A group of University of Cape Town students recently organised a panel discussion on the decolonisation of science, which is another way of saying that science should be Africanised.

The YouTube version of the debate went viral, arousing consternation in some quarters and mocking and ridicule in others. What the students were trying to do was to conscientise people about this issue and arouse a willingness to start a long-overdue debate. What could have been a timely intervention somewhat lost its impact when one of the students made uninformed statements about natural phenomena, such as the supposed power of witches over lighting, and then sought to trash the whole legacy and history of Western science, as if it is anathema to the decolonisation venture. In framing Western science as being white, the student pivoted the whole decolonisation venture on the premise that science must be cleansed of any vestiges of its white heritage.

Trying to separate what belongs to the white world from what does not becomes rather impossible, given how we are all products of modernity, which is itself a beneficiary of the accumulation of science over the millennia. We are all beneficiaries of the scientific mind that has dominated Western civilisation and industrialism in the last 500 years or so. The scientific mind, though, is not a preserve of a particular race or culture – it is an inherent feature of human curiosity.

We can go back to the first agricultural societies in Mesopotamia, the mathematical and engineering genius of the Egyptians, the Nubians, the Mayans and many other civilisations dating back 5 000 years or more. Science is a testimony of both our differences and commonality. We are different because our specific cultural, geographic and political settings are responsible for the diversity of scientific and technological endeavours over the millennia, while our commonality derives from the fact that we are driven to absorb the useful discoveries and observations of others to create the same benefits for ourselves.

The universal discoveries of the workings of nature transcend racial essentialism and belonging. Even if scientific discoveries are made in the West, it is possible to take the science from the West and replicate it in China, Africa or any other part of the world. The same basic laws of physics that enabled us to put humans on the moon or will enable us to put humans on Mars in the future are gifts of science that cannot be the property of a specific race or people.

We are entangled in the world of science and technology, even though one sphere of the world has been dominant in generating and using science and technology. The boundaries of science overlap, with some of the best minds of Africa and Asia residing in the Western world, contributing to its scientific endeavour and bringing their knowledge and experience back to Africa and Asia. In this way, they make the application of science Asiacentric or Africanised. You just have to look at fields such as agriculture, telecommunications and many others to see how Western knowledge is appropriated to meet the needs of non- Western people. This is possible because science’s magnetism lies in the fact that it is universal and ubiquitous and is able to meet the needs of different societies seeking to use science for their own development and wellbeing.

The development of science, as noted in the work of Yoval Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, did not start with the idea that humans knew everything and that all the answers about heaven and earth were ‘knowable’ by a religious figure or a king. Rather, it was the acknowledgment of ignorance that drove the success of modern science and its many discoveries. The effect of this is that evidence and proof became the basis for truth and belief, not myth or mysticism. As Harari notes: “The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge.”

When Isaac Newton wrote his famous book, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, he highlighted what had long been missing – the power of mathematical theory and the ability to construct the basis that all observations of similar cause and effect can be predicted through mathematical theory. It is this power that gives science its universal applicability, irrespective of one’s cultural affiliation. Although I live in Africa, I can use one of Newton’s law, F=MA, to make the same observations of what the law predicts as scientists in Germany would. The power of Newton’s method is that it shows how nature is governed by mathematics, and mathematics helps you to predict outcomes.

The Periodic Table, which was first formally developed by Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869, sets the basic elements of nature in the order of their increasing atomic weights as the basis of modern chemistry. But influence, over hundreds of years, also came from the occult tradition of alchemy – practised in Egypt, Asia and Europe – which involved attempts by dabblers, philosophers and many others to convert silver or other metals into gold. In fact, the word ‘alchemy’ is of Arabic origin and many twelfth-century and earlier Muslim scientific works on alchemy were translated by Europeans during the Renaissance. These works described basic methods of experiment, theories, terms and the results of various experiments. The main influence was the works of Jabir ibn Hayyan, who lived in the eighth century and pioneered a more systematic approach to science by introducing the idea of using a laboratory, careful experimentation and record keeping. Ibn Hayyan is regarded as the father of chemistry because he infused it with scientific methodology.