Yesterday some friends and I watched the movie “The Visitor” (nice film which also stars my heartthrob Haaz Sleiman ). There’s this great scene in the film where a middle-aged white woman approaches Zainab (the girlfriend) and asks where she is from. When Zainab responds “Senegal,” the woman then says “Oh, my daughter was in Cape Town once.” After the woman leaves, the Israeli sitting next to Zainab turns to her and ask, “And exactly how far away is Senegal from South Africa?” She responds, “About 8000 km.”
I could not even count the number of times I’ve had this sort of experience since moving to Burundi. ”You live in Africa? I know someone who went there once. How is African culture?”
A lot of you have probably heard me talk about this before…but how big is Africa really? The map below hung in one of our lecture halls at Mac….it puts things in perspective.
How big is Africa?
Centuries of colonialism and Euro-centrocism have distorted how we see the world. Maps have been made to privilege Western cultures… another good basis for how to think of the world is that when you’re looking at a map, remember that Greenland (836,330 sq. m) is actually roughly the size of Mexico (761,605 sq. m). Not 7x larger as its commonly displayed on the well known Mercator Map (see below).
Mercator World Map
An article I read recently calls this distortion and complete unawareness of people “immappacy.” The author says, “In addition to the well known social issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, there also should be such a concept as “immappacy,” meaning insufficient geographical knowledge.”
I would add “poorly taught geographical knowledge.”
I like it. Miss Annie has a similar map in her Sunday School classroom at Pleasant Hill.