A really futile and stupid gesture

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? What has made this dustup worthy of attention is that Smith and Figueiredo have moved their crusade a crucial step closer to victory. At the recent XX International Botanical Congress in Madrid, they proposed an amendment that would negate that inconvenient rule, and thus allow legitimate species names to be changed if they are deemed offensive (by whom?), or honored individuals known for “crimes against humanity” (how defined?). Their amendment passed by a majority vote of the roughly 600 botanists who were eligible to cast a vote. The rule change is not yet a done deal, but the vote now obliges the IBC’s Nomenclature Section to consider it formally. 

Their proposal has not been without controversy. A South African botanist friend has described the move to me as “total bollocks.” Heated discussion of the proposal has been livening up the pages of the normally staid Nomenclature Section’s journal Taxon. For example, a Ukrainian botanist, Sergei Mosyakin, provides many amusing examples of the absurd logic behind such taxonomic virtue-signalling. What is to be done, he asks, with the plesiosaur fossil Leninia stellans, or the blind carabid beetle Anophthalmus hitleri? Should both be purged? Or do they, like matter and anti-matter, cancel one another out? He goes on to ask rhetorically whether this Pandora's box should be opened at all, seeing inevitable taxonomic chaos as others jump on the anti-colonial bandwagon. 

One doesn’t have to use the reductio ad absurdum, as Mosyakin artfully does, to see his point: Smith and Figueiredo themselves provide an inadvertent example of the problems that await. One of those problematic species names is a South African species of the genus Portulaca (the purslanes), in particular Portulaca caffra, known locally as porcupine root. They propose changing the species name to Portulaca affra. Done and dusted, as is commonly said there. What would be the harm, they ask? 

There are several. Foremost would be a utility problem. Biological nomenclature does not exist for fun: it is primarily a standard, and to be a standard, it has to be governed by rules that ensure its reliability. Just as physicists need a standard of length (the meter) to talk to one another, so too do biologists need to know that a species name always refers to the same species, no matter where the name is used, or how far back in time the usage goes. If Portulaca caffra were to be changed to Portulaca affra, for example, what about all the previous literature references to Portulaca caffra (which go back to the 18^th century)? Would all that past literature have to be revised? Would compendia have to be compiled that track all the changes? Would new pages be sent out to libraries, as Soviet lexicographers did, to replace pages that contain problematic words, so they could be cut out and the new ones pasted in? And suppose when that’s done, someone gets a new bee in the bonnet, and it all has to be done again? 

Aside from being burdened, politically-motivated name changes would impoverish botany. Biological nomenclature might be a pretty dry subject, but it does have a certain charm for the easily distracted like myself, I suppose similar to the charms of philately. That charm would be drained away by the political cleansing the new rules would implement. To illustrate, follow me a little into the taxonomic rabbit hole. We start with the species’ complete formal name: Portulaca caffra (Thunb., 1794). The parenthetical Thunb. refers to Karl Peter Thunberg, who is credited with describing Portulaca caffra and naming it, and the year it was formally designated (1794). 

Now, follow me a little deeper into the rabbit warren. Who was this Karl Peter Thunberg? There’s a rich story there as well. When Carolus Linnaeus was formulating his system of taxonomy (upon which all biological nomenclature is based), he sent out a number of protéges - ”Apostles of Linnaeus”, as they were called - around the world to collect species of plants and send the samples back to Sweden. These specimens were the moon rocks of Linnaeus’ day, serving as essential evidence to Linnaeus’ own project of identifying “centers of creation” that would explain the diversity of species. The Apostle that Linnaeus sent to southern Africa was … Karl Peter Thunberg, who collected plants there from 1772 to 1775. From there, Thunberg went on to botanize in Japan, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka before returning to Sweden. 

Now that we know a little more, we can look again at whether the species name Portulaca caffra was established in bigotry and racism. It’s hard to make that case, to say the least, but knowing more about Thunberg, we can test the idea. At the time Thunberg was collecting in southern Africa, the only established European presence there was the Dutch victualing station in the Cape of Good Hope. To collect his plants, Thunberg ventured beyond the Cape into a terra incognita that was designated on contemporary maps simply as “Kaffraria” – land of the Kaffirs, the Bantu tribes of Africa, in short. Thus, the species name of that problematic purslane, Portulaca caffra: it designates the place where Thunberg found it, that is to say, Kaffraria. Taking away the “c” from the species name erases that rich history and renders Portulaca affra as “purslane from Africa”, just one of the thirty-two Portulaca species located on the African continent. How bland. How boring. 

As small as such taxonomic revisionism might look, it is worth a reminder that this is part of a broader movement to “decolonize” science. In addition to sniffing out offensive location names, Smith and Figueiredo have also been involved in purging honorifics from species names of individuals who have committed “crimes against humanity.” Coming in for particular criticism in their eyes is George Hibbert (1757-1857), a planter and amateur botanist whose name frequently pops up as a genus name (Hibbertia) or a species name (e.g., Erica hibbertia). Never mind his contributions to botany, Hibbert is to be dismissed as a criminal because he was “ a slave trader and slave owner”, and worse, an alleged defender of slavery. Hibbert is thus indicted as a Simon Legree, whipping his slaves mercilessly as they were worked to death on his Jamaican sugar plantations. The picture is a little more nuanced than that, but little room is left to explore Hibbert’s full story. When the heart is pure, nuance matters little. 

Not to worry, though. If the campaign against Hibbert doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other targets for taxonomic decolonization. Cecil John Rhodes drapes many species names, for example. Eliminate them! Queen Victoria, the über-colonist, is another. The list of taxonomic thought-crimes is long, and the opportunities to purify the nomenclature are vast. This might keep the taxonomic busy bodies occupied for a long time, but the logical end-point of such thinking is self-destructive. Linnaeus himself has been accused of harboring racist thoughts, for example. Is he therefore the ur-taxonomy colonist, no different from Hibbert or Hitler, the guilty one who established the monstrous regime of white supremacy on biodiversity? If convicted, as some come perilously close to doing, perhaps the entire edifice of Linnaean taxonomy should be bundled into the tumbrels, along with Hibbert, Rhodes, Queen Victoria, and the others? 

Perhaps there’s a compromise that would avoid that logical endpoint? Rather than tinkering endlessly with species names, and the chaos that would ensue, perhaps formal species names could be just left as they are, but now include something like the obligatory “land acknowledgement” that now commonly opens many meetings on university campuses. Land acknowledgments are the ultimate virtue signal, a consequence-free stroking of egos that carries no intention at all of handing the allegedly “stolen land” back. The crusade to decolonize taxonomy is also an empty virtue signal, but this one has consequences. To avert those, perhaps a formal species name could now look like something like this:

“Portulaca caffra (Thunb. 1794).
We acknowledge the egregious racism of this species name, and apologize for the violence inflicted upon the Xhosa, Thembu, Mfingu, Mpondo, and Mpondmise peoples in the theft of their rich indigenous natural history by bigoted white supremacist racist botanists.”

That should keep the busy bodies occupied for some time. 

J Scott Turner is Director of Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars