Strange Maps: Did you realize Africa is this big? | Hacker News Reader

Strange Maps: Did you realize Africa is this big?

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39 pointsmattjaynes51 comments

I think my perception of Africa's size comes entirely from the fact that it's only worth 3 armies in Risk.

That perception may be too generous. The GDP of the combined African Union countries is less than that of the Netherlands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Union#Economy

What are you talking about? The GDP of the AU is 1 and a half trillion, and of Netherlands is 600 billion. South Africa alone has a GDP of 500 billion.

You know full well that I am referring to the about the nominal GDP, while you are referring to the GDP at purchasing power parity. Both are interesting economics measures.

You should not be too surprised that I choose the more surprising one to write about.

The dymaxion map reduces distortion: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/pub/xplanet/fuller_1280x640.jpg

It's funny how most people from the northern hemisphere don't know their world maps look funny. Particularly European versions.

I wonder if this was the map Larry Niven was thinking of when he put a "Map of Earth" on the Ringworld?

Here's an animation showing how the map is folded out from the globe: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=vfOcYUWfVqE

One thing that many people don't also realise is that Africa is internally broken into 3 or 4 major blocs. West Africa from Senegal through to Cameroun are a bloc, central Africa another, the horn, another and the southern countries.

West African countries have relatively good communication and transport across themselves, but not to the southern countries.

The average American probably knows a lot more about the Congo than the average Nigerian, hard as that may be for you to believe.

Here's a map for those who, like me, found your description hard to visualise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Africa-regions.png

Except for South Africa of course, the wealthiest country on the continent.

South Africa and Namibia are very close economically and culturally. Same with the two small countries in SA, and I believe Zimbabwe used to have a lot of trade too, before the latest problems.

South Africa is rich, but the West African economic zone is almost as rich.

Theres a fascinating book called "Guns, Germs and Steel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) which attempts to explain why Eurasia was a dominant force for almost the entire history of civilisation, despite that fact that humans evolved in Africa.

The main idea is that Eurasia had a massive advantage in farmable crops (that is crops which were amenable to farming after a small number of mutations) and domesticable animals large enough to replace manual labour. In addition, the climatic differences across Eurasia are smaller than in Africa or the Americas so domesticated species were useful over a larger area.

Agriculture supports higher population densities (larger armies) which in turn leads to specialisation (guns and steel) and highly evolved germs to which the local population is resistant (during Spanish colonisation of

Whether or not you agree with the specific ideas its amazing that its even possible to consider the question and produce an answer that is, at least in part, empirically falsifiable.

Probably the best non-fiction book I read in the last 10 years. It puts forward many reasoned arguments for the Eurasian historical supremacy (the Guns, Germs and Steel of the title), but as you say, the crux of it is that Eurasia is the continent with the largest contiguous area of similar climate. In other words, Eurasia is wide, while North America is narrow, and South America and Africa are both tall and narrow, resulting in very large climatic diversity, and smaller ecosystems adapted to each of those climates.

I was pretty surprised at how completely inaccurate my perception of Africa's size was. This map really helped put it in perspective.

It also made me think about the potential wealth of Africa. It will be interesting to see how it continues to transform with technology and micro-entrepreneurship.

At the same time, this also sheds some more light on Africa's problems. One of which is logistics.

The continent's security is hampered by its sheer size and the massive borders of many of its countries. What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory. So outside the cities, large parts of the countryside exist in a security vacuum where thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types essentially have free reign.

It also hampers trade and communication. With communities being spread out over such huge distances, transport infrastructure and the associated costs become vital. But few African nations can afford to maintain proper highway networks and even if they could, there's a lack of sufficient transport capability to effectively utilise it. As a result, intra-state trade is severely limited and inter-state trade even more so. This logistics problem also affects the delivery of aid.

To be fair, this isn't true of all African countries. South Africa and Egypt, for example, are notable exceptions for having a security presence throughout the country, a well-developed and advanced transport infrastructure and so on. But bringing countries like the DRC, CAR & Uganda up to the same level is not going to be an easy task.

One hope lies in having less of a top-down socialist central-planning approach and more encouragement of a federal self-organising entrepreneurial environment to encourage communities to grow themselves and gradually build their own transport and communications networks outwards. Technology will make this easier, but I think anybody expecting an economic revolution in Africa anytime soon is holding on to a false hope.

> What this means it that few countries have the funds for large and capable enough security forces to exercise control over the whole of their territory.

Through the majority of US and Canadian history, the same could be said of both countries. (Canada did send the mounties out in advance of the settlers, but there weren't enough of them.)

Let me suggest that the problem is not the lack of security forces but the need for them, especially since they tend to turn into "thugs, rebels, criminals and assorted other unsavoury types".

Interesting comparison, but it's not really the same situation. In the case of the US and Canada there were large border regions that were essentially frontier societies with little protection offered by the state, but the major population centres and the areas between them were generally safe. And as time went on, the expansion of both countries were driven in large part by the expansion of their armed forces and the gradual extension of control over more and more of the country. Aside from a few hardy settlers, there were no large population groupings living in areas in which the state had not yet established a basic level of control. The societies expanded their territory only as the security umbrella which protected them grew larger.

For many African countries, such as the DRC, this is not the case. They have inherited borders and population groupings that date from colonial eras and have more to do with arbitrary lines drawn on a map than the actual ability of each country to enforce or protect them. As a result there is seldom a single point of origin from which to begin the creation of a security umbrella and then expand outwards; instead they have to individually try to secure a number of cities and towns situated far apart from each other while trying desperately to get a hand on the largely undeveloped and un-patrolled areas in between. To use the DRC as an example, the national army has virtually no control over the land between Kinshasa, the capital, and cities like Goma and North Kivu. There is no proper level of internal security.

