Strange Maps: Did you realize Africa is this big?

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2006/11/20/35-the-size-of-africa/

by mattjaynes • 18 years ago

39 51 18 years ago

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mattjaynes• 18 years ago

I was pretty surprised at how completely inaccurate my perception of Africa's size was. This map really helped put it in perspective.

It also made me think about the potential wealth of Africa. It will be interesting to see how it continues to transform with technology and micro-entrepreneurship.

Maktab3• 18 years ago

At the same time, this also sheds some more light on Africa's problems. One of which is logistics.

The continent's security is hampered by its sheer size and the massive borders of many of its countries. What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory. So outside the cities, large parts of the countryside exist in a security vacuum where thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types essentially have free reign.

It also hampers trade and communication. With communities being spread out over such huge distances, transport infrastructure and the associated costs become vital. But few African nations can afford to maintain proper highway networks and even if they could, there's a lack of sufficient transport capability to effectively utilise it. As a result, intra-state trade is severely limited and inter-state trade even more so. This logistics problem also affects the delivery of aid.

To be fair, this isn't true of all African countries. South Africa and Egypt, for example, are notable exceptions for having a security presence throughout the country, a well-developed and advanced transport infrastructure and so on. But bringing countries like the DRC, CAR & Uganda up to the same level is not going to be an easy task.

One hope lies in having less of a top-down socialist central-planning approach and more encouragement of a federal self-organising entrepreneurial environment to encourage communities to grow themselves and gradually build their own transport and communications networks outwards. Technology will make this easier, but I think anybody expecting an economic revolution in Africa anytime soon is holding on to a false hope.

anamax• 18 years ago

> What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory.

Through the majority of US and Canadian history, the same could be said of both countries. (Canada did send the mounties out in advance of the settlers, but there weren't enough of them.)

Let me suggest that the problem is not the lack of security forces but the need for them, especially since they tend to turn into "thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types".

spinonethird• 18 years ago

I think your analysis is way off. The problems you cite are not problems of size but of population density. And I would not think that anybody in their right mind would argue that the cure for Africa's many problems is more population

You cite length of borders as an issue. Borders grow as the square root of the size of a country, and if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country, securing borders is actually easier for big countries.

The cost of having a strong enough security forces and of building adequate transport infrastructure should not depend on the size of the countries, but on the population density -- when expressed as percentage of GDP.

Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way: Africa: 30 person per km^2 (and this includes the Sahara where basically nobody lives -- almost a third of Africa) South America: 21 USA: 31 Mexico: 55

uuilly3• 18 years ago

Two rather depressing maps of Africa:

http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=166

http://vimeo.com/2131732

mleonhard• 18 years ago

We could also stop crushing democracy in Africa with money for brutal dictators.

cglee• 18 years ago

I wasn't surprised. Africa is the world's second largest continent, it should be about the size of a collection of countries.

Jem• 18 years ago

> I was pretty surprised at how completely inaccurate my perception of Africa's size was.

Likewise. I'd always had it pegged as smaller than the USA.

The shocking thing is that I got a high grade for Geography when I was in school (what are we teaching our kids?!)

DLWormwood2• 18 years ago

> It also made me think about the potential wealth of Africa.

Not really... before seeing this map, I've long known that the Sahara desert is larger than the continental U.S. Besides the logistics problems mentioned in other comments, this large block of non-producing land, which separates the fertile parts of the continent from Europe and Asia, is a key reason why the continent has historically been disadvantaged. (It's quite possible the creation of the Sahara is what encouraged the first proto-humans into leave the continent to colonize the rest of the world.)

Xichekolas• 18 years ago

More startling to me was the fact that India is roughly a third of the size of the US, yet has about 3.5x the people.

For some reason I thought India was much bigger than it is.

paraschopra• 18 years ago

And what is startling to me is that US is 3 times the size of India.

ObieJazz• 18 years ago

...yet has about 2/7x the people.

danw3• 18 years ago

The dymaxion map reduces distortion: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/pub/xplanet/fuller_1280x640.jpg

alecco• 18 years ago

It's funny how most people from the northern hemisphere don't know their world maps look funny. Particularly European versions.

