South African scientists are discovering that traditional communities are rich in technology, writes Lesley Cowling
THERE is a toad in the Northern Province that is considered a delicacy among local people. It is harvested from its natural habitat, has its innards removed and is braaied over coals to provide a gourmet treat for the lucky diner. The going rate for toad-out-of-the-hole is R5 for 500g, which makes it slightly cheaper than chicken.
To most outsiders (excepting, of course, the French), this is nothing more than a rather unpalatable local custom. But to researchers in a Council for Industrial, Scientific Research (CSIR)project, the hapless frog is an opportunity for food creation, and gathering, cooking and selling it is a distinct agricultural technology.
It’s all a question of perception. To an outsider, living in rural Africa seems to be the simple life, where the concept of technology has no place and science takes a back seat to mythology and mysticism.
These perceptions are based on the assumption that technology is associated with steel machines on factory floors, computers in offices or labs ranked with microscopes and glass tubes. But “technology is everything that is invisible in a product or service”, argues the CSIR’s Adi Paterson. It is the process that brings a product into being.
And, as French anthropologist Claude Lvi- Strauss argued, societies the West dubbed “primitive” have hierarchies of knowledge about their environment that equal the West in sophistication and scientific importance.
So when CSIR researchers embarked on a project in Northern Province villages, they did not do the expected thing of transferring their knowledge and technologies to the locals. The reverse was true: they went in to discover what technologies and opportunities for wealth creation traditional rural communities have to offer South Africa.
The idea of discovering these processes originated with Wally Serote, chair of the portfolio committee on arts, culture, science and technology, and was taken up by Paterson after some informal discussions with Serote. They linked up with Phuti Ngoepe of the University of the North’s physics department and in August last year the CSIR began training students from the university to go back into their communities in the Northern Province and northern Mpumalanga and “collect technologies”. The students were shown how they could identify a technology used in rural life and describe it and given survey forms to fill out.
Paterson says their focus was technological rather than anthropological and included looking at issues related to the competitiveness of the product, market opportunities and job creation.
When the students came back with their results earlier this year, they had documented about 50 technologies per village. Some of these, Paterson says, are similar to technologies used in the area and overlap with other communities, but others were unique to one village or even to one individual. When all the information is processed in the project’s next stage – creating a database – Paterson expects they will have documented about 90 to 100 distinct technologies.
Some of these are intriguing and show distinct promise. These include the froggy fricasse mentioned earlier. Paterson says that fish farming is often suggested for rural areas that have food shortages, but that many African cultures are not keen on fish. Would it not be better to look at the possibility of cultivating foods, like the toad, that are already part of the local diet? This has already been done in Botswana, parts of South Africa and Zimbabwe with the popular mopane worm, and has led to mopane worm farming taking over from cattle in some areas.
Paterson says that before launching such a project, they would look at its environmental consequences and its commercial viability. “This particular toad might be a declining resource and could become a basis for farming,” he says.
A cosmetic oil produced by only one woman in a village is produced in a very complex process that extracts the oil from the seeds of a local plant. There are many stages involved and many different elements of the recipe, some of which are secret. “This particular technology is already making her about R1 000 a month and people come from about 20 to 30km to buy it,” says Paterson.
One of things the project will look at in examing this technology is intellectual property. The woman who owns the process currently protects it by keeping certain stages secret. She inherited the process from an older female relative and is teaching a younger member of her family how to make the oil. If the process was to be more widely known, she would have to be protected by patent or other legal means, so that she can earn money for sharing her intellectual property.
Another local plant, this time the leaves of a bush, provide a popular tea. Paterson says this has eco-tourist and other economic possibilities, given the popularity of recent years of herbal teas.
The next stage in the project is to create a database of the technologies, which include food storage, building and basket- making. After that, the CSIR will identify technologies that could create jobs and wealth, or solve problems, and will investigate them further.