Africa's Decolonization Push: Maps, Schools, and Narratives Redrawn

In early September, the United Nations General Assembly voted 164 to 1 to endorse a shift in how the world's maps should be drawn. The resolution, championed by African nations and backed by the African Union, calls for the adoption of equal-area map projections—most notably the Equal Earth projection—to replace the Mercator projection, a cartographic standard that has dominated global mapmaking since the 16th century. The Mercator projection, while useful for navigation, systematically distorts the size of landmasses near the equator, rendering Africa substantially smaller than it actually is. For centuries, this visual misrepresentation has shaped how people around the world perceive the continent's true geographic and economic scale.

Robert Dussey, Togo's foreign minister and the driving force behind the Correct the Map campaign, described the vote as a moment of vindication. "Finally, Africa is fighting to regain its place in the community of nations," he told Deutsche Welle. "The place it has been reserved to this day is unfair. It does not correspond to Africa's reality, not in historical, geographical or economic terms." For Dussey and the nations that backed the resolution, the debate over cartography was never merely technical. It was fundamentally about power—about who decides how the world is represented, and whose perspective shapes the categories through which knowledge itself is organized. The single dissenting vote came from the United States, whose president Donald Trump has pursued his own cartographic ambitions through executive order, renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and Lake Ontario as Lake America.

The map resolution sits within a much larger movement across Africa to reclaim narratives and knowledge systems from colonial influence. Romain Tiquet, a historian at the African Worlds Institute in Paris, noted that since the late 2000s, questions about the decolonization of knowledge have gained momentum in universities, museums, and cultural institutions worldwide. "Who established the categories through which we conceptualize the world? From which locations? And what power dynamics result from this?" Tiquet asked. Cartography, he explained, is inseparable from these questions.

In Mali, this reckoning has taken concrete form in the classroom. In October 2025, the Malian government removed French history from its school curriculum, eliminating instruction on the French Revolution in favor of a focus on Malian history and the ancient West African kingdoms that preceded colonial rule. The decision reflects a broader political realignment: Mali ended military cooperation with France in 2022, and French troops subsequently withdrew. Burkina Faso and Niger followed suit, and the three nations formed the Alliance of Sahel States in 2023. Philemon Mtoi, a historian at Tumaini University Makumira in Tanzania, defended Mali's curricular shift as strategically sound. "A country without a strong understanding of its own history is like a country without clear leadership and direction," he said. By investing in the research and preservation of African history from an African perspective, Mali was not merely performing an act of decolonization—it was claiming intellectual independence and contributing to global scholarship in a way that had long been denied.

Tanzania, Ghana, Namibia, South Africa, and Kenya have undertaken similar curriculum reforms. Tanzania recently made Tanzanian history and ethics a compulsory subject taught in Swahili, replacing global history in the standard sequence. Mtoi cautioned, however, that the goal was not to erase knowledge of other nations or historical events. Rather, it was to establish a foundation in one's own history first, with the study of global events like the French Revolution deferred to later stages of education. The shift reflects a conviction that intellectual independence begins with understanding oneself.

Beyond the classroom, organizations like Africa No Filter are working to reshape how the continent is portrayed in media and public discourse. The nonprofit, which helped organize the Correct the Map campaign, released a report titled "The cost of media stereotypes to Africa," estimating that the continent loses up to $4.2 billion annually in inflated interest payments due to biased media coverage that portrays Africa as poor, corrupt, and perpetually crisis-ridden. To counter this narrative, Africa No Filter launched the #NotWaiting campaign, which aims to highlight positive developments and initiatives across the continent while centering African voices and perspectives. Francois Bouda, an officer for arts and culture at the organization, emphasized that the campaign is directed first at Africans themselves. "We've accepted the image of a continent incapable of taking care of itself, one that is poor and has no opportunities. We've internalized this and come to believe it, even though many positive things are happening," he said. The campaign features stories of people across Africa's 54 countries—entrepreneurs, innovators, community builders—who are not waiting for external validation or direction. "Millions of ordinary people doing extraordinary things every day," as one promotional video describes it. The work is not about erasing Africa's real challenges, but about making visible what has always been there: the agency, creativity, and progress that international media has systematically overlooked.