Far Off
Africa covers about 30.3 million km² including adjacent islands, roughly 20 % of the world’s land surface. You can lay the United States, China, India, the European Union, Japan and Mexico inside it simultaneously and still have 1.3 million km² spare, about the area of Chad.
The continent runs 8,000 km north to south and 7,400 km east to west. On the wall map in most classrooms it looks about the same size as Greenland. Greenland is 2,166,086 km².
On 4 September 2026 the UN General Assembly voted 164 to 1 to encourage the world to stop drawing it that way. The numbers below are why.
| Fits inside Africa | Area | Times over |
|---|---|---|
| Japan | 377,915 km² | 80 |
| Mexico | 1,964,375 km² | 15.4 |
| Greenland | 2,166,086 km² | 14.0 |
| India | 3,287,263 km² | 9.2 |
| European Union (27) | 4,225,104 km² | 7.2 |
| Australia | 7,741,220 km² | 3.9 |
| China | 9,596,960 km² | 3.2 |
| United States | 9,525,067 km² | 3.2 |
Country areas: United Nations Statistics Division. Continental area: 30.3 million km², adjacent islands included.
1. The United States, 3.2 times over
At 9,525,067 km², the United States fits into Africa 3.18 times. That includes Alaska and Hawaii.
Detail. This is the comparison most Americans get wrong, because on a Mercator map the two blocks read as similar. Latitude explains it. The lower 48 sit between roughly 25° and 49° north, where Mercator already inflates area by a factor of 1.2 to 2.3. Alaska, above 55°, is inflated by three or more. Africa straddles the equator and gets no inflation at all.
2. China, 3.2 times over
China, 9,596,960 km², fits into Africa 3.16 times. Algeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the two largest African countries, come to only half of China between them.
Detail. The reason this feels wrong is that nobody ever puts a country and a continent on the same footprint. Africa is 54 recognised countries; China is one. Fragmentation reads visually as smallness, which is why the continent registers as a mosaic of minor states rather than a 30 million km² block.
3. The European Union, 7.2 times over
The EU-27 covers 4,225,104 km². Africa holds 7.2 of them.
Detail. The practical consequence is flight time. Dakar to Mogadishu is about 7,000 km in a straight line, further than Lisbon to Moscow and further than Paris to New York. Crossing Africa west to east is not a regional hop; it is a transatlantic-scale journey inside a single continent, and roughly half the distance of the record holders in the 10 longest flights in the world.
4. India, 9.2 times over
India, 3,287,263 km², fits into Africa 9.2 times. Both hold well over a billion people.
Detail. Africa and India are the two land masses that Mercator hurts most, for the same reason: they sit near the equator, where the projection adds nothing, while Europe and North America swell above them. Equatorial regions are the only parts of a Mercator world map shown at true relative size, and that is precisely what makes them look small.
5. Greenland, 14 times over
Greenland is 2,166,086 km². Africa holds 14.0 of it. On a standard Mercator map the two take up comparable space on screen.
Detail. This is the textbook distortion and the arithmetic is short. Mercator multiplies area by 1/cos²(latitude). At 60° that factor is 4. At 75° it is 15. Greenland runs from 60° to 83° north, so it is drawn between 4 and more than 60 times too large depending where you look. Africa, from 37° north to 35° south, is barely stretched at all.
6. Mexico, 15.4 times over
Mexico, 1,964,375 km², fits into Africa 15.4 times. That makes it fractionally smaller than Greenland, at 91 % of its area.
Detail. This one you can test yourself in ten seconds. Pull up any Mercator world map and compare Greenland to Mexico: Greenland dwarfs it. They are within 9 % of each other. No calculation needed, just two shapes on the same sheet.
7. Australia, 3.9 times over
Australia, 7,741,220 km², fits into Africa 3.9 times. It is the smallest continent; Africa is the second largest after Asia.
Detail. Australia is the useful control case, because it is also mentally shrunk, but for a different reason: isolation rather than projection. It sits low enough on the map to be drawn near true size, yet almost nobody guesses that Perth to Sydney is 3,291 km. The same reflex is dissected in the most isolated cities in the world.
8. Japan, 80 times over
Japan, 377,915 km², fits into Africa 80 times. Nigeria alone, at 923,768 km², already holds 2.4 Japans.
Detail. Read backwards, this gives a working yardstick for African countries. Chad is 3.4 Japans, Ethiopia 2.9, Namibia 2.2, Algeria 6.3. A country that looks mid-sized on the African map is almost always larger than any country in Western Europe.
9. The United Kingdom, 124 times over
The United Kingdom covers 244,376 km². Africa holds 124 of them.
Detail. The figure carries some history. At the height of the colonial period, nearly all of this continent was administered from a handful of European capitals whose combined territory did not reach a twentieth of it. Every map drawn in that era used Mercator, which placed those capitals in the enlarged upper half of the sheet.
