Square One

Muza Gondwe from Malawi is presently on a six-month fellowship at the Centre of African Studies on the Public Understanding of Science in Africa in Cambridge. She writes on BMJ Blogs about her project which seeks to develop ways of engaging science through communication in Malawi and to identify and celebrate distinguished black African pioneers of science. She was motivated to do this after reading these:

“It will be seen that when we classify mankind by colour, the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race.” – Dr. Arnold Toynbee, The Study of History, Vol. I, page 233. (Vol I: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations (Oxford University Press 1934).

“[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” James Watson, in 2007 in an interview with the Sunday Times.

And what does she find?

In my investigation I have learnt some startling facts: no black African has won any of the Nobel prizes in science; the UK has six times as many researchers as Sub-Saharan Africa; and, according to the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD), 0.1% of the total number of mathematicians in the world are of black African heritage.

The full post is here.

Muza Gondwe’s personal blog, “Communicating science, the African way” is here.