in 1984 by a German scientist purporting to show the third world countries properly and it caused a sensation in Europe and other cartographic centers. It alleges that it was the only one to portray the true pictures of third world countries unlike the Mercator projection that had exaggerated Europe and North America and denied Africans and other third world countries their proper dimensions. The producer of this was also naïve and had no clue of what cartographic projections were all about. If for instance Nigerian Government used that projection, it was to distort the states. The best for the tropical regions would be the Mercator that woul gave approximately equal areas of the lands


The only true size of the world is the globe. That gives the right size of Africa vis a vis other continents of the world. Therefore, we are better advised to look at the globe in our libraries or the actual pictures of the world that have been corrected. Why do I state so? It is because there are some distortions of the pictures that are taken using cameras mounted on satellites that circulate around the earth and take pictures that are used by scientists for further mapping, remote sensing, Landsat imagery and many more. Others are taken by aircraft that has special cameras that take aerial photographs. These are employed in the production of topographical maps or thematic maps. Others are modified and used directed as in desert areas where details are not required. These are called orthophotomaps. Thematic maps are special purpose maps that are used for several spatial analyses. Among these are populations’ distributions, transport net works, agriculture, and other land uses that require maps for their studies. Topographic map bases are used and some of these details are superimposed.


Africans did map too before European Came

We have just seen that Europeans used maps for their spatial activities and why there are different projections. If Africans did not use them, it was not because they did not like to use them or could not produce them. They had maps in their heads and could navigate on land and in the coastal areas without maps of European makes. The sorts of maps they used were called or are still called mental maps. These were used for their developmental purposes. It does not mean that Africans did not draw maps. There was a King in the Cameroon Republic called King Njoya who actually drew a map or maps of his kingdom without the influence of Europeans. One of his maps was discovered by a German missionary in 1908 and it was sensationally. Prior to this, a good number of European scientists were of the opinion that Africans were incapable of drawing maps. The maps of King Njoya whose kingdom eventually became part of German Cameroons as it was written in those days are still available. The author of this article has documented the stories of the production of his maps and could be read in the following academic journals: The Bulletin of Society of Cartograhers Vol. 32, Part 1 1998, pp11-31; Also vide: Association des Cartotheques et Archieves Cartographiques du Canada Bulletin, Numero 98/Hiver 1997, pp.1-42.


One of the reasons why Africans did not draw maps and charts or were motivated to draw maps and charts as Europeans was that they were not seafarers and were not megalomaniac. They were not interested in having other lands when Africa was still full of empty species Europeans did not know and were longing to have. To start with Europeans population grew by leaps and bounds with industrial revolution stepping in. With stability, and medical advances, it means lower infant mortality and a sudden growth in population. They suddenly had more mouths to feed and needed land and houses to put the swarming population. There was high crime rate and their prisons could not even accommodate all the defaulters. Land had to be sought else where where surplus population was exported. This led to the founding of colonies.


As for the case of Great Britain, it was decided that they send those excess populations to the new territories that they had discovered. There territories were not all that empty. They were occupied by natives whose views of lands were different from those of Europeans. They were not exploiting their lands as Europeans did and did not value land. To many of them land was free for all and they did not see or dream of one having land indefinitely as Europeans. So they easily allowed European to come and settle as friends or long lost cousins who had left Africa before and were coming back.


The same sentiments were expressed by the natives of Australia, North and South Americas, African, Australia, Tasmania, India and some parts of Asia. Where Europeans were not allowed to settle amicably, they used force and settled. Europeans had had industrial advances and could produce sophisticated weapons as muskets, flint locks, powerful crossbows, maxim guns, cannons and others that Africans did not have. When they got engaged in warfare, Africans were easily defeated. This became easy as Africans were inherently fragmented as sadly they are still today. One tribe numbered some 2000 strong sitting next to one that was over a million. If there were alien attacked the one million did not bother coming to help the smaller tribe because they had not had signed treaties of friendship. Europeans invaders exploited this loose relationship that existed in Africa to penetrate and exploit with ease Africa.


