Among the many charges that will forever stick to the apartheid government is that its repression of oppositional voices robbed the country of some of its richest intellectual and political resources.
The British government has been one of the fortunate beneficiaries of South African-born talent: one of those forced to leave the country in the 1960s was Peter Hain, an anti-apartheid activist who now occupies the sober position of Secretary of State for Wales in Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Cabinet.
Another Sixties’ exile from apartheid was Sir David King, the British government’s chief scientific adviser and head of the United Kingdom office for science and technology since 2000.
Speaking to the Mail & Guardian during a brief visit to the country this week, he remarks with characÂteristic understatement that his departure in 1963 on a one-way visa was “hasty”. In fact, those who remember the time recall that the political heat on him was getting so intense that he had to accelerate the completion of his doctorate in chemistry at Wits University to escape unscathed.
But science, not politics, is his chief topic in conversation with the M&G. This is a sector that no less an authority than Minister of Science and Technology Mosibudi Mangena recently described as “inward-looking and embattled”; so King’s vast experience as an outsider who nevertheless knows the inside well proves provocatively illuminating.
Funding priorities necessarily differ between South Africa and the UK, he says. In the UK “it’s very important to fund the sector in a way that enables our scientists to be at the cutting edge of what they do best and so invent the future. You get unexpected breakthroughs by allowing scientists to research what they want. That’s when ‘disruptive technologies’ — the ones that supersede older ones — emerge.”
South Africa’s science sector, by contrast, has been based historically on mining. It now has a broader base, King says, citing the technology responsible for the country’s status as the world’s third-largest exporter of citrus, the possibility that our car manufacturing research could produce the new cars of the 21st century (rather than today’s petrol-heavy vehicles) and the urgent need for medical research on HIV/Aids and other infectious diseases.
“That doesn’t mean South Africa shouldn’t be cutting edge,” he argues, pointing to the Southern African Large Telescope project in Sutherland, Northern Cape, but the need to be so “is not a priority”.
Asked if South Africa’s strong official emphasis on the link between knowledge and economic growth was the right approach, he answers: “That’s a key question, as it is in the UK. One must remember the value of the unexpected outcomes of research done for its own sake. But the UK has a very large science budget. It’s very difficult for South Africa to compete in pure knowledge stakes.” Even so, the country does have niche areas, such as palaeoanthropology, that are not aimed at economic growth. “Those should not be cut back.”
A common complaint from South African humanities academics is that, because their work is often not obviously linked to wealth creation, they get short shrift from the heavy priority the government gives to funding scientific research that does have such outcomes.
King recalls that when he became head of the UK’s office for science and technology, the arts and humanities office asked, successfully, to become part of his organisation. “It’s critically important — we need more seamless funding [between the two areas].”
The threat in the UK from alQaeda and the need for counter-terrorism research provide an immediate illustration of such a need, he says. “We’re funding a lot of research into that — not for economic gain — for instance into understanding the diversity of our communities. You can’t do that without the arts and humanities.”
South Africa has no equivalent of the office King heads and “many countries don’t”, he says. Yet “any modern society depends critically on developments in science engineering and technology, whether in clean water sanitation or protecting people against infectious diseases. And governments need to understand what you can do with those developments. That is, they need good science policy advice.”
South Africa, however, faces “a real problem” from the rising average age of scientists and the country’s failure to replace them with enough younger specialists. Bilateral science agreements between countries can help here, he suggests. Where research funds have been granted for specific two-country projects, “bilateral agreements optimally involve the exchange of people and that’s where the real knowledge transfer happens”.
Politics surfaced briefly at the end of the interview, when the M&G asked King about rumours that the character of a radical, anti-establishment academic in Malcolm Bradbury’s satirical 1975 novel The History Man was based on him. The UK’s chief scientific adviser merely smiled and said: “You’ll need to ask Bradbury.”