compersion & limerence

I...did not use the signal bookmarklet correctly, but h/t to conuly's post for this fabulous article about cross cultural science writing:

Decolonizing Science Writing in South Africa

Sibusiso Biyela

( brief cut for image space )

Last October, I received one of the toughest assignments of my freelance career. Scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, had discovered the fossils of a new species of dinosaur, Ledumahadi mafube, unearthed in the mountainous Free State province. Weighing in at 12 metric tons and dating back nearly 200 million years, Ledumahadi mafube, Sesotho for “Giant Thunderclap at Dawn,” was one of the earliest Jurassic giants. Its fossils held clues about how even larger dinosaurs, the sauropods, evolved. My job was to write about the discovery for the South African website SciBraai—and to do so in my native language of Zulu.

But there’s no word for “dinosaur” in Zulu. Nor are there words for “Jurassic,” “fossilization,” or “evolution.” Despite the fact that Zulu—or isiZulu, as the language is called in South Africa—is spoken by some 10 million people, it simply doesn’t have the words for communicating science.

This article ties in many many interesting threads that I am adding to my mental toolbox: language and apartheid; 'retrofitting' a language for science communication; language-based scientific alienation; some successful Zulu + Xhosa sci-comm projects; and science storytelling as a particularly Zulu cultural imperative. It also serves to illustrate a metrics divide based on semi-specific background knowledge, because (for those unfamiliar) S. Africa is by far the scientific powerhouse on the African continent. Their research outputs are something like an order of magnitude greater than the rest of the continent combined (afaik from research a few years ago, and measured by fairly traditional metrics), so it's especially interesting how relatively little progress there has been in enabling indigenous languages to talk about scientific work. I mean, though, apartheid is a pretty good explanation for it, in the end.