10. All of them at once
The decisive number is the sum. United States (9,525,067) plus China (9,596,960) plus India (3,287,263) plus the European Union (4,225,104) plus Japan (377,915) plus Mexico (1,964,375) comes to 28,976,684 km².
Detail. Africa, at 30.3 million km², swallows all six and keeps 1.3 million km² in reserve, another Chad. This is the demonstration Kai Krause popularised in 2010 with his infographic “The True Size of Africa”, subtitled “a small contribution in the fight against rampant immappancy”. Individual figures in it have been argued over; the order of magnitude never has.
Why Mercator shrinks Africa
Gerardus Mercator published his projection in 1569 for one job: navigation. Its defining property is that a constant compass bearing appears as a straight line, so a sailor can rule a course directly onto the chart. No other projection does that.
The cost is arithmetic. To preserve angles, scale has to grow with latitude as 1/cos(φ), so area grows as 1/cos²(φ). At the equator the factor is 1. At 45° it is 2. At 60° it is 4. At 80° it is 33. At the poles it diverges, which is why Antarctica appears as an infinite strip along the bottom of the map.
Mercator never claimed his chart was for comparing areas. The problem is not the projection, it is the default: school atlases, wall maps, and now nearly every online mapping service, which uses a variant called Web Mercator. Nobody on Google Maps is plotting a rhumb line, but plenty of people are forming an idea of how big a continent is.
The alternatives
No projection is free of error. A sphere does not unroll onto a flat sheet without something breaking, so the choice is about what you are willing to sacrifice.
- Gall-Peters (James Gall, 1855; popularised by Arno Peters in 1973). Equal-area, so relative sizes are exact. Shapes are stretched vertically, which cartographers dislike. Boston Public Schools adopted it in March 2017 and restarted the whole argument.
- Mollweide (1805). Also equal-area, elliptical, with heavy angular distortion at the edges.
- Robinson (1963). A compromise with no exact property, used by National Geographic from 1988 to 1998.
- Winkel Tripel (Oswald Winkel, 1921). Another compromise, adopted by National Geographic in 1998 to replace Robinson because it handles the polar regions better.
- Equal Earth (2018), by Tom Patterson, Bernhard Jenny and Bojan Šavrič. Equal-area, but deliberately drawn to look like Robinson so that it reads as a normal world map. It was created in response to the Boston controversy, to give schools accurate areas without the Gall-Peters silhouettes.
What the UN actually voted on
On 4 September 2026 the UN General Assembly adopted resolution A/80/L.104, known as “Correct the Map”, by 164 votes to one with six abstentions. It encourages governments, schools and technology companies to use equal-area projections, and names Equal Earth specifically. The United States cast the single vote against.
The text was tabled by African Union member states together with the Bahamas. It follows the Correct the Map campaign launched on 7 April 2025 by Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, which the African Union Assembly formally backed in February 2026. The vote breakdown is published by UN News.
A General Assembly resolution is not binding, and no map is going to be confiscated. What it targets is the default setting, which is where the whole problem lives: almost nobody chooses the projection of the map they are looking at.
Mirror piece: how many times does France fit into the biggest countries, where the same exercise runs from a single country instead of a continent. Going further: the longest straight line on Earth and the longest train journeys in the world.
Frequently asked questions
How big is Africa exactly?
Africa covers approximately 30.3 million km² including adjacent islands, about 20 % of the world’s land surface, making it the second largest continent after Asia. Published totals range between roughly 30.2 and 30.4 million depending on whether Madagascar, the Canary Islands and various Indian Ocean islands are counted in.
How many countries fit inside Africa at the same time?
The United States, China, India, all 27 European Union member states, Japan and Mexico fit inside Africa simultaneously. Their combined area is 28,976,684 km² against 30.3 million for the continent, leaving 1.3 million km² unused, roughly the size of Chad.
Why does Greenland look as big as Africa on maps?
Because the Mercator projection multiplies area by 1/cos²(latitude). Greenland spans 60° to 83° north, where that factor runs from 4 to over 60. Africa sits on the equator and is drawn almost exactly to scale. The result is two land masses occupying similar space on screen when one is 14 times the size of the other.
Which map projection shows countries at their true size?
Any equal-area projection: Gall-Peters, Mollweide, Equal Earth, Albers, Eckert IV. They keep area ratios exact at the cost of distorting shapes and angles. Equal Earth, published in 2018, is the current recommendation for a general world map, and it is the projection named in the UN resolution adopted on 4 September 2026.
Is the Mercator projection wrong?
No. It is a navigational instrument that does exactly what it was built to do in 1569: turn a constant compass bearing into a straight line. The failure is one of context, not of mathematics. It ended up in classrooms, on wall charts and inside online map services, where nobody is plotting a sea route but a great many people are comparing sizes.