Science and Society in Southern Africa

Book excerpt: This collection, dealing with case studies drawn from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Mauritius, examines the relationship between scientific claims and practices on the one hand and the exercise of colonial power on the other. It challenges conventional views that portray science as a detached mode of reasoning with the capacity to confer benefits in a more or less even-handed manner. That science has the potential to further the collective good is not fundamentally at issue, but science can also be seen as complicit in processes of colonial domination.