Africa's true size

A few years back there was an exhibition in a London gallery by the Royal Geographic Society, and the curator asked the edge.org group to contribute “unusual maps”. Thinking it would be for a few hundred people at most, I put together a little map that I had made previously in the mid 80s before, then as an example of scientific visualization graphics software (which I spent a decade on, actually).

It was a very simple premise that I had seen done a number of times before - never claimed it to be a novel invention - but had a slightly new twist in mind: Africa is so mind-numbingly immense, that it exceeds the common assumptions by just about anyone I ever met: it contains the entirety of the USA, all of China, India, as well as Japan and pretty much all of Europe as well - all combined !

And the idea was to roughly put all of them as puzzle pieces somehow fitting inside the outline shape of Africa, which is of course just a symbolic image - it may as well have been just blobs to tell the story, but it actually worked pretty well with the real pieces, at least enough to get the idea across in a visual and visceral way:---
a simple graphical depiction of the statement: Africa is just immense - much, much larger than you or I thought. Just look at it, realize that, and smile - because you will never forget it again :)
And: here is to Africa achieving the stature that it deserves to have…
Kai Kause
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