Mid-century encyclopaedias claimed the power to decide what counted as knowledge and what didn’t – much as online publishing platforms and social media companies do today.
ChatGPT is a sophisticated AI program that generates text from vast databases. But it doesn’t understand the information it produces, which also can’t be verified through scientific means.
Pandemic restrictions have shuttered research projects - some, for good. The consequences for science, not to mention policy and decision making, must be addressed
Africa’s urban challenges are increasingly well known and documented. But the amount of data produced on urban Africa still pales in comparison to other parts of the world.
Losing archives has significant implications in a country like South Africa with a fraught and contested history because voices from the past, which may carry alternative histories, are lost.
His life’s work was asserting the humanity and history of the Bantu people, while proposing that the soul was able to bring knowledge of the past and of the future into the present.
With humility that belied his global stature, his laugh came easily, and his generous storytelling taught lessons that his students grew into for many years after he shared them.
Decolonising mathematical sciences is possible. The answer lies in rediscovering existing African examples of teaching maths and including them in the Western body of knowledge.