Linking modern science to African culture

Ali Mazrui
Director, Institute of Global Cultural Studies
State University of New York at Binghampton

'If Africa wants to become more scientifically and technologically responsive, attention has to be paid to the way that culture conditions people's response to both activities'

In the Africa of the twentieth century, the technological and environmental legacies of the West have proved more influential than those of the continent's other civilisations - the indigenous, the Islamic and the Western. But in the twenty-first century, the other components of Africa's triple heritage may need to restore a healthier equilibrium.

An African renaissance requires three major revolutions: a revolution in skills, a revolution in values and a revolution in relations between men and women. Skills are important because international stratification and influence are based not on who owns what, but on who knows what. We know this from the experience of Apartheid in South Africa, where relatively few whites reduced a continent of 500 million people to political impotence for nearly five decades.

The university is one institution in which skills are imparted. But the Western-style university is basically a foreign institution in Africa. It has not been easy to Africanize universities that started as overseas colonial extensions of universities in Europe. Many are now decaying, partly because they are not adequately relevant to the needs of their societies. For example, science in Africa is rarely taught in indigenous languages.

President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania translated Shakspeare's Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into Kiswahili. But there has there been no African president to translate Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, or The Descent of Man. Similarly, as a child, Apollo Obote of Uganda adopted the name Milton Obote out of admiration for John Milton, author of Paradise Lost. But we don't have an African president who became Newton Obote out of admiration for the great physicist.

Colonialism was good at transmitting the Western literary heritage to Africa. It was less successful at transmitting the Western scientific heritage. Skills need science and technology. But culture ultimately conditions how people respond to science and technology. If Africa wants to become a more scientifically and technologically responsive region of the world, attention has to be paid to the functions of culture.

Culture has many functions in society. It is a lens of perception, a standard of judgement, a basis of stratification, and a means of communication. Culture also conditions patterns of production and consumption, and provides a basis for identity. For example, African cultural concepts of immortality have influenced attitudes to family size and made population growth among the fastest in the world. One reason is that many Africans believe that no-one is really dead as long as their blood flows in the veins of the living. Having many children, therefore, improves a parent's chances of immortality.

Culture also serves as a standard of judgement. The difference between right and wrong, virtue and evil, even ethical and corrupt, are all conditioned by culture. Why, for example, is taking a chicken to a chief acceptable in traditional society as a form of salutation, but rejected as bribery in modern society?

Culture also conditions how we communicate. Can any country achieve first-rank technological and economic development if it relies overwhelmingly on foreign languages for its discourse on development and transformation? Will Africa ever take off when it is held hostage so tightly to the languages of its former imperial powers?

Japan rose to dazzling industrial heights using its own language for science and technology. Israel resurrected a dead language - Hebrew - for its own technological transformation. South Korea has made the Korean language the medium of its own technological take-off.

When two Japanese physicists meet to discuss a problem in physics, it is now possible for them to do so in the Japanese language. But when two African economists - let alone physicists - meet to discuss economics, they do so in a European language, even if they come from the same African linguistic group.

African languages, like Korean, Japanese and Hebrew, need to be made purposefully more scientific. Women, traditionally, are the trustees of indigenous languages. Mothers transmit mother tongues from generation to generation. A linguistic revolution in Africa will need to be reinforced by a gender revolution.

In most sub-Saharan traditional cultures, women were supposed to have a triple custodial role: as custodians of fire, water and Earth. In many African countries - even today - women are the major suppliers of firewood, domestic water, and also constitute the majority of farmers.

But in education and science in colonial and post-colonial Africa, women have been all but marginalized. Only 23 per cent of secondary school-age girls make it to secondary school. Only three per cent enter higher education. A smaller fraction still study science and technology.

Girls are routinely discouraged from engineering and advanced science. This bias must end. And science should initially focus on the traditional custodial roles of African women. For example, they should study the science and management of energy, agriculture, and water.

Unesco has done much to encourage women in science. It currently funds a chair in women and science and technology at the University of Ghana, and another at the University of Swaziland, as well as a series of special awards for women in science.

Modernization means change which is consistent with the present stage of human knowledge, which seeks to comprehend the legacy of the past, which is sensitive to the needs of human generations, and which is responsive to its global context.

Alexander Pope said: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pyrean spring." Africa needs more modernity, but less of what I shall substitute as "the Western spring". A non-Western route to modernity is possible for Africa - provided African culture is fully mobilized as an ally in the enterprise.

This article is based on an address to the recent meeting organized by the African Academy of Science in Hammamed, Tunisia. See report.