The Vocation of Decolonising Science

SCIENTISTS, especially the category that is invested in scienticism, often laugh off the suggestion that science education like other disciplines needs to be decolonised.

Scienticism is that political habit of scientists to regard science as an exceptional discipline that is beyond question and probity.

The scienticists are ideologists of science that often make the racist argument that Africans, Asians and Latin Americans should cry about colonialism but also remember to be grateful that besides all the pain of being conquered and dominated, colonialism brought them the great gift of science and technology.

Much infamously, South Africa’s Hellen Zille made a scienticist argument when she alleged that South Africans should not perpetually mourn about colonisation because the railway lines, running water and electricity that they were enjoying were wonderful gifts that colonialism bequeathed them. Zille’s unfortunate and also pathetic argument suffered the misery of falsely believing that white colonisers had the monopoly of science that other people of the Global South were bereft of. I drive the argument in this short article that all human beings in all the parts of the world are capable of scientific thinking and action.

Human beings are, otherwise, scientific animals as much as they are political and spiritual beings in their different ways. There is no race or tribe of people that has monopoly of science.

A Decolonial Encounter with a Science

Community

It is a commonsensical truism that humanity and the planet are helplessly dependent on science for salvation and daily life. Without medical science and its discoveries, by now, epidemics and all sorts of maladies would have already wiped off the human race from the floor of the earth. Technological inventions have provided hardware and software that have made life easier and much more luxurious on earth. Human beings fly the sky and float the oceans using technological gadgets and equipment that are owed to science.

What is celebrated as the Fourth Industrial Revolution is a planetary boom in communications and other technologies that have magically transformed life in the present world. Science is an important necessity that is also a monumental luxury. Human beings have cleverly and greatly mobilised Artificial Intelligence for their benefit, and sometimes their destruction.

I observe in this account that, like religion, science was instrumentalised and abused in the evils of conquest, slavery, colonisation and imperialism at a world scale. To decolonise science, therefore, is to recover science from the way it has been systematically and structurally abused by Empire for purposes evil in shape of Coloniality.

To restore science to its status as a human and universal good is to liberate the scientific discipline and profession from coloniality. How to decolonise science without losing its gifts and blessings to humanity is a question that occupied my mind when the University of Free State in Bloemfontein invited me to take some residence there and participate in working with academics of the School of Science in decolonising the science education curriculum, which is a thankless task, given the scienticist tendencies of most science academics and professionals.

What we have called the Decolonial

Vocation is a courageous commitment by decolonial philosophers and activists to confront coloniality at whatever inconvenience and cost. The University of Free State, a former whites only institution of higher education in South Africa, boasts an impressive science tradition in the fields of engineering, medical sciences, agriculture and other provinces of science. My brief has been to work with academics of the School of Health Sciences in particular.

The Colonist versus the Nativist Prominent attempts to decolonise science education in South Africa have fallen into the nativist temptation. During the Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall protests a video of a black young student crying that “Science Must Fall” widely circulated.

The University of Cape Town student argued that pre-colonial black Africans were accomplished scientists that could command lightning to strike down a chosen adversary. Western and modern science, she declared must be banned in the university and African science such as witchcraft and sorcery be introduced.

Her arguments were not only nativist but also smelt of primitivism and were grievously wrong about science and decolonisation.

The responses to the young lady’s call that “Science Must Fall” were mainly from racists and colonists. One Daniel Eloff, writing in the Rational Standard Magazine, ridiculed the young lady and claimed that the idea of decolonising science is a nonsensical endeavour.

Eloff fell into the colonial and racist scienticist trap of thinking that white people generously and greatly brought the gift of science to dark Africa, and black people should forever be grateful for that colonial gift. Both Eloff and our brave but mistaken student represent unfortunate understandings of science and of Decoloniality.

The nativism of the student holds the untrue belief that black Africans did not contribute to modern science and were only good at the dark arts of sorcery.

Eloff perpetuates the racist and colonial myth that white colonisers brought western science to Africa that had no science except superstitions and magic. A great part of decolonising science and science education is to free science and the science curriculum from both nativist and colonialist understandings that naively and criminally do not understand both science and Decoloniality.