Blacks and Liberals Want to Abolish Science

On my recent visit to Stockholm for the Identitarian Conference, some Swedes and I compared notes on whose country was the most crazy-liberal and anti-white. The Swedes pointed to a short video recently released by an NGO that said Swedes should “integrate” into the culture of third-world immigrants to form a “new country.”

My Swedish colleagues agreed with French author Renaud Camus. Writing on Free West Media, he argues that, whereas white populations everywhere seem determined to be replaced by third-worlders, “the case of Sweden is even more tragic, more extreme, more insane. Nowhere else do a people and a nation show a stronger will to suicide.”

But I believe South Africa is worse. We have actual laws, regulations and policies that require corporations, universities and sports bodies to replace whites. Our country has become the world champion of anti-white, anti-Western ideology. Together with our northern neighbor Zimbabwe, we are to multiculturalism what Pol Pot’s short-lived Democratic Kampuchea was to communism: its most extreme expression. Pol Pot waged genocide against the entire middle class of Cambodia in order to start a “new society.”

South Africa’s ruling elite also wants a “new society” that will be cleansed of Western influences and even the white race. As Robert Mugabe put it during his famous 2015 visit to Soweto: “I don’t want to see a white face.”

The current upheavals at our universities–known absurdly as the “fallist movement”–have been widely reported. Enraged black students, egged on by “understanding” whites, have demanded that one thing after another must “fall,” each accompanied by its own hashtag. First it was #RhodesMustFall (the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town), then #AfrikaansMustFall (blacks want to eliminate Afrikaans as a language of university instruction), followed by #FeesMustFall (they want tuition fees abolished) and now, #ScienceMustFall.

In a video that has had nearly a million views, a female black student at the University of Cape Town called for science to be scrapped, saying:

If I personally were committed to decolonization, science as a whole is a product of Western modernity and the whole thing should be scratched off. So if you want practical solutions to how to decolonize science, we have to restart science from–I don’t know–from an African perspective, from our perspective, from how we’ve experienced science. For instance, I have a question for all the science people: There is a place in KZN called Umhlab’uyalingana. They believe that through the magic, the black magic–you call it black magic, they call it witchcraft–you are able to send lightening to strike someone. Can you explain that scientifically because it’s something that happens?

The initial reaction was widespread ridicule from ordinary whites, but I knew that her dismissal of Western science was not taking place in a vacuum and was connected with the cultural-Marxist ideas swirling through most Western universities. After all, Herbert Marcuse, one of the founders of cultural Marxism wrote this in “An Essay on Liberation” in 1969, at the height of US student radicalism:

This is the Hippie subculture: ‘trip,’ ‘grass,’ ‘pot,’ ‘acid,’ and so on. But a far more subversive universe of discourse announces itself in the language of black militants. Here is a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined, and places them into the opposite context–negation of the established one. Thus, the blacks ‘take over’ some of the most sublime and sublimated concepts of Western civilization, desublimate and redefine them. (p. 35)

Needless to say, Marcuse approved of the black “take over,” and if he were alive today, he would surely applaud what is happening in South Africa. Not only are blacks taking over Western concepts and changing them into their opposites, they are taking over our institutions as well.

In universities and the mainstream media there was actually praising this young “fallist.” I was only slightly surprised to read a piece in Afrikaans entitled, “#ScienceMustFall nie so belaglik soos dit mag klink” (#ScienceMustFall not so ridiculous as it sounds). It was written by Liezel de Lange, the managing director of our Sunday newspaper Rapport, which once supported apartheid and segregation.

Miss De Lange first confessed ignorance because she attended the University of Pretoria in the days when it still taught Western ideas and culture. She laments that when she studied English literature “almost all our prescribed works were from Britain (and Ireland), as well as the USA. I have to give my lecturers at the time credit for assigning readings from Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.” Most Westerners no doubt have deficient educations because they have not been taught Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Although Liezel de Lange did not exactly endorse the science-must-fall idea, in defense of the young fallist she evoked the mythical “medieval African university” of Timbuktu as evidence that Africa’s vast contributions to world learning are being ignored. In fact, Timbuktu was a center for Islamic and Tuareg schools, not a hub of forgotten African or black science. Nor are Africans themselves united in wanting to preserve what is left of the “medieval African university.” Recent Al Qaeda activity in the region has been so destructive that the New Yorker recently ran a story called “Has the Great Library of Timbuktu Been Lost?”

I asked Liezel de Lange on Twitter whether she was an Afrocentrist, but she evaded the question, answering that she merely “posits that not all knowledge, wisdom and insight come from the West.” It’s hard to disagree with that.

Miss De Lange’s column was just a watered-down version of a more radical piece she had read on the left-wing website The Daily Maverick by Joel Modiri, called “In the Fall: Decolonisation and the rejuvenation of the academic project in South Africa.”

Mr. Modiri is a black academic at UNISA (University of South Africa), which has been racially “transformed”–meaning that whites have been all but banished. It is Africa’s largest correspondence university, naturally founded by South African whites. Mr. Modiri explained that “her [the fallists] error proves her point.” He decried:

the presentation of knowledge by South African universities as predominantly the product of the West, and the failure to recognize that some of the major scientific disciplines (medicine, physics, astronomy, mathematics, among others) have deep heritages in Africa, China and India . . . .

In other words, she is a victim of the false, Eurocentric view that science is Western to begin with. Some American blacks have long maintained that the West stole its knowledge from Africa. They never explain how science could be “stolen” from one people by another, leaving no trace behind. Knowledge is not like the Mona Lisa, which cannot exist in more than one place, so it is strange that the wise Africans who conceived of science and culture no longer possessed it once it was “stolen” from them.

But we have to remember Samuel Huntington’s dictum in his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order: “culture follows power.” If anything, this is what the rest of the world might learn from South Africa: Whoever dominates politically will impose his culture and beliefs, even if they are more primitive than those it replaces. Once the scientist has been politically and culturally subjugated he may have to bow down to the witchdoctor.

Unfortunately, it is not only pseudo-intellectual blacks such as Mr. Modiri who hate the West. One of the most Europhobic statements in support of the black UCT student came from Stuart Theobald, a white-liberal English South African academic who “divides his time between London and Johannesburg.”

In the same Rapport that Liezel de Lange edits, Mr. Theobald writes of the need to “decolonize” science because “it has been used to justify racism” and to support “biological racism.” He continues:

We are kidding ourselves if we pretend that colonial attitudes are not still affecting the way science works today. This is why a deliberate effort to decolonise science is valuable and South African universities have the opportunity to lead the charge.

He adds that we need a new paradigm in science “that recognises the racism embedded in much of scientific practice and methodology,” and that “a postcolonial science” that is “shorn of the straitjacket of past thinking” will solve problems that now baffle us. He notes the “fuss” made over the fallist student’s comments and then asks: “But when you see the entanglement of racism and science, can you blame her?”

Are South African blacks and white liberals ready to ditch science in favor of the “dark arts” as Harry Potter would say? If they have tooth aches or appendicitis, I suspect they will submit to the humiliation of “colonial science” rather than look for a cure in the traditional rituals and voodoo of Africa.