Editor’s Note: The following is a short excerpt from an article originally published on the Substack Heterodox Stem on September 1, 2024. With edits to fit MTC’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.
Is the tide turning against the woke mind-virus? There are hopeful signs for sure, as universities and companies are beginning to eliminate mandatory diversity statements, or are gutting their DEI bureaucracies.
But, to quote Han Solo, “don’t get cocky.” The woke mind-virus is a bit like shingles. The virus might go quiescent, but it’s still there, waiting to erupt suddenly. Even the sciences are susceptible. Seemingly out of the blue, birdwatchers were demanding the name of John James Audubon be stripped from the eponymous Audubon Society—he had a couple of slaves for a time and had unpleasant aspects of his personality. Preceding that was the campaign to erase Thomas Huxley’s name from Imperial College London’s institutional memory—Huxley had said unkind things about women and black people. More recently, a cadre of geologists tried to create an entirely new geological epoch—the Anthropocene—to shame bad humans and their stupid Industrial Revolution. Most of these dustups seem to embody Sayre’s Law, vicious arguments waged over very small stakes.
The latest eruption is a campaign to purge racist species names from plant taxonomy. Apparently, the botanical nomenclature is rife with a South African version of the “n-word”. The horror! The specific complaint concerns species names that contain some variant on the word “kaffir”, such as “cafra, caffra, cafrorum, and cafrum”, which, we are told, is a very offensive word—the “k-word” if you will—tainted by its supposed connection to apartheid.
About that word. “Kaffir” is an Arabic word meaning “infidel” or “unbeliever.” It entered the African lexicon as a loanword to Swahili, via the Arab slave trade that long predated the Atlantic slave trade, the colonial “scramble for Africa,” and apartheid. The Arab slave trade arguably is ongoing, by the way. Kaffir became the “k-word” via Afrikaans, also as a loanword. The connection to apartheid actually is tenuous: a Google Ngram shows its usage actually declining during the apartheid years. I’m also compelled to point out that racially derogatory terms are hardly unique to Afrikaners: the words “boer”—usually in the chant “kill the boer”—or “makwerekwere” serve the same purpose when uttered by black mouths and have been on the rise since the shackles of apartheid were thrown off. Nor is the word definitive evidence of bigotry. My first encounter with the k-word was through a so-called van der Merwe joke, a popular genre of South African jokes in which the butt is a stock Afrikaner character known for his stupidity and clumsiness. The black characters—the kaffirs—in a van der Merwe joke are usually dragged in as straight men. So, while the term has certainly fallen out from polite discourse, it’s hardly the equivalent of a lynching.
Still, the k-word intensely exercises some peoples’ emotions, including those of two self-appointed commissars of botanical nomenclature: Gideon Smith and Estrela Figueiredo, both affiliated with Nelson Mandela University, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province. The two have long been doing estimable scientific work to catalogue and describe the world’s most biodiverse flora. Somewhere along the way, they became captivated by the white-savior project of “decolonizing” science. Their present passion is ferreting out species names that are vestiges of colonialism.
For example, they have compiled a list of two hundred and eighteen species of vascular plants, thirteen algal species, and seventy fungal species that contain some variant of the k-word. Those names smear botany with the taint of colonialism, they assert, and they are determined that attention must now be paid. They also have a simple solution: remove the “c” from all the variants, which transforms the offending species names from cafra to afra, cafrorum to afrorum, and so forth. The trimmed names can now more benignly be construed as “from Africa”, thus healing the wound. Standing in their way, though, are established rules that govern how species are named, one of which states that “[a] legitimate species name must not be rejected because it, or its epithet, is inappropriate or disagreeable.”
Now you, dear reader, are probably wondering why you should care?
Image by Firn — Adobe Stock — Asset ID#: 391053729
