Why Science has not thrived in Africa

Have you ever asked yourself why Science has not thrived in Africa as it has done in other continents? Well, one probable answer would be that Africa is just a few hundred years old according to the recorded history. But doesn’t the same history claim Africa is the cradle of mankind? Well, maybe brain drain is as old as man. World civilizations in Europe, Asia, America and the Arab world have some of the oldest recorded histories. The History of Science records little or nothing at all to have come out of Africa. Nonetheless, this does not mean that nothing was invented in Africa.

Invention is the inevitable persistent act of developing capacity to address existing challenges or the intelligence and ingenuity in humans to address future problems. Writing as an art was not as prevalent in Africa as it was in ancient civilizations. The African history is more oral than it is written. As generations were phased off, so were the history and the inventions for those that were not passed down adequately.

It is also fair to appreciate that the development of the human mind has not been and can never be a straight line graph. We all follow different paths of development and thus the endless variety of the human race. A baby is born in a state of tabula rasa, much as the baby is coded with somewhat unique properties derived from its genes, the baby begins a path of development purely dictated by the environment. In the end, we all develop distinctively as products of our distinct environs and through our own determinations.

The practice of religion is the acceptance of and belief in certain teachings without posing questions. Just like our founding president, The Late Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, noted “When the Missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the Missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible”, is the same way Science was ‘preached’ in Africa. Science, simply put, ‘the study of nature’, was taught to Africans as a purely foreign concept, when in reality, nature had co-existed with the same Africans in their entire history.

Be it as it may, the British were much advanced. Their weaponry and inventions awed the African mind. Science was then associated with the white man and Africa was only to be a consumer of this foreign technology. Our ancestors largely accepted this notion and so have generations after generations. This however, can never underestimate the great achievements of black minds both in local and global arenas in present day and in the recent history.

Does Science matter to us? The African mind is not really intrigued by the potential that Science poses. The scientific curiosity of the African child is killed by the parent and the teacher who are only interested on the school syllabus. Over time, Africa has gotten used to consuming end products. It is not surprising to note that Africa produces raw materials that are processed in other continents and later sold back to the same source. It is time that we Africans harnessed and utilized our resources optimally within our continent, we only need to develop the will and actualize it by building the necessary industries.

Perhaps school exams have been our major undoing. The many captivating concepts I was taught in Physics, Chemistry and Biology in high school had little to do with their application outside the classroom or laboratory. Do you remember counting the oscillations of a pendulum or titrating and the mole concept calculations thereafter? Well, all those were majorly meant for good grades in KCSE. I may not be done with Physics yet, but the classroom experience did not awe my imagination into the physical world as it should have.

How much time have we allocated to the exploration of nature? Africa has more demanding problems than the thought of Science. Today we are dealing with corruption in government; we spend huge resources, time, human capital, equipment and revenues fighting corruption. What if all these were directed to the study of nature? Kudos to us, the illiteracy levels continue to shrink every day and eventually we hope poverty levels and diseases shall follow suit. But in the meantime, we have pressed too hard on our resources towards these vices till there’s none left for scientific research.

Most ancient inventions were as a result of severe situations in the ancient civilizations and the same is true in the present day. There seems to exist in Africa, a certain sense of comfort, a disease of its own kind. Our present day environment presents no fear, our history has never been hit with difficult times and we are less concerned of future threats. When the National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States is busy exploring the possibility of life on planet Mars, we sit and pose the same questions the church posed during Galileo’s time.

We must change this narrative. Our planet is least explored and with the greatest potential. It is time we took our place in the globe and prove that we are not lesser of scientists.