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This morning at breakfast, I sat with a renowned historian from the University of Ghana. We were both attending the 5th Vice-Chancellor’s Management Retreat, held at a lovely resort on the banks of the Volta River, two hours’ drive from Accra. I am deeply grateful to the Vice Chancellor, Professor Nana Aba Appiah Amfo, whose leadership, vision, and dynamism I greatly admire, for the honor and privilege to make two presentations at the retreat, one on university financing and advancement and the other on the impact and implications of digital technologies. I thoroughly enjoyed the deliberations and learning about the challenges, opportunities, and trajectories of higher education in Ghana and on our beloved continent from the leaders shepherding Ghana’s flagship university and one of Africa’s premier research universities.
At some point in our conversation at breakfast, my fellow historian and I veered into current global affairs, and almost inevitably, we briefly discussed the intensifying imperialist saber-rattling by the Trump administration over Greenland. We couldn’t help seeing the parallels between Greenland and Africa, how America’s naked colonial ambitions and Europe’s outraged reaction have unsettling echoes with African history. Being in Ghana invites such reflections, given its distinction as the first country in western, eastern, and Southern Africa to gain independence in 1957, under the leadership of the legendary Pan-Africanist, internationalist, and political philosopher, Kwame Nkrumah.
Cartographic Delusions
Greenland enjoys an inflated place in Eurocentric cartography, symptomatic of Europe’s and the global North’s exaggerated self-referentiality in global affairs and human history. In maps using the Mercator projection invented in the 16th century, as Europe embarked on its age of colonial conquests, Greenland often appears as large as Africa, when the latter is actually fourteen times larger. To put it graphically, some of the world’s largest countries and regions, thirty countries in all, can fit into Africa, including the contiguous United States, China, India, Western and Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Middle East, Japan, and the two Koreas. The Democratic Republic of the Congo alone is two-thirds the size of Western Europe.
Africa’s cartographic diminution and cognitive disparagement in the imagination of Euroamerica are mutually reinforcing, which has had disastrous existential, economic, and epistemic consequences for Africa and its peoples for the past half millennium under the European-dominated world system, which is thankfully drawing to a close as Asia and Africa rise.
In fact, Africa with about 30.4 million sq km is the second largest continent after Eurasia with 55 million sq km (Europe’s invention as a continent can be attributed to the cartographic, civilizational, and geopolitical conceit of peoples on the western tip of this massive landmass), followed by North America (24.7 million sq km), South America (17.8 million sq km), and Australia (8.5 million sq km). Not surprisingly, the African and diaspora intelligentsia has long advocated for the decolonization of Eurocentric epistemic delusions, including the construction of Euroamerican, African, and global historical geographies. Even the African Union felt compelled to join the cartographic struggle, endorsing the “Correct The Map” campaign, the replacement of the Mercator projection with the Equal Earth projection, which maintains the true relative size of landmasses.
In the public debates raging about Trump’s “fixation” on Greenland, some have argued that it reflects his lack of geographical understanding. Writing in Foreign Policy in February 2025, soon after Trump returned to power, Nick Danforth observes: “With his renewed threats to annex Greenland, President Donald Trump has not only inspired alarm and despair over the future of American foreign policy, he has also revived a niche cartographic debate about the Mercator projection. Discussing his interest in acquiring the Arctic territory, Trump previously explained: “I love maps. And I always said, ‘Look at the size of this. It’s massive.’ That should be part of the United States.” Yet many commentators have pointed out what any true map-lover knows: Greenland is not actually as big as it appears on most maps.”
Imperial Appetites
Beyond the American president’s embarrassing intellectual ignorance, his motivations reflect more familiar and fundamental imperatives, the age-old imperialist drives: the robbery of other people’s lands and resources, spatial aggrandizement, and geopolitical rivalries. Europe wrote the script for modern imperialism, and it is horrified when fellow Europeans or its historical outposts turn their covetous eyes internally from Hitler’s Lebensraum that spawned World War II, Putin’s irredentism that generated Europe’s most lethal military confrontation since 1945 over Ukraine, and now Trump’s Donroe expansionism that threatens to destroy the postwar western alliance.
Before Trump recently escalated his rhetoric toward a potential military takeover of Greenland, European nations attempted to mollify him through a policy of accommodation and strategic offers including expanded military access to Greenland, mineral resources partnership with proposed deals to provide the U.S. with Greenland’s rare earth minerals, which are critical for high-tech and military manufacturing, increased Arctic presence in which to counter Trump’s claims that Denmark was failing to defend the territory from Russia and China, European allies proposed a NATO surveillance mission called “Arctic Sentry” to involve U.S. troops in monitoring the region, and they generally adopted a policy of “strategic supplication” to keep the U.S. onside regarding other issues, such as the war in Ukraine.
