Nigerians might be surprised to learn they live in a landlocked country and people in Ivory Coast shocked that they are southern African not West African - but that is what a map used by a US official at a recent conference showed. Not only that, the cartographic malfunction included completely unrecognisable shapes of the six misidentified countries. The flawed map appeared during a State Department slide presentation, at an Aids conference in Brazil on Sunday, about Washington's funding for programmes tackling HIV. The State Department has described it as "an unfortunate error" caused when a team member "hurriedly altered" the slide deck before the event. The mistake came to light after HIV/Aids expert Emily Bass shared a photograph of the slide on her Substack newsletter, external, prompting widespread criticism online.