VIC MENSA: RECLAIM THE NARRATIVE

Africa has been inaccurately represented for over 500 years on maps, obscuring Africa’s wealth and size to advance white-supremacist interests, according to rapper Vic Mensa in this recent clip from a talk at Harvard University.

A Flemish geographer and cartographer named Gerardus Mercator created the now-infamous Mercator projection, a flat map in 1569. But it wasn't just a tool of navigation—it was a weapon. By massively enlarging Europe and shrinking Africa, it created a visual lie that still shapes global consciousness today

The Western narrative goes that Africa was on the periphery of world events, a silent bystander to Europe’s development of the modern world, the Americas and Asia. But history tells a different story. Africa was not merely watching the birth of the modern world; it was the beating heart of it. The insatiable European hunger for African gold and enslaved Africans directly drove the colonisation of the Americas. Therefore, the European Slave Trade was not a divergence but a building block of the global economy. Global capitalism was not born in London or Paris, but on the backs of Africa's stolen people and stolen wealth.

Colonial theft didn’t end with independence ceremonies and new flags. It evolved. France extorted billions from Haiti, the world's first Black republic, through forced reparations until 1947 for ousting enslavers in 1804. Centuries of Western interventions, occupations, extortion and coups d’état have prevented Haiti from being a sovereign country.

Foreign corporations also control most major gold mines in resource-rich Ghana. 

Fourteen French-speaking countries still use the CFA franc in West and Central Africa despite minor reforms in 2019 that only scratched the surface, unlike what Mensa mentioned.

Video credit: @vicmensa via IG

Sources

https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/18/africa/real-size-of-africa/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/17/haiti-france-reparations-independence-ransom-anniversary

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/08/mercator-projection-distortion-map-africa/401543/

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2019/11/8/west-african-cfa-franc-nations-plan-to-move-reserves-from-france

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2021/10/05/1042518732/-the-greatest-heist-in-history-how-haiti-was-forced-to-pay-reparations-for-freed

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/gerardus-mercator

https://www.tresor.economie.gouv.fr/tresor-international/la-zone-franc/les-principes-et-modalites-de-fonctionnement-de-la-cooperation-monetaire

https://ambafrance.org/Monetary-cooperation-between-Africa-and-France-the-CFA-franc

https://www.mincom.gov.gh/operating-mines