by Xinhua writer Gui Tao
NAIROBI, Aug. 1 (Xinhua) -- A bizarre map of Africa recently appeared in a U.S. government presentation at an international conference in Brazil. Nigeria was shown as a landlocked country in the Sahara, Mozambique was moved to the Horn of Africa, and Cote d'Ivoire was placed on the opposite side of the continent. The U.S. State Department later acknowledged the mistake, saying the PowerPoint slide had been hastily modified before the event.
Mistakes happen. But the episode raises a question that goes beyond a faulty graphic: Why was such a distorted image of Africa allowed to pass scrutiny and appear in an official presentation?
In the age of artificial intelligence, technology can reproduce mistakes at unprecedented speed. But AI does not create all errors from nothing; it often reflects the assumptions and biases embedded in the information it learns from.
The answer lies not only in technology or human error, but in perception.
Nigeria was misplaced partly because it was confused with Niger, a recurring mistake in Western public discourse. The two neighboring countries have different histories, geographies and societies, yet major news organizations have repeatedly published explainers reminding readers that they are not the same country.
The incident of the misplaced map matters because it reveals a deeper question: How well does the West truly understand Africa? The issue is not simply about getting a country's location right, but about whether Africa is being viewed as a continent of diverse nations, societies and histories, rather than through simplified assumptions.
In recent years, Washington has become increasingly interested in Africa's critical minerals, supply chains and strategic competition. Cobalt, lithium, copper and graphite now appear regularly in discussions among policymakers and think tanks in the West. The Lobito Corridor, backed by the United States and its partners to improve transport links for mineral exports from countries such as Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has become a recurring geopolitical phrase.
In other words, there is a risk in seeing Africa primarily through what can be extracted from its land. However, a continent of 54 countries and about 1.4 billion people cannot be reduced to a map of resources.
As a pivotal member of the Global South, Africa boasts some of the world's fastest-growing digital economies, a vibrant and youthful population, and a rich tapestry of cultures and societies, each with distinct ambitions and development trajectories. For too long, the West has chosen to overlook this reality.
A map is never merely a map. It reflects how the world is imagined. For centuries, maps of Africa were drawn largely by outsiders. In the 1880s, European powers partitioned Africa at the Berlin Conference with almost no African representation. On the maps they drew, borders were traced along rivers, lines of latitude and longitude, dividing communities that had long shared languages, cultures and trade networks while forcing very different regions into the same political units.
These maps did not reflect geographic realities. They served colonial interests, resource extraction and the balance of power among European rivals. None of the lines on the map were drawn by Africans. All of them were imposed.
Although the colonial era has ended, the thinking behind those maps has proven harder to change, or the idea that Africa can be understood without fully listening to Africans themselves.
That is one reason the African Union has backed a campaign challenging the continued use of the Mercator projection in schools, media and digital mapping platforms, arguing that it distorts Africa's true size and reinforces outdated perceptions of the continent. On many Mercator maps, Greenland appears almost comparable in size to Africa, even though Africa is about 14 times larger.
The Africa map controversy offers a timely reminder that correcting the image of Africa requires more than fixing a slide. It requires changing the way the West sees the continent from a passive object of competition and extraction into an active force shaping its own future. ■