Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge

Abstract

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.