African Affairs Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
African Affairs 2009 108(432):413-433; doi:10.1093/afraf/adp037
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Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge
William Beinart is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University (william.beinart{at}sant.ox.ac.uk); Karen Brown is a senior research officer at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford (karen.brown@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk); and Daniel Gilfoyle works in Research and Collections at the National Archives in London (Danielgilfoyle@ nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk). We acknowledge funding from the Wellcome Trust for a joint project on ‘Veterinary medicine, entomology and the state in South Africa, c. 1900–1950’, based at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, 2002–5.
Africanists have long criticized the social construction, and consequences, of technical knowledge. Colonial science was seen as a particularly problematic enterprise, moulded by authoritarian colonial states, wherein science ‘delineated the relationship of power and authority between rulers and ruled’. Much the same critique has been applied to post-colonial experts and expertise, becoming almost paradigmatic in the literature. This article seeks to re-open this debate, pointing to the diverse and changing location of scientists; the salience of scientific work in constructing categories and understandings for historians and social scientists; the value of trying to understand scientific explanations, as opposed simply to analyse their application in coercive policies; and the degree to which experts have sometimes incorporated local knowledge. The article draws examples from veterinary science and policy in southern Africa, and seeks to move beyond the inversions of colonial thinking in post-colonial analysis and provide instead a platform for interdisciplinary research strategies.