Mission, Science, and Race in South Africa
Mission, Science, and Race in South Africa

Author: Keith Snedegar

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2015-09-17

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0739196251

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Lost in the Stars is a biographical study of Alexander William Roberts, a Free Church of Scotland missionary educator who in 1883 was posted to the Lovedale Institution at Alice, South Africa. Inspired by the night sky of the southern hemisphere, Roberts became a leading observer of variable stars and an early contributor to the theory of close interacting binary stars. He actively promoted the development of colonial scientific culture and was elected president of the South African Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913. His teaching career at Lovedale fostered a commitment to the interests of his African students and their communities. In 1920 Roberts was appointed to the South African senate to represent “native” Africans; he also served as senior member of the Native Affairs Commission. Despite his liberal instincts he acquiesced to the movement toward racial segregation as advanced in the Natives (Urban Areas) and Native Administration Acts. Roberts nonetheless militated against the erosion of the Cape non-racial franchise rights; he resigned from the Native Affairs Commission just as the all-white parliament was poised to remove Africans from the common voters’ roll. His engagement with the politics of race interfered with Roberts’s astronomical research. Although he published nearly one hundred papers in scientific journals most of his observational data remained unknown until the Boyden Observatory’s Roberts archive was digitized in 2006. His influence as a mission educator also has been little known, although among his pupils were journalist and academic D.D.T. Jabavu, the physician James Moroka, and Swazi king Sobhuza I.

The Scientific Imagination in South Africa
The Scientific Imagination in South Africa

Author: William Beinart

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1108944817

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South Africa provides a unique vantage point from which to examine the scientific imagination over the last three centuries, when its position on the African continent made it a staging post for Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonialism. In the eighteenth century, South African plants and animals caught the imagination of visiting Europeans. In the nineteenth century, science became central to imperial conquest, devastating wars, agricultural intensification and the exploitation of rich mineral resources. Scientific work both facilitated, and offered alternatives to, the imposition of segregation and apartheid in the twentieth century. William Beinart and Saul Dubow offer an innovative exploration of science and technology in this complex, divided society. Bridging a range of disciplines from astronomy to zoology, they demonstrate how scientific knowledge shaped South Africa's peculiar path to modernity. In so doing, they examine the work of remarkable individual scientists and institutions, as well as the contributions of leading politicians from Jan Smuts to Thabo Mbeki.

The Scientific Imagination in South Africa
The Scientific Imagination in South Africa

Author: William Beinart

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-05-20

Total Pages: 419

ISBN-13: 1108837085

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An innovative three hundred year exploration of the social and political contexts of science and the scientific imagination in South Africa.

Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa
Class, Race, and Inequality in South Africa

Author: Jeremy Seekings

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 458

ISBN-13: 0300128754

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The distribution of incomes in South Africa in 2004, ten years after the transition to democracy, was probably more unequal than it had been under apartheid. In this book, Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass explain why this is so, offering a detailed and comprehensive analysis of inequality in South Africa from the midtwentieth century to the early twenty-first century. They show that the basis of inequality shifted in the last decades of the twentieth century from race to class. Formal deracialization of public policy did not reduce the actual disadvantages experienced by the poor nor the advantages of the rich. The fundamental continuity in patterns of advantage and disadvantage resulted from underlying continuities in public policy, or what Seekings and Nattrass call the “distributional regime.” The post-apartheid distributional regime continues to divide South Africans into insiders and outsiders. The insiders, now increasingly multiracial, enjoy good access to well-paid, skilled jobs; the outsiders lack skills and employment.

South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations
South Africa, Race and the Making of International Relations

Author: Vineet Thakur

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-17

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1786614650

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This book offers readers an alternative history of the origins of the discipline of International Relations. Conventional, western histories of the discipline point to 1919 as the year of the ‘birth of the discipline’ with two seminal initiatives – setting up of the first Chair of IR at Aberystwyth and the founding of the Institute of International Relations on the side-lines of the Paris Peace Conference. From these events, International Relations is argued to have been established as a path to create peace in the post-War era and facilitated through a scientific study of international affairs. International Relations was therefore, both a field of study and knowledge production and a plan of action. This pathbreaking book challenges these claims by presenting an alternative narrative of International Relations. In this book, we make three interconnected arguments. First, we argue that the natal moment in the founding of IR is not World War I – as is generally believed – but the Anglo Boer War. Second, we argue that the ideas, methods and institutions that led to the making of IR were first thrashed out in South Africa – in Johannesburg, in fact. Finally, this South African genealogy of IR, we show in the book, allows us to properly investigate the emergence of academic IR at the interstices of race, Empire and science.

Utterly Immoral
Utterly Immoral

Author: Simon Keable-Elliott

Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd

Published:

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 1803134852

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When Robert Keable’s First World War novel Simon Called Peter was published, critics called it ‘offensive’, ‘a libel’ and reeking of ‘drink and lust’. Scott Fitzgerald suggested it was ‘utterly immoral’ and referenced it in The Great Gatsby. The novel became a huge international best-seller, a Broadway play and the sequel made into a Hollywood movie. And it made its author an international celebrity. What critics did not know was that the novel, about a military chaplain and a young woman having an affair during the war, was autobiographical. Utterly Immoral tells the remarkable true story of Robert Keable. He was an up-and-coming star of his Church. Raised in Croydon by evangelical parents he became increasingly high church while studying at Cambridge and, once ordained, he travelled to Zanzibar as a missionary. Following the outbreak of the First World War, he moved to Basutoland to work as a parish priest. He travelled to France as chaplain to the black labourers of the SANLC. It was during the war that he began to lose his faith, dispirited by the appallingly treatment of his men, the horrors of the war and the implications of his secret affair with the nineteen-year-old lorry driver, Jolie Buck. Having written Simon Called Peter he left the church, and his wife, and fled to Tahiti to live in Paul Gauguin’s house. He lived the celebrity life in Tahiti, marrying a Tahitian princess, dubbed the ‘Helen of Troy of Tahiti’. The author, Robert Keable‘s grandson, has used letters, books, articles, interviews and a trip to Tahiti to produce a fascinating account of Robert Keable’s life and the story of the success of Simon Called Peter.

Superior
Superior

Author: Angela Saini

Publisher: Beacon Press

Published: 2019-05-21

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0807076910

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2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019” (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Science Education
Socio-Cultural Perspectives on Science Education

Author: W.W. Cobern

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9401152241

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Global science education is a reality at the end of the 20th century - albeit an uneven reality - because of tremendous technological and economic pressures. Unfortunately, this reality is rarely examined in the light of what interests the everyday lives of ordinary people rather than the lives of political and economic elites. The purpose of this book is to offer insightful and thought-provoking commentary on both realities. The tacit question throughout the book is `Whose interests are being served by current science education practices and policies?' The various chapters offer critical analysis from the perspectives of culture, economics, epistemology, equity, gender, language, and religion in an effort to promote a reflective science education that takes place within, rather than taking over, the important cultural lives of people. The target audience for the book includes graduate students in education, science education and education policy professors, policy and government officials involved with education.