Scrap science, start over: the frightening call of a fallist, by Roxanne Henderson.
A so-called “fallist” has asked students at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT’s) science faculty to consider scrapping science as a whole if it is ever to be decolonised.
“Fallists” promote a “pan Africanist identity, post-apartheid liberation ideology”, giving rise to fears of African fascist nationalism.
At a panel discussion this week‚ published on YouTube‚ the woman responded to a question about the decolonisation of science.
“Science as a whole is a product of western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off. Especially in Africa‚” she says.
She says, in part:
“[W]estern modernity is the problem that decolonisation directly deals with. It’s to say that we are going to decolonise by having knowledge that is produced by us‚ that speaks to us and that is able to accommodate knowledge from our perspective.
“Decolonising the science would mean doing away with it entirely and starting all over again to deal with how we respond to the environment and how we understand it.”
Imagine being at a university where people are saying that.
A reader adds:
It wouldn’t be a university in the normal sense of the word.
Substitute the idea that science is western with the idea the rationalism is western. What she is really saying is that the West, post-Enlightenment, has been advancing because of the acceptance of rational thought as a basis for making decisions and organizing society.
Outside the West some people aren’t as rational, which explains much about their societies — and why the PC crew are wrong with their silly cultural equivalence of “our culture’s no better than theirs”.
This will just send underdeveloped parts of the world back to ignorance, superstition, and tribal customs. That’s their business and OK with me, so long as the West doesn’t allow itself to be destroyed from within by PC lefties importing these people by the million into the West to vote said PC lefties into running Western governments.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
