Cartographic catastrophe as US State Department redraws map of Africa

The claim that US officials struggle to locate the rest of the world on a map is often – and rightly – dismissed as snobbish European condescension. But not, alas, in the case of a map of Africa used by the State Department at a conference in Brazil which spectacularly managed to put every country in the wrong place.

It has emerged that a presentation given at the Aids 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro by US health envoy Jeff Graham, showing a map illustrating the State Department’s new health agreements, showed Nigeria, where the US has several hundred troops, landlocked in the Sahara Desert.

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Mozambique, which is in south-east Africa, was somehow located to the Horn of Africa, while Ivory Coast, which is in West Africa, managed to make its way right over to the other side of the continent.

The map, you may or may not be shocked to hear, bore an artificial intelligence watermark indicating that it had been produced using OpenAI. The technology firm has since launched an inquiry into the matter.

The State Department has now said it took full responsibility for the “confusion” caused by the latest unilateral redrawing of the continent’s borders, saying that it had been produced by a team member who changed the slide deck before the event. “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners,” the department announced.

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Alas, by then it had already been posted on Substack by Emily Bass, an Aids expert, and viewed more than 40,000 times on LinkedIn. Atlantic Council analyst Matt Petit said that those responsible “did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to check their work”.

Meanwhile, US boffins continue their work in developing entirely AI-driven military hardware with the ability to select targets themselves without the need for such fripperies as human involvement. What on earth could possibly go wrong?