The internet has been buzzing for the past week or so about a video taken during a discussion at the University of Cape Town during which a "Fallist" student calls for the scrapping of "western science", whatever that might be, as part of a "decolonisation" agenda. "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," the student says. Responses to the video range from a kind of skewed sympathy for the underlying motivation to outright bewilderment that this is the parlous state of the debate at, of all places, a university. As always in SA, contradictions abound. As many have pointed out, the student, still unnamed, is criticising colonialism speaking a "western" language at an institution founded by a "western" mining mogul, wearing "western" clothes and using "western" electronics to learn and communicate. Yet at least some of their critics are also seemingly unaware o...
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