Men have marched under many a banner bearing a strange device, from the "Don't Tread on Me" serpent of the American Revolution to the three-headed elephant of Laos. This year 18 new flags were unfurled by the emergent nations of Africa and the Mediterranean. Cyprus boasts the first national flag bearing a map. Mali is the first to emblazon its colors with a human ideogram, employing an ancient African symbol of a man with arms raised to heaven and feet planted firmly on earth, signifying attachment to religion and the soil.
Most of the former French colonies paid their mother country...