103
Africa’s Reductive Images, Contesting the Sources, and New Generations as Passive Victims: A Reflection on Historical and Global Representational Practices
JOURNAL OF YOUTH RESEARCHES
Figure 3: The True Size of African Continent
The daily mail’s news article appeared with the heading ‘Africa as you’ve never seen it
before: Clever comparison shows it’s really as big as China, India, the United States AND
most of Europe put together’ (Turvill, 2013).
Source: The true size of Africa. (2013, n.d.). Inside/Out. Retrieved from
-
paper.org/the-true-size-of-africa (2013).
Yet, as the most silenced and voiceless in this regard, Africa did not have strong de-
nouncements and reclaims at this point. Africa has long been shown as the land of ‘oth-
ers’ who have not been part of most of ‘the rest’. In common world maps, African has
been shown as far from the rest, ‘the far land’; as having quite less size than its actual
size; and as separate or marginalized land from the world.
There have not been significant contestations in disclaiming such spatial distortions, let
alone claiming Africa as the center of the world, with a very big size only next to Asia,
connected to Europe and Asia by land, and to other continents by ocean. One of the
nearest distances from Africa to Europe is the 90km short passage from Morocco to
Spain. While there are multiple intersections to Asia, again one of the nearest distances
from Africa to Asia is the short passage between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And concerning
size, we see that Africa is bigger than even the size of the sum of USA, China, India, and
most of Europe.
