It is almost a hobby for journalists to record geographic size in respect to the informal unit of measurement ‘the Wales’. For example, rainforest destruction is often measured in Wales’. Wales covers an area of 8023 square miles (20779 km squared). England works out as 6.2 times larger than Wales (while France is twenty-five times larger). There’s even a helpful website sizeofwales.co.ukto make the measuring job of journalists easier, that also includes the ability to measure in blue whales and the surface area of the Prince of Wales.
In light of this, I use the website to retrace some of my journey around the coast of Africa in Wales’, to give a sense of the area I traversed across in various countries – rather than the length of a country’s coastline – and how the size of countries varies (due to colonial ambition predominantly) across the different regions of continental Africa:
That so many of these former British colonies are larger than the homeland that ruled them reminds me of an image from a book I saw at the British Library’s Propaganda exhibition last week. Read my review of the exhibition here.
