Nattras: Monumentalising science in the age of Decolonisation

21 Jun, 2020 - 00:06 0 Views
Nattras: Monumentalising science in the age of Decolonisation Marcus Gurvey

The Sunday News

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena

All thinking is an experiment. This entails that thoughts of all kinds are falsifiable and must be open to correction and or addition.

It is for that good reason that Sandew Raju has argued that scientific thinking including mathematical reason should have its baptismal principle as falsifiability and openness to correction. Colonial, and by another name, westernised science seems to arrogantly reject that truth. Empire is by nature possessed of the conquest mentality that like a true fundamentalism does not open itself to correction even if by compelling evidence and reason.

Empire mindset is impervious to reason and deaf to evidence. Recently, Nicoli Nattras who is a professor at the University of Cape Town and a defender of science published a racist and harmful paper in the South African Journal of Science. The paper is importantly titled: Why Black South African Students are less likely to Consider Studying Biological Sciences”.

The paper observes and concludes that the black students are too materialistic; they do not keep pets and are anticolonial to see the importance of biological sciences. She backs her research with heavy credentials of numerous book awards, teaching awards and a monumental “more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals or as chapters in edited collections.” Academics know what this means. She has intellectual weight to throw around and to suffocate opposition to her thinking.

The Black Academic Caucus at UCT responded tersely in a circular that begins appropriately with the phrase: “We the Black Academic Caucus at UTC are outraged!” The UCT Executive promptly issued a statement condemning the paper, the journal and disassociating the University from the crime. Her reply was among other objections that, “I reject the accusations levelled against me by the UCT Executive.”

She cites academic freedom and the power of scientific research in her defence. Nattras achieved fame in her opposition to former South African President Thabo Mbeki’s arguments on HIV/ Aids science and politics. Her argument then was that Mbeki was a political leader and had no business questioning the wisdom of medical scientists on a pandemic. Mbeki was supposed to dutifully obey science. That Mbeki has since been proven right by science has not and still does not bother Prof Nattras. She is soldiering on in defence of science against disrespectful and uninterested blacks. The Black Academic Caucus are reduced by Prof Nattras to ideological and political interlocutors that science should bend before.

What time is it?
The present moment in the world is not only the time when the world looks up to science for salvation from the coronavirus pandemic. It is also the time that Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni has named as the time of the “Demonumentalisation of Empire.” Slavish and colonial statues the world over are coming down tumbling. Statues of Empire-builders and slave traders are everywhere brought down by protesters against racism led by the Black Lives Matter Movement.

And what are monuments and statues but part of the signatures and artefacts of Empire in the planet. Westernised science like westernised art is part and parcel of the monumental library and museum of Empire everywhere under the sun. Empire-Builders did not only claim to have discovered places and their people but they marked places with signatures and artefacts. They erected statues and monuments that celebrated and now commemorate conquest, occupation and settlement.

Black and white people of the world are coming on hot against Empire and its living and dead symbols. Graves and other monuments of Empire are presently on trial and the world is no longer at ease. Statues and monuments of Empire are at last exposed for what they truly are; unholy idols of conquest, slavery and colonisation.

That the pulling down of statues and monuments of Empire is now no longer just taking place in Africa, as in during the Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall uprisings in South Africa, but in the West is telling. Aime Cesaire said it in 1955 that the western civilisation will not forever stand before the test of reason or get away with murder and barbarism. The fraud and force of Empire that has been signing itself with statues and monuments the world over are being exposed and attacked.

The calls for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonisation are growing from protest to policy. Justice for black people is a call that is growing from common sense to a cause. In other words decoloniality at a world scale is achieving currency and purchase. Black people and black lives are in vogue in a world that has naturalised and normalised racism against black people, the people of colour as they are named. The life of injustice and oppression is proven to be temporary. Long dead perpetrators of slavery and colonialism are on trial. The beneficiaries of their conquest and exploitation are answering very uncomfortable questions from unstoppable fighters.

Only the beginning, is it?
Frantz Fanon begins his classic of 1952, Black Skin White Masks, with the words: “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon . . . or too late.” Malcolm X also spoke of black people “catching hell” one day. Marcus Gurvey dramatised the return of black people to their native land abode a Black Star Liner. Martin Luther King had a dream that “one day” justice for human beings will flow down like the rivers.

So many black people, all sorts of philosophers and prophets in the past, have spoken of a time when the centre will not hold and domination of one by the other will suffer cracks and eventual collapse. Countless numbers of black people have been killed in the United States of America in the plantations and the streets. Not all the deaths received the attention that George Floyd’s death has received.

The Rastafarians have for many decades sang of Babylon and its coming end. With Frantz Fanon I believe that it is either too soon or too late but it is real.

All forms of conquest, tyranny and oppression will one day, in good time come face to face with an explosion and a catching of hell.
Human freedom and happiness are normal, injustice and oppression are not. Domination and exploitation by their nature have their days numbered.

Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina in Pretoria: [email protected].

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