Africans had no choice but yielded. Europeans were not only armed with military superiority. They were armed with psychology. Men like Charles Darwin had written books based on pseudo scientific research in which he defended the theses that there was evolution of species. This was dangerous in those days as it dismissed the religious or biblical statement that all creatures were made by God. Therefore evolution was out of question and was heretical. Darwin advanced in his book Origin of Species published in 1859 that all creatures started from being primitive and after which they evolved to superior creatures. He continued that their very survival was based on how best they cope with their environments and other creatures that were fighting for the same habitats with them. Those that were weaker were competed away or completely wiped out. Now imagine this being applied to areas outside Europe by Europeans.


Darwin's doctrine did not find a fertile ground in Western Europe that was predominantly Christian where men like Galileo were excommunicated for saying that the earth was revolving round the sun and not the sun revolving round the earth. The earth was then considered as the center of the universe and a place like Jerusalem was looked upon as its capital. Darwin wrote his Origin of Species and he had the conviction that the book that was defending his theses was going to be published by his wife when he had long died. We conjecture that he was contemplating suicide. He was not prepared to see the backlash that was to be spurred by his publication of such a these.


However for reasons we shall not dwell into, he did not die and his wife went on to publish his book the Origin of Species whose ideas had negative effect on colonialism and imperialism. It became a number one best seller not because of it controversial doctrines. The point as is still today is that some scholars literally translated his doctrine of survival of the fittest to human beings. Europeans were far advanced scientifically. They had got the scientific theories and practices from the Romans and the Romans had got them from the Greek and the Greek from Egyptian who were Africans. The only difference is that Europeans perfected some of it as IT is being perfected by Americans although it had its birth in Europe. Also look at the car industry. The Japanese copied from the European and North Americans and are literally dominating the industries because they could modify and customized and moved with time. There were things Americans had failed to do because they had not foreseen the invasion of the Japanese automobile industries. Let us not digress.


Europeans felt that they were by virtue of their advanced knowledge superior to those they considered inferior races. Therefore they could exploit them for their advantage. Remember this was necessary for survival of their species that was supposed to be superior to those of others in other continents. With "superior" intelligence, they invented things, and perfected others that were already being used. They claimed to have been invented by them and did not even give credit to those who had invented them in the first place. These were Africans the first human beings to inhabit the earth and others were by animals. They perfected navigation and having conquered the seas, they were able to come to Africa and other continents. We learned that when not as friends, they waged wars and conquered the "primitive" races. Africans were once their fathers or fore parents, became primitive inferior races.


The color of Africans did not go well with them after this "false" doctrine of superiority of other races. According to them, a man was to be light-skinned and if he were not so, he was next to an evolved animal. Were they right? In that case he could be treated like an animal. That was not frightening. The moment Africans were not treated as people Europeans were supposed to be but next to animals, it meant that they could be maltreated and killed without remorse. They were equated to animals and 8 Africans were supposed to equal to one white. White was on top of the hierarchy and the colors that were below white in the color scale of man was supposed to be inferior. Europeans who had come to Africa to buy spices called Guineas stumbled on a large population of humble Africans. They had also go to America and stumble upon the aborigines there whom they called West Indians.


Remember Christopher Columbus was looking for the route for East India before he stumbled on East Indians. Why did he have to cross the Atlantic instead of the overland route that was used to bring in spices form East India? The Italians and Arabs who controlled that route were asking so many tributes for the use of their territories to take spices across. These species were used for the preservation of meat that was the favorite dish of the rich in Europe. Remember that there were no fridges. If there were fridges to store meat, spices could not have been sought and perhaps Europeans could not have seen Africans before slavery started. The history of the world could have been different.


One thing that was in demand was sugar that was needed for the production of rum and drinking of tea and coffee. All these emanated from the Far East as well as the spices that came from India. Sugar production was labor intensive and when the Europeans arrived in the Caribbean they needed the labor of the natives and those Europeans who were driven away from Europe because there was no space to accommodate them. These included prisoners who could work in sugar plantations and mines to buy their freedom. Then working in the tropics was exhausting for Europeans who came from the tropical lands. A certain Bishop Las Casas suggested that Africans who were very strong, far stronger than Europeans and Indians who were dying like flies from European diseases could be imported to replace native Indians. His suggestion was out of sympathy but he did not know that it was to lead to transatlantic slave trade and change the history of the world. Whereas Arabs were taking slaves from the interior of Africa, Europeans were taking them from the coastal regions of Africa. It was a lucrative business that started from the 15th century to the 19th century when abolitionists like William Wilberforce of Hull in England stepped out to campaign for the abolition of slavery and slave trade.


