Africa: Africa in History

The misconception about its size is based on the distortions of the Mercator map which show the countries in the northern hemisphere as being bigger than those in the Southern hemisphere. It is actually many times bigger than all the colonial powers put together who so carelessly took it to pieces in the last two centuries.

It consists of about forty-five countries, not nations. These countries were formed by statesmen sitting around tables in Europe, holding rulers in their hands. They argued over who owned what, and when they came to some agreement, they put their rulers to the page and drew straight lines to indicate the borders between one country and the next. It didn’t matter to them that these lines sometimes ran right across nations, or that sometimes hundreds of ethnic groups, speaking completely distinct languages, were clustered into a single country.

What did matter was who the country belonged to. If we look at a historical atlas from 1950, we will see that there are large areas of pink on the map - these belonged to Britain. Then there were the green areas - usually France, purple for Portugal etc. In other words, it was defined in European terms, and reflected European political boundaries. No African points of reference were used. 1    2    3     4