However, following the spectacular kidnapping of President Maduro of Venezuela in early January, an emboldened Trump, feeling increasingly beleaguered domestically as his popularity craters, the Republican Party frets, and the MAGA movement fractures, ratcheted the push to annex Greenland. My colleague and I couldn’t help noticing the irony that the same European powers that reacted cautiously, indeed cowardly, to America’s brazen military operations in Venezuela, finally seemed to be taking the threat of American imperialism seriously.
In recent days, several European nations have deployed military personnel to Greenland to demonstrate collective defense. European leaders have also issued sharp warnings regarding the potential collapse of the Western alliance, including NATO. To deter a forced takeover, European diplomats are exploring ways for President Trump to “claim victory” without changing the island’s ownership. At the time of writing, the crisis remains unresolved and unpredictable. High-level talks in Washington this week between Danish/Greenlandic officials and U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio ended in “fundamental disagreement.” A joint working group has been established to continue discussions over the coming weeks.
When Chickens Come Home to Roost
More fundamental for us as African historians was what my colleague called the “sweet irony” of watching the aversion of the European powers to America’s colonialist impulses. These are the same European powers that shipped African bodies across the Atlantic for centuries, with wanton imperialist greed and inhuman indifference, including Denmark itself, which built or occupied several major fortifications between 1658 and 1850 in what is today modern Ghana. The ill-gotten wealth from the triangular Atlantic slave trade and centuries of unpaid labor of the enslaved Africans in the Americas, created the modern world system, equipping European powers with the material imperatives, racial ideologies, and industrial and military prowess to embark on a global imperialist crusade. Lest we forget, Greenland was colonized by Denmark from 1721 to 1953, when it was integrated as a district, before gaining Home Rule or internal self-government in 2009.
Now, Europe’s most successful and ruthless settler colonial progeny in the world, the United States, threatens to give them a taste of their own medicine of colonial annexation. They are bewildered. They are shocked. They are apoplectic, but they shouldn’t be because they birthed the monster of modern imperialism. Maybe they will now appreciate how countries in Africa, Asia, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas feel about colonial conquest. Crucially, they might better understand the continued demands by the formerly colonized countries of the global South for a more equitable multilateral system and global order.
Perhaps they’ll atone for the enslavement of Africans and colonization of Africa by addressing the call for reparations. The African Union has placed this at the center of its agenda, declaring 2025 the “Year of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations”, followed by the 2026-2036 African Union Decade of Reparations, to demand systemic economic justice, restitution for looted artifacts, and action against ongoing structural inequalities. This agenda moves beyond mere compensation to demand fairness, dignity, and a future free from colonial legacies, linking past wrongs to present-day challenges like climate change.
Europe’s accession to reparatory justice for its colonial and imperial crimes and solidarity with Africa and the global South might provide the region the necessary diplomatic, economic, and strategic space it needs in a world lurching toward unadulterated American imperialism, turbocharged by the supepower’s fading global hegemony, increasingly directed at its own progenitor as the Western Alliance unravels.
The Case for Principled Anti-Imperialism
Eventually, Africa will become strong enough to enforce its demands for a new world order, partly anchored on restitution for centuries of humiliation, as a resurgent China is doing. Europe will be better off addressing these enduring aspirations by recalibrating its relations with its southern neighbor sooner rather than later. Greenland is a warning that the legacies of imperialism embedded in the memories of subjugation survive and mutate among the descendants of the empire, both the European settlers and the Indigenous peoples.
Greenland is a reflection of the anti-Europeanism that propelled the American Revolution, subsequently reinforced by the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century, which has resurfaced under the America First passions of Trump’s MAGA movement. Memories of European colonialism run deep across Africa and other parts of the global South. In francophone Africa, for example, they animate youth-led movements against French neocolonialism. The maps, mentalities, and memories of the long history of Europe’s empire building linger in the global political economy, imagination, and deep unconscious of the offspring of its perpetrators, beneficiaries, victims, resisters, and combatants.
This offers a compelling reason to break the cycle, for principled resistance against Trump’s imperial adventures wherever they occur. One hopes Europe is now learning that lesson through Greenland. It’s never too late to learn from history, for history will continue to unfold for eternity, until the sun expires in five billion years, or a lot sooner if humanity perishes from self-inflicted destruction through thermonuclear war or catastrophic climate collapse.