DLWormwood2• 18 years ago

I wonder if this was the map Larry Niven was thinking of when he put a "Map of Earth" on the Ringworld?

danw3• 18 years ago

Here's an animation showing how the map is folded out from the globe: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vfOcYUWfVqE

paul9290• 18 years ago

Are you talking about the continent or the country :)

jeroen2• 18 years ago

There is no country called Africa. You may have been thinking of the Republic of South Africa.

helveticaman• 18 years ago

This was a reference to a certain politician's confusion as to whether Africa was a country or continent.

demallien• 18 years ago

bwahahahaha, très drôle! You probably needed to stick big blinking irony tags around it though - those of us living in the rest of the world have a poor opinion of American geographical knowledge (justified by the incident to which you refer), and sometimes we forget that the US actually has quite a lot of very well educated individuals.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

I think he meant to make fun of a political figure who was recently running to become vice president of a country and did not know Africa was a continent.

tdavis• 18 years ago

I think more surprising is how easy it is to be Geographically ignorant. I have been to roughly 20 different countries and would be hard pressed to locate some of them on a map. Honestly, who cares where Kyrgyzstan is? ;)

laut• 18 years ago

Is Western Europe one of the "named countries"?

jsmcgd• 18 years ago

The Mercator projection has a lot to answer for. Did you know that Sudan is the 10th largest country in the world?

markessien6• 18 years ago

One thing that many people don't also realise is that Africa is internally broken into 3 or 4 major blocs. West Africa from Senegal through to Cameroun are a bloc, central Africa another, the horn, another and the southern countries.

West African countries have relatively good communication and transport across themselves, but not to the southern countries.

The average American probably knows a lot more about the Congo than the average Nigerian, hard as that may be for you to believe.

danw3• 18 years ago

Here's a map for those who, like me, found your description hard to visualise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Africa-regions.png

ochiba• 18 years ago

Except for South Africa of course, the wealthiest country on the continent.

markessien6• 18 years ago

South Africa and Namibia are very close economically and culturally. Same with the two small countries in SA, and I believe Zimbabwe used to have a lot of trade too, before the latest problems.

South Africa is rich, but the West African economic zone is almost as rich.

parenthesis• 18 years ago

I had an equal-area projection map on my wall as a teenager ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_area_projection#Equal-are... ), so this didn't come as news to me.

chairface• 18 years ago

I think my perception of Africa's size comes entirely from the fact that it's only worth 3 armies in Risk.

falsestprophet2• 18 years ago

That perception may be too generous. The GDP of the combined African Union countries is less than that of the Netherlands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union#Economy

markessien6• 18 years ago

What are you talking about? The GDP of the AU is 1 and a half trillion, and of Netherlands is 600 billion. South Africa alone has a GDP of 500 billion.

kirubakaran• 18 years ago

Another fun fact that impressed me: If you dumped all the people of the world in Texas, it will have the same population density as New York city.

zacharydanger• 18 years ago

DFW Airport is actually billed as "Larger than the island of Manhattan".

boredguy8• 18 years ago

Get a globe.

cousin_it• 18 years ago

As a map nut I take this opportunity to plug the Winkel-Tripel projection that National Geographic chose ten years ago. It's quite beautifully balanced despite being neither equal-area nor equal-angle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Winkel-tripel-projection....

biohacker42• 18 years ago

Yes I do, because I own a globe. No, that's not a "strange map".

This shouldn't surprise you if you're over the age of 12 and you are not named Sarah Palin.

Jasber• 18 years ago

What happened to Alaska!?

jamii• 18 years ago

Theres a fascinating book called "Guns, Germs and Steel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) which attempts to explain why Eurasia was a dominant force for almost the entire history of civilisation, despite that fact that humans evolved in Africa.

The main idea is that Eurasia had a massive advantage in farmable crops (that is crops which were amenable to farming after a small number of mutations) and domesticable animals large enough to replace manual labour. In addition, the climatic differences across Eurasia are smaller than in Africa or the Americas so domesticated species were useful over a larger area.

Agriculture supports higher population densities (larger armies) which in turn leads to specialisation (guns and steel) and highly evolved germs to which the local population is resistant (during Spanish colonisation of

Whether or not you agree with the specific ideas its amazing that its even possible to consider the question and produce an answer that is, at least in part, empirically falsifiable.

olifante• 18 years ago

Probably the best non-fiction book I read in the last 10 years. It puts forward many reasoned arguments for the Eurasian historical supremacy (the Guns, Germs and Steel of the title), but as you say, the crux of it is that Eurasia is the continent with the largest contiguous area of similar climate. In other words, Eurasia is wide, while North America is narrow, and South America and Africa are both tall and narrow, resulting in very large climatic diversity, and smaller ecosystems adapted to each of those climates.

Strange Maps: Did you realize Africa is this big?

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