WHAT DOES SCIENCE MEAN FROM AFRICA? A VIEW FROM DZIMBAHWE

Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga is associate professor of science, technology, and society at MIT and visiting associate professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Professor Mavhunga’s work engages the meanings of science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship from Africa in the long historical context, and their implications on how Africa thinks about its future. The failure to engage seriously with African modes of thought and practice is dangerous, Mavhunga says, because it uses ignorance of Africa’s treasures and a lack of methodology to study them as an excuse for an easy embrace of cultural, knowledge imperialism. He is the author of Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe (MIT Press, 2014), and has just finished his second book, tentatively entitled What Does Science Mean from Africa? A View from Dzimbahwe, under review with MIT Press. Mavhunga has also published numerous articles, including “Vermin Beings: On Pestiferous Animals and Human Game.” Professor Mavhunga is actively involved in collaborative projects with Africa-based colleagues in curriculum, doctoral supervision and examination, research, policy innovation, and the inclusion of the grassroots (informalized sector) as partners in science, technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship, and not simply as recipients of the formalized sector’s wisdoms. His short to medium-term ambition is to establish interdisciplinary and applied STS programs to train the next generation of Africa’s policymakers, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs in inclusive, ethical, and context-specific tools of trade.

Fascinating ideas, I am looking fwd to reading the book.
My non exhaustive take-away points:

• discussions about animals/bioweapons

• 1) come to learn from locals, 2) Creating parks (conservation) i.e. remove from local practices 3) come back to teach
• Poaching ~ criminalizing K.
• Solution: communality of ressources, shared ownership

• Monopolize knowledge, from the people you learned it in the first place
• Colonization of science: able to reach globally and learn, get knowledge from places, structure it in ‘western science’

• Wild animals?! If we already know his behavior, even if found in a bush, not wild anymore?