As navigation was improved, there was no land that was not known by Europeans. When slavery and slave trade was abolished, Europeans were getting into mass production of goods. They needed territories to feed their gargantuan industries in Europe, and eventually they needed markets. Africa and other new territories they had forcibly obtained by deception of using the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest were employed. Since the colonized were inferior, theoretically, their languages were inferior; their cultures were inferior, and even their foods and colors were inferior. (We earlier saw that these were psychological tactics employed by Europeans colonialists and it did wonders for them. Armed with this tiny Europe could control the rest of the world).


Therefore in order to be human like the European, the colonized had to shade all his colors, food, culture, everything and become a European in his own land. That was difficult. Why did European colonizers have to adopt these tactics? By doing so, it was easier for them to inculcate in Africans that they were the "chosen" peoples and Africans and Indians and the rest were inferior peoples next to animals. (Were they? Of course not. They knew the answer and what they were doing?) With that attitude a few British were able to conquer and rule with Indirect Rule a mass continent like India and vast territories in Africa.


It was only a far seeing man, Indira Gandhi who had been schooled in South African injustice of the Whites apartheid against Africans that he started to fight for the liberation of India and that continent eventually became independent in 1949. That was to spur men like Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who was castigated by the colonialists who did not want Africans to stand on their feet as a communist. Was he really a communist? Many present independent African nations and other Asian and American nations followed those footsteps of India and what the USA had done to drive away the British (who only remained in Canada) to achieve political independence most of them now know today.


The maps that were often used in geography and history studies were the Mercator and Robinson projections. These portrayed Europe and even bigger than Africa. As said, it gave the true picture of the lower and middle latitudes than other projections. Therefore, when one looked at it, Britain was even bigger than Ghana and Germany was even bigger than the present day Namibia that was their colony in the 1912. As earlier indicated, when you look at India as portrayed by the Mercator projection, two Indians can easily fit into Greenland. That is the fact being distorted to a person reading this chart as equidistant. The fact is that Greenland is smaller than India by far and this is gross exaggeration to a lay person. Iceland is bigger than Guinea Conakry and that is false. Guinea Conakry is bay far larger than Iceland. The point is that towards the poles, the longitudes are exaggerated or elongated thus giving the land areas that false reading.


Conclusions


This is a very long topic but I have tried to demonstrate that the choice of Robinson Projection was not necessarily the intention of Europeans to exaggerate their continent, Europe as being bigger than it is in real life. The present day Democratic Republic of Congo is about the size of Europe. The chosen projections were a matter of scientific convenient. Recall that what is scientific is the truth and not pseudo science or some mumbo-jumbo. If we are not to use the sea for our operation, say navigation, fishing, mining, oil extraction, oceanography, and were interested in mainland Africa there will be no point using the Mercator projection that will serve our maritime activities better than those depicting lands. Let us take for instance Nigeria. Owing to its shape and size, it will not be recommended to take a projection that Argentina or Chile will take to portray their land use activities or for the production of their topographic maps. It is true that in the past Europeans were megalomaniac and wanted to paint a picture to foreigners who were considered as still inferior to them as them being super humans, maps would have been the last gadgets that they would have used for their propaganda. You will remember too that there were not many Africans who could read and write and mapped as Europeans and Chinese. However there was a maverick case of King Njoya of Mum Kingdom, Western Africa we referred readers to that fascinated early Europeans even hitherto. When it comes to scientific presentation, there are no possibilities of falsifying data. As said, if you are familiar with the caboodle of projections we have outlined, you have to simply choose the ones that are right for your purpose. In that case we will be wrong to assume that the choice of Robinson in the portrayal of the continent of Africa was a way to lie and show European superiority. The crystal clear fact is that pure science is pure science and its application is universal, be it in America, Europe or Africa. It is not politics, ethics, logic or metaphysics. It is the fact of natural philosophy and should not and cannot be falsified. Having said so, human errors do arise and it should not be generalized as the convention..


Dr. Viban Viban Ngo



The author would like to apologize for the publication of the original draft prior to its subsequent modification. Comments and constructive criticisms are welcomed. March 12, 2009