The world is getting a new map, and it’s all Africa’s fault. In early September, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution encouraging countries to update the over 450-year-old projection credited to the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Among other changes, the favored new renderings more accurately depict Africa’s real size and shape — bigger, leaner, longer.
The United States, itself an enthusiastic practitioner of revisionist cartography, was outraged. “Resolutions like this, and the ideological agenda they promote,” read a statement from the U.S. mission to the U.N., “are barnacles on our work here.”
But the map, as the saying goes, is not the territory. A new map of Africa, even if it’s more true to scale, poses the same central questions as the old one: What does a jumble of countries locked inside a (slightly bigger) continent actually tell us about how Africa, and by extension the world, works? What would an accurate rendering of contemporary Africa look like?
These days, the immediate instinct is to say that it would be a continent of shards, fragments, quadrants. Like everywhere else, Africa is now subject to the logic of rupture — the definitive break in the old world order. If divide and conquer was the logic of colonialism, today’s rupture seems to achieve this as a matter of course, as major and minor powers seek to seek advantage in a roiling, warring atmosphere. But it’s a mistake to think of the current situation as a historical retread. Though many African countries are still paying down colonialism’s vast and deadly mortgage, restricting choice and flexibility, what is now unfolding cannot be confused with what came before.
Then, it was European galleons docking in exotic harbors. Today, it’s authoritarian African governments, frazzled juntas, short-termist democracies and oligarchic power brokers actively seeking to forge international partnerships to meet their own interests. In other words, this time the call is coming from inside the house, even if the outcome is the same: unrestrained extraction, elite accumulation and popular discontent.
Africa is shaping — and being shaped by — the Middle East, China, Western Europe and Russia, an increasingly complex geopolitical web that makes the colonial era appear simple by comparison. And yet the continent still entirely eschews an African view of Africa’s future. New vistas of possibility may be opening up, but as the world is warped by naked transactionalism, the map is fraying. It’s been many years since Africa seemed more spectral, and its people more vulnerable, than it does now.
It is helpful, as far as it concerns those benefiting from this new normal, that the continent has never been more of an international afterthought. In global bodies such as the Group of 20, South Africa was long considered a gateway to everything south of the Sahara. But the Trump administration’s absurd insistence that the government enables violent attacks against its white minority population has left South Africa sidelined from the group’s conference in Miami in December. The Security Council still does not have a permanent African member, a geopolitical exclusion that, given the Security Council’s efficacy, is as meaningless as it is persistent.
Meanwhile, African unity is a chimera. Outside of geographic contiguity, there is effectively nothing that binds, say, Malawi in the east and Senegal in the west. Continental infighting, whether verbal or violent, is far more common than collaboration. If you were looking for a performative display of multilateralism, you could do no better than the African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, itself locked in a semi-permanent civil war that threatens to rope in most of the region.
There are no substantive continentwide free trade agreements (despite one being signed). There is no universal visa for African residents. There is no common currency (although there is a version in parts of West Africa). On foreign policy matters such as the wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran, there is little consensus, mostly because individual African states — and sometimes factions within those states — have conflicting affiliations with one side or the other. In political terms, “pan-Africanism” is a dusty anachronism, “nonalignment” is incompatible with today’s transactionalism and “South-South cooperation” has been reduced to a consultancy buzz term.
The future arrives in fits and starts. If artificial intelligence is your benchmark for economic and technological advancement, there are now around 260 data centers across the continent — and yet so far the investment numbers being discussed are a small fraction of what’s being spent in North America or Asia. Perhaps this is why: The International Energy Agency lists only six African countries among its 32 members and 14 associate members. Without widespread, cross-border regional cooperation, an A.I. building program is unlikely to ever happen.
The African continent is, of course, well acquainted with the ups and downs of commodity super cycles. Rubber, diamonds, gold, platinum, coltan: Whole societies and histories have been written and unwritten by prices determined in distant markets. The social and economic results of the previous cycle — China’s manic, enormous growth spurt from the late 1990s until the 2010s — remain ambiguous. Yes, gross domestic product figures in parts of the continent rocketed up, but development was lumpy, often restricted to cities and stock exchanges. More money from corruption is changing the continent in manifold ways, from glass and concrete phantasmagorias like Lagos’s Victoria Island on one hand to grotesque economic inequality on the other. The benefits from the current, A.I.-driven cycle may end up being even more uneven.
Africa is officially organized into a few large political blocs — rump cuts of the continent that make up the Southern African Development Community, the Economic Community of West African States and other barely functional regional bodies. But as with the map, these blocs are not the territory. It is now possible to divide Africa up into postmodern quadrants (and quadrants within quadrants).
