Stop the xenophobia — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election: a review by A.S. Soodyall

“If you look at the publications of South African researchers relative to other international researchers where the GDP is much higher, I think we are doing reasonably well,” says Soodyall.

South Africa has a number of landmark scientific achievements. In 2021, a team of researchers in South Africa and Botswana alerted the world to the new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron. South Africa is a hub for palaeoanthropology: its researchers have unveiled two new hominin species, Australopithecus sediba in 2010, and Homo naledi in 2015.

AzWINndini Muronga, dean of science at Nelson Mandela University in Gqeberha, South Africa, says the university is increasingly using international collaborations. If the lifeline was cut, we’d be in a very dire situation.

For years, South Africa has been grappling with violence against people from other African and Asian countries. One out of 10 researchers in South Africa are from another country. Scientists are worried about a rise of xenophobia on University campuses.

Source: ‘Stop the xenophobia’ — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election

The SKA Perspective on South Africa: The Science, Technology, and the Technological Impact of a Black Hole-Hosting Space Telescope

The universe has been captured in unprecedented detail, including the chaotic area around the black hole. The country is one of the SKA telescope’s hosts. MeerKAT will eventually form the heart of the SKA’s mid-frequency array.

Keeping young people in the education system is also a challenge. A survey by Statistics South Africa, the national statistics agency, found that, in 2021, nearly 10% of 17-year-olds had dropped out of school. Around 50% and 60% of students end up dropping out of university after a year in college, according to estimates.

Four out of five ten-year-olds in South African schools are unable to understand what they read, according to the 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study.

Several people whom Nature spoke to also lamented academia’s ‘leaky pipeline’ as universities are struggling to attract and retain talent. The problem, they say, starts with basic education.

Public and private spending on R&D has been declining since 2017–18, and sits at under 35 billion rand (US$1.9 billion) for 2020–21, the most recent period for which data are available. That accounts for 0.61% of GDP, below 0.76% in 2017–18 and less than halfway to the government’s target of 1.5% by 2030.

The ANC has historical strengths in geology, astronomy, biology, nuclear technology, and clinical medicine. Military research and development (R&D) was also a strength.

According to 1991– 92 data, the majority Black population was excluded from the 22,000 strong scientific community. That has since changed.

Human Rights Watch cautioned political parties to be careful with language that could lead to more violence. Black university staff and students who aren’t from South Africa have been the subject of verbal and physical hostility.

“In South Africa politics, the last thing people debate about or talk about is science, right? I will be talking about what people need when they are desperately poor.

The country’s GDP per capita has fallen from $8,737 in 2011 to $6, 763.50 in 2023. The World Bank found last year that more than 60 percent of the population lived in poverty. A third of adults are not employed. Frequent power cuts are needed because of a 17-year-long energy crisis.

Source: ‘Stop the xenophobia’ — South African researchers sound alarm on eve of election

The Story of Freeman Hrabowski: Making a Changemaker in the ANC: Celebrating the Story of Nelson Mandela and Changemaking in South Africa

The ANC has been in power since 1994, when Nelson Mandela, the leader of South Africa’s liberation struggle against the country’s previous apartheid rule, became its first democratically elected president.

People around the world are pushing back against discrimination in order to make a positive difference. Their stories will be told in our series.

The articles will highlight the achievements of scholars who have worked day and night, often overcoming great adversity and at great personal cost, to make the culture of science more inclusive for people of all backgrounds and perspectives. We want the articles to be a celebration of positive change. This is what makes these articles different.

Our inaugural Changemaker, Freeman Hrabowski, exemplifies the spirit of the series. Hrabowski is a mathematician and former president of the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in Catonsville. UMBC has an important place in the history of US higher education. It was the first public university in Maryland to welcome people of all races from its opening day in 1966.

Hrabowski was the guiding hand behind the creation of the Meyerhoff Scholars Program. It was established in 1988 with a US$500,000 grant from philanthropists Robert and Jane Meyerhoff to help prepare African American students for scientific research careers. From that initial instalment, the scheme has boosted the numbers of Black science students in the United States. Nearly 1,500 people have graduated from it, and around 500 have gone on to pursue PhDs. Its success can be found at other universities in the country.

Hrabowski’s own path has been anything but smooth. He recalls, during his childhood in Alabama, sitting in the audience at a church and hearing Martin Luther King Jr ask the congregation: “What will it take to open the eyes and hearts of people to allow our children to go to better schools?” In 1963, aged just 12, Hrabowski was jailed for a week for marching with other children in an anti-segregation protest. During his years as a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the early 1970s, Hrabowski recalls in the Nature podcast: “I was the only Black kid in the classes, there was never a faculty member of colour and only one woman. I knew that I wanted to change that — I wanted other people to see that people of all backgrounds could excel.”

The series will include accounts of having to fight injustice and facing it. They can be uncomfortable to read. But such experiences are still much too widespread, and need to be highlighted until the day comes when they become history.

Alongside the Changemakers series, this journal’s commitment to reporting on these issues will continue. We hope that the series will inspire other researchers, and also the leaders of their research teams, departments and institutions, to make their workplaces kinder and more inclusive.

Nature holds the Changemakers and their work in the highest regard. Their work should not be seen as ‘extracurricular outreach’ or ‘diversity work’, but rather as integral to what makes scientific inquiry successful and what advances discoveries, inventions and innovations. Science and society as a whole will benefit when doors are opened to more creative minds.