Isaac Lutwama Nsubuga

US leader Donald Trump’s administration is fascinating to watch. Mr Trump looks at the map, unilaterally renames the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, and that’s fine. He looks at the map again, unilaterally renames Lake Ontario, and that’s okay. Yet when the world - via the UN - looks at a centuries-old 1569 Mercator map that portrays Africa as several times smaller than its actual size, action is eventually taken. On 4 September, the UN adopted a non-binding “Correct the Map” resolution encouraging governments, schools, media, and tech companies to use equal-area projections - specifically the 2018 Equal Earth map - to accurately represent the true scale of continents and countries. The vote passed 164–1, with the United States casting the sole vote against. Trump’s ambassador to the UN dismissed the initiative as a waste of time, calling it further proof of why the organisation is “irrelevant”. There is a striking irony in a leader redrawing the map at a whim, only to dismiss a global effort to represent geography accurately as a waste of time.