A simplistic, if useful, way of looking at it has Russia attempting to lock up deals in the northern Maghreb and in the Sahel, while China and the Gulf powers vie for influence along the eastern region adjacent to the Middle East, and America dabbles in the west, including in the petroleum power of Nigeria, though none of these parties confines its ambitions to a single theater. Each instance is case by case, and it is dangerous for outsiders to impose their will — it’s pay to play.
In the Sahel, the long colonial hangover that permitted the French to remain as a de facto ruler has finally dissipated. The West African states of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso are now shakily run by military leaders who have decoupled from the regional economic body and have innovated a new junta-led multilateralism linked to Russia. (Libya, Mali and Algeria serve as Moscow’s beachhead into the region.)
In some cases, mines and mining industries have been nationalized — an echo of the socialist liberation era, but stripped of all ideological cladding. Disputes with Western-headquartered multinationals have increased with the price of gold. The threat of international arbitration in Paris has diminished along with the influence of America, the global rule of law’s erstwhile policeman. After all, if there are no international cops, why should there be an international courthouse?
If the Sahel is tentatively the Russian domain, then the American sphere of influence is fast becoming more ad hoc and febrile. The second Trump administration infamously and cruelly destroyed U.S.A.I.D. and the programs it supported, many of which were based in Africa, resulting in incalculable immiseration. Last Christmas in Nigeria, the United States military indulged MAGA’s evangelical base by bombing what residents have described as empty pasture land and vacant military hide-outs where Christians were allegedly being persecuted by Muslim terrorist groups. The Tomahawk missiles used in the operation cost U.S. taxpayers $32 million, and may have bought Trump supporters some festive cheer.
But this rather narrow view of Africa’s most populous country sums things up: For Nigeria, as for the developed world, a senescent superpower promises either privilege or pain in exchange for deals small or large, in a parody of colonial extraction.
By contrast, China is diffused through the continent, preaching a more benevolent developmental model. The Belt and Road initiative, a vast infrastructure project meant to connect the previously unconnectable, serves as a deal-making icebreaker — although deals with Beijing are no longer so easy to come by and the terms are no longer as favorable as they once were.
Perhaps nowhere are the stakes of foreign meddling more evident than in Sudan. There, a brutal civil conflict has raged since 2023, except that it’s no longer a civil conflict alone — it’s a world war in miniature. Russia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey are only a few of the players who appear to be trying to prop up and collude with whichever side ends up prevailing. Hundreds of thousands of people have been slaughtered. Not far to the southeast, in Somalia and Somaliland, where the United States and Israel jostle for influence as a buffer against the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen, regional flare-ups threaten to set off a wider, continental conflagration. The doom loop shows no signs of slowing.
The lens of conflict reveals the intensity of what can often only be described as invitation-only deal-making. But does any of this frenzied activity lead to meaningful agency for African leaders, to say nothing of regular people?
Deals can be made, hands can be shaken, contracts can be signed. But the real, lasting opportunities lie elsewhere. If demographics are destiny, then the planet’s destiny is African. Africa is approaching the same population density that Asia had when it began its own economic ascendancy. After all, the continent is a market. It may be small by North American and Western European standards, but it is growing, both in numbers and purchasing power. By 2050, the population is projected to grow from 1.5 billion to more than two billion.
According to this logic, Africa’s nameless, faceless people may yet be central to the world’s story, not as forced laborers or wage slaves in the West but as consumers in a growing region on a demographically shrinking planet.
Africa is not static, it is not waiting. Entire music genres burst into being and flame out; youth cultures are born, grow, mutate and die online without anyone in the West being the wiser. Artistic expression and academic innovation hurtle forward, while conversations about artistic and intellectual legacy are fierce online and in art exhibitions. The continent is at the leading edge of how technology fills gaps that were once considered irreconcilable. The MPesa mobile payment system, for instance, would be considered revolutionary for the barely banked in the United States, let alone in Kenya, where it first emerged to enable micropayments.
But the speed of change so often meets the implacability of political and economic stagnation, and the net result is whiplash. What should be obvious is that hopping between hegemons will not work. Accepting third-wave colonialism will not work. Tolerating America’s (or Russia’s, or the United Arab Emirates’) finance-bro foreign policy will not work. Leaning on the noblesse oblige of development aid will not work. Only new solutions will be fit for the purpose.
As it stands, the global moment of rupture is being defined in Africa by African elites designing the future in presidential palaces and high-end hotels. But they’ll find, as their forebears did, that this new map is not the territory. It’s a trap. The only way out is for Africans to disassemble it together.
Richard Poplak is a South African journalist and filmmaker.
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