How Colonial Maps and Myths Distorted Africa’s History

The Mercator projection did more than distort the size of Africa on a map. It reflected a wider colonial story that portrayed the continent as small, empty and waiting to be claimed. These ideas helped turn conquest and extraction into something presented as legitimate. The myth of an “empty land” ignored established African societies, trade routes, kingdoms and centres of learning. Timbuktu, the Mali Empire, Great Zimbabwe, the Kingdom of Kush and the Kingdom of Kongo all challenge the old claim that Africa had no history or intellectual tradition. Colonial powers also used racial pseudo-science and arbitrary borders to justify slavery, occupation and divide-and-rule policies. Many present-day tensions cannot be understood without recognising how colonial administrators elevated groups, redrew boundaries and misrepresented African political systems. Correcting the map is symbolic, but the larger task is to challenge the inherited narratives that erased Africa’s complexity, scholarship and agency.

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