Pick the three heavyweights of the modern world. The United States, China, India. Two superpowers and the most populous country on Earth. Between them: about 3.2 billion people and most of the planet’s headlines.
Now add up their land.
USA: 9,439,564 km². China: 9,371,364 km². India: 3,155,854 km². Total: just under 22 million km².
Africa is about 30.4 million km². Drop all three inside and the continent still has over eight million square kilometres going spare. That’s room for another two Indias, and you’d still have change left for a France.
The most underrated shape on the map
This is the comparison that made the designer Kai Krause famous in 2010, when his “True Size of Africa” graphic went round the world. It went viral for a simple reason. Nobody believed it, and then everybody checked.
The disbelief is manufactured. Africa straddles the equator, exactly where the Mercator projection draws land at its true size, while the north of the map gets inflated around it. Greenland, drawn about the same size as Africa on the wall map, is actually fourteen times smaller. The continent holds 54 countries and about 1.5 billion people, and the Sahara alone is roughly the size of the entire United States. The dry bit at the top of Africa matches the whole third-largest country on Earth.
Don’t take the graphic’s word for it
A viral image is still just an image. Open the scene and the three giants are already parked on the continent, the USA across the Sahara, China over the Congo Basin, India down towards the Kalahari. Real shapes, real areas, live on the map. Drag them around yourself. Try to make them overflow. You’ll run out of country before Africa runs out of room.
Then, for the encore, remember that the ocean next door is twice the size of Africa. The map has been underselling everything south of the Mediterranean, land and water alike, your entire life.