Science, Africa and Europe

Processing Information and Creating Knowledge

Martin Lengwiler, Nigel Penn, Patrick Harries, Martin Lengwiler, Nigel Penn, Patrick Harries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351232654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Historically, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the relationship between Europe and Africa. Starting with travel writers and missionary intellectuals in the 17th century, European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about realms of the world like Africa provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves as members of enlightened and modern civilisations. Science and technology also offered crucial tools with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a new global world but the knowledge drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with information and ideas that contributed in everyday ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropole. This book poses questions about the changing role of European science and expert knowledge from early colonial times to post-colonial times. How did science shape understanding of Africa in Europe and how was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts?

1 Science between Africa and Europe

Creating knowledge and connecting worlds (introduction)

Martin Lengwiler and Nigel Penn

This book investigates the role of science in the relationship between Europe and Africa and in creating knowledge about Africa. Since at least the 17th century, scientists and experts have played a prominent role in shaping the view Europeans had on Africa. Starting with missionary intellectuals and travel writers, generations of European savants have engaged in the study of nature and society in Africa. Knowledge about Africa and other non-European realms of the world provided a foil against which Europeans came to view themselves an enlightened and modern civilisation. Science and technology also offered crucial instruments with which to administer, represent and legitimate power relations in a world of empires and, after decolonisation, in a world of a globalised capitalism. In the colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries, science and technology was an intellectual resource for reform policies, in order to develop and modernise the colonies and their infrastructure. Also in the context of post-independent African nations, science and technology kept this role for modernisation policies, in different areas such as education, health or infrastructure. Knowledge about Africa finally also reflected back on European institutions. The information and specimen drawn from contacts with people in far-off places provided Europeans with ideas and objects that contributed in multiple ways to the scientific revolution and that provided explorers with the intellectual and social capital needed to develop science into modern disciplines at home in the metropoles. Traces of this African heritage can be found in publications, but also in museums, university collections and the private estates of scientists and travellers.¹

The contributions to this volume investigate the history of European knowledge on Africa from the early colonial to the post-colonial era. The timespan witnessed the establishment of academic institutions and knowledge-based bureaucratic organisations both in Europe and later in Africa. The chapters analyse how science and expert knowledge shaped the understanding of Africa since the early colonial period. How was scientific knowledge shaped, adapted and redefined in African contexts in the 18th and 19th centuries? How did it permeate the administration of colonial empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries? How did the colonial context feedback on the development of science and technology in Europe? And how did the entanglement between science and colonialism change with decolonisation?

We use the term of “science” in a broad sense: it includes fundamental sciences as well as applied sciences, encompassing a vast range of activities like collecting material, cataloguing, arranging and exhibiting specimen with the intention to enhance knowledge about Africa. Thus, a variety of actors contribute to science, including adventurers, explorers, naturalists, scientists and experts, Africans and Europeans, from different fields and backgrounds. On a disciplinary level, the contributions to this volume are situated in the history of knowledge rather than merely in the history of science. They do not address the internal life of academic institutions and scientific disciplines but rather the activities of scientists beyond their laboratories, “in the field”, and the use of scientific knowledge in non-academic contexts. This encompasses the ways in which knowledge takes on popular or “folk” expertise in non-academic contexts and comes to be marginalised, displaced or occluded by more established forms of scientific knowledge.² This understanding of knowledge and science, which underlies the book, is as polycentric as our notion of modernity.³

To understand the connected history between science, Africa and Europe, the volume combines three fields of research and their relevant states of the art: the history of Africa, imperial history (or the global history of colonial empires), and the history of knowledge, or of science and technology, with a focus on specific subfields like the history of medicine or the history of geography. We specifically aim at invigorating the history of Africa and imperial history by combining it with the perspectives of the history of science and the history of knowledge. In recent historiography, this combination between knowledge-based and space-based theoretical approaches proved highly innovative and original.⁴ Thus, we investigate both, the process of creating truth by scientific actors and the mechanisms of connecting worlds through the knowledge produced. In the following paragraphs we will discuss some of major themes and debates in this field. In the latter part of the introduction, we will present the themes and structure of the book and the argument brought forward by the contributions.

Hybrid knowledge, cultural encounters and scientific pluralism: current historiography on science in Africa

Much of recent research in the history of science in Africa is driven by the theoretical concern to transcend the conceptual juxtaposition between Western science and non-Western indigenous knowledge. These categories, and the valuation implied by them, are themselves the product of a specific historic context. The case studies, presented in the following chapters, trace the complex mechanisms through which Europeans developed methods of scientific reasoning and how they came to consider them as a key to superior, privileged forms of knowledge. Scientific knowledge depended on a specific set of methodological rules, academic institutions, a process of specialisation along the lines of disciplines, and a growing professionalisation, patrolled and defined by scientists themselves. Western science also relegated African skills and expertise to a realm of magic and superstition held in place by communal beliefs and traditions.

