From the perspective of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the south pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width – and thus its majesty – as it narrows ‘northward’ into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness to the top, insufficiently connected to the other continental bodies.

Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms – three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic traits. ‘We are all Africans under the skin,’ says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature write large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes:

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.