To be fair, your point about the quality (or lack thereof) of African security forces is valid. There's no doubt that if more African armies were well-trained, disciplined and professional they would be able to make far more effective use of the limited resources available to them. Unfortunately, most are as useless and corrupt as the political hierarchies governing their countries. But my point was that even with well-trained forces, the vast distances across which many African countries stretch make an already difficult situation so much harder to deal with on the tiny budgets most African countries have available. And that even those who do attempt to get their act together are dragged down by the fact that trade, the one thing that could lift them out of poverty, is often severely restricted by geography.

I think your analysis is way off. The problems you cite are not problems of size but of population density. And I would not think that anybody in their right mind would argue that the cure for Africa's many problems is more population

You cite length of borders as an issue. Borders grow as the square root of the size of a country, and if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country, securing borders is actually easier for big countries.

The cost of having a strong enough security forces and of building adequate transport infrastructure should not depend on the size of the countries, but on the population density -- when expressed as percentage of GDP.

Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way: Africa: 30 person per km^2 (and this includes the Sahara where basically nobody lives -- almost a third of Africa) South America: 21 USA: 31 Mexico: 55

if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country

Why would you assume that?

Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way

But Earth's population density is off the chart compared to other planets. Africa is too big to generalize. The USA has both New York City and Wyoming. Population and economic value are intensely concentrated in cities, so being big or small doesn't matter. Having productive cities does.

But Earth's population density is off the chart compared to other planets.

You don't say...

Two rather depressing maps of Africa:

http://uuorld.com/gallery?image=166

http://vimeo.com/2131732

Why do you feel compelled to prepend 'depressing' to Africa? Don't you think a focus on the positive is more helpful than a constant focus on the negative?

If you can look at that image and that video and not call it depressing than the word should be retired.

The really depressing thing are people who have no idea how Africa really is making blanket judgements on the continent. If there were less of that, and more people who are willing to actually do research about the continent, there would be more trade. As-is, people like you just have some 2 paragraph opinion of the continent, and never ever see it as a place where one can invest or otherwise communicate with.

Excuse me, but you don't know anything about me or my opinions on the continent. I mentioned visualizations of two stats, one from the World Bank and One From the CIA with the word "depressing" in front of them. You have made a bunch of assumptions here...

We could also stop crushing democracy in Africa with money for brutal dictators.

I wasn't surprised. Africa is the world's second largest continent, it should be about the size of a collection of countries.

> I was pretty surprised at how completely inaccurate my perception of Africa's size was.

Likewise. I'd always had it pegged as smaller than the USA.

The shocking thing is that I got a high grade for Geography when I was in school (what are we teaching our kids?!)

> It also made me think about the potential wealth of Africa.

Not really... before seeing this map, I've long known that the Sahara desert is larger than the continental U.S. Besides the logistics problems mentioned in other comments, this large block of non-producing land, which separates the fertile parts of the continent from Europe and Asia, is a key reason why the continent has historically been disadvantaged. (It's quite possible the creation of the Sahara is what encouraged the first proto-humans into leave the continent to colonize the rest of the world.)

Another fun fact that impressed me: If you dumped all the people of the world in Texas, it will have the same population density as New York city.

DFW Airport is actually billed as "Larger than the island of Manhattan".

The Mercator projection has a lot to answer for. Did you know that Sudan is the 10th largest country in the world?

As a map nut I take this opportunity to plug the Winkel-Tripel projection that National Geographic chose ten years ago. It's quite beautifully balanced despite being neither equal-area nor equal-angle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Winkel-tripel-projection....

More startling to me was the fact that India is roughly a third of the size of the US, yet has about 3.5x the people.

For some reason I thought India was much bigger than it is.

And what is startling to me is that US is 3 times the size of India.

...yet has about 2/7x the people.

Are you talking about the continent or the country :)

There is no country called Africa. You may have been thinking of the Republic of South Africa.

This was a reference to a certain politician's confusion as to whether Africa was a country or continent.

Alleged confusion, judging by the latest reports. It looks like the story's source doesn't actually exist and has pulled similar hoaxes in the past.

Not that I like Palin, but then again I'm a fan of disliking politicians based on the merits of what they have really said and done.

Not quite right. One on-record verifier of the story was a hoax. The original source has not yet been outed.

My bad. That probably didn't get as much coverage on this side of the ocean, so I missed it.

bwahahahaha, très drôle! You probably needed to stick big blinking irony tags around it though - those of us living in the rest of the world have a poor opinion of American geographical knowledge (justified by the incident to which you refer), and sometimes we forget that the US actually has quite a lot of very well educated individuals.

I think he meant to make fun of a political figure who was recently running to become vice president of a country and did not know Africa was a continent.

I think more surprising is how easy it is to be Geographically ignorant. I have been to roughly 20 different countries and would be hard pressed to locate some of them on a map. Honestly, who cares where Kyrgyzstan is? ;)

Is Western Europe one of the "named countries"?

I had an equal-area projection map on my wall as a teenager ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_area_projection#Equal-are... ), so this didn't come as news to me.

Yes I do, because I own a globe. No, that's not a "strange map".

This shouldn't surprise you if you're over the age of 12 and you are not named Sarah Palin.

Get a globe.

What happened to Alaska!?

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