Zooming in on the northern (bottom) part of the map, we see an ironic reversal of the present situation: in our timeline, Spain is still holding on to Ceuta, Melilla and other plazas de soberania in Northern Africa. But what if Europe had suffered an even more catastrophic extermination – one from which it could not recover? It would take the continent more than a century to reach pre-Plague population levels. In our own timeline, over the course of the half dozen years from 1346 to 1353, the Black Death wiped out between 30 and 60% of Europe’s population. The point of divergence: the deadliness of the Plague.
Its difference from our own starts in the mid-14th century. To arrive at this map, Cyon constructed an alternative timeline. Essentially, it formulates a cartographic answer to the question: What would Africa have looked like if Europe hadn’t become a colonizing power? It is therefore an ideal title for this thought experiment by Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon. That name is sometimes used by those who reject even the name ‘Africa’ as a European imposition. The continent depicted here isn’t even called Africa but Alkebu-Lan, supposedly Arabic for ‘Land of the Blacks’. This map is the result of an entirely different course of history.
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