The epistemological dichotomy between primitive and modern ways of thinking has a long history and was at the heart of modern anthropology since its early days. One of the founders, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl expressed this Eurocentric view in 1910 in How Natives Think, outlining the different ways in which “primitive” and “modern” people organised and structured reasoning. Later, evolutionist anthropologists challenged the fixity of Lévy-Bruhl’s distinction between primitive and modern and stressed the possibility of transforming primitive cultures through a temporal development. The subsequent generation of functionalist anthropologists in turn questioned the racialised way in which evolutionist approaches developed a temporal hierarchy of knowledge. And Claude Lévi-Strauss, in his La pensée sauvage (1962), criticised the functionalists’ view that knowledge was a mechanism in the struggle to survive. Instead, he stressed that people are “bricoleurs” who arrange and analyse data over time in logical ways. In all these approaches, the distinction between primitive and modern knowledge remained fundamental and linked – implicitly or explicitly – to the opposition of “European” and “non-European” knowledge.⁵

Since the 1960, historians and anthropologists increasingly questioned and criticised the superiority of Western science. As a philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn developed in the early 1960s the influential notion of knowledge paradigms and of scientific revolutions, thus preparing the ground for a social and historical constructivist understanding of scientific objectivity and of Western science.⁶ Half a decade later, historian George Basalla outlined the process whereby Europeans had carried “Western science” into the corners of their expanding world, notably to Africa, giving way to a new field of research criticising the role of “colonial science” for the rise and expansion of Western imperialism since the late 19th century.⁷

However, over the past years, scholars in African history, African studies and science studies have begun to revise traditional narratives about the role of science in Colonial Africa and imperial development. A starting-point for these recent debates has been the critical assessment of concepts like “colonial science”, “imperial science”, or “colonial medicine”. These concepts were brought forward in the 1990s, by Roy MacLeod and others who followed the work of George Basalla. Another influential figure was Edward Said, who offered with Orientalism a theoretical approach for highlighting the nexus between knowledge and power, in particular in colonial contexts.⁸ All these approaches owed much to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discourses as fields of asymmetrical power relations.

MacLeod and others assumed that in colonial contexts since the 18th century, modern science developed into specific forms serving the interests of colonial powers and their administrations – although which forms often remained unclear.⁹ The notion of “colonial science” stressed the political role of science and was meant as a critique of a Mertonian understanding of science as a universalist, disinterested form of knowledge driven by the organised scepticism of the involved scientists. It was also critical of theories of modernisation that was also based on traditional understandings of science. Lay voices from rural Africa were seen as more authentic than the scientific perspectives of the Western metropoles.¹⁰

In a series of recent publications, concepts like “colonial science”, together with the underlying conceptual dichotomies of expert vs. lay knowledge or metropoles vs. peripheries, were criticised as too linear and simplified. To begin with, there is no coherent, unified form of colonialism. Studies in the new imperial history rather pointed out a variety of colonialisms: settler colonialism and indirect forms of colonial rule; or British, French and American imperial traditions – each of them marked by national-specific sets of norms and values.¹¹ Moreover: Relying on science and technology for achieving political aims was no prerogative of empires. Post-independent governments too built their economic planning and modernisation policies on scientific knowledge and technical expertise.¹²

Another problem lies with the concept of science. Beinart et al. argue that science is often not as homogenous as assumed by the notion of “colonial science”. The links between science and colonial authorities or capitalist corporations were neither clear nor direct. Reducing science to an instrumental role would underestimate the specific logic of scientific activities and inventions and the partially detached relation between scientists and colonial authorities.¹³

Patrick Harries’s study on the scientific activities of missionaries is a case in point. The work of missionaries like the Swiss missionary Henri Alexandre Junod (1863–1934) oscillated between scientific endeavours, spiritual motivations and colonial settings. Junod understood himself as a missionary and a naturalist, a representative of a learned, civilised society, firmly anchored in the values of the enlightenment. He contributed to evangelisation, but also established schools and medical services. He distributed hymnbooks and the bible, but he also studied African languages and cultures as a linguist and anthropologist, not least to being able to preach the gospel in the language of the natives.¹⁴

Other authors too pointed at the variety and heterogeneity of scientific endeavours, shaped by local contexts and natural environments of the colonies, within which scientists were situated. In a survey of studies on the British empire, Mark Harison particularly stressed the various local forms of indigenous knowledge that shaped scientific activities and were integrated into academic forms of knowledge.¹⁵ Studies on the use of science in French colonialism also point at the lacking coherence of the disciplines involved. Parts of geography were closely collaborating with the colonial administration, whereas historians seemed to be irrelevant, at least from the perspective of the government authorities. And colonial law existed as a term, but materialised eclectically in very disparate forms.¹⁶ A lot of these experts acted, in the words of Roy McLeod, as scientists in the colonie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface: tribute to Patrick Harries (1950–2016)
• 1 Science between Africa and Europe: creating knowledge and connecting worlds (introduction)
• Part I Mapping and exploring
• Part II Knowledge practices between colonial and local actors
• Part III International discourses, transnational circulations of knowledge
• Index