Maps Are Not Neutral: Cartographers Challenge Old Western Bias

As political situations shift rapidly around the globe, a growing number of cartographers are drawing attention to a long-overlooked truth: maps are never neutral. Rather than being simple representations of geography, maps reflect choices shaped by history, culture, and power.

One of the clearest examples of this bias involves Africa. For centuries, many widely used Western maps have depicted the continent as significantly smaller than its actual size, despite Africa being large enough to contain numerous other countries within its true landmass.

Cartographers argue that this distortion is not accidental. It stems from mapping conventions developed by Western powers, whose projections and design choices often diminished the visual scale and perceived importance of non-Western regions.

These experts describe their current work as decolonizing maps — an effort to strip away outdated assumptions embedded in cartography since the era of Western colonial expansion. This includes reconsidering how borders, labels, and proportions are chosen and presented.

According to the cartographers, every mapping decision, from which regions are centered to how landmasses are scaled, encodes a particular perspective. There is no such thing as an objective map; every version tells a story shaped by whoever created it.

The renewed attention to this issue comes as political situations worldwide continue to change quickly, prompting closer scrutiny of how maps shape public perception of nations and continents. Observers note that inaccurate representations can subtly influence how people judge the relative significance of different parts of the world.

By pushing for more accurate and balanced maps, the cartographers hope to correct these long-standing distortions and offer a clearer picture of global geography. Their broader aim, they say, is to help dismantle outdated hierarchies of representation that have persisted for centuries and to foster a more equitable understanding of the world's regions, particularly Africa.