This article unites different disciplinary debates on 'southern innovation', 'theory from the South', and 'decolonisation of knowledge' in order to discuss existing understandings around the role of Africa in the production of health-related knowledge, public health policy, and medical innovation. Arguing that high-income countries have much to learn from the global South when it comes to health-related knowledge and practices, we propose an interdisciplinary research approach to uncovering and examining African contributions to global health, drawing on an ongoing collaborative project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We present four empirical case studies concerning drug development, healthcare systems, and urban planning to critically enquire into both historical and contemporary transcontinental knowledge circulation and learning potentials, as much as cases of forgetting and silencing. On this basis, we argue that 'learning from the South' must mean more than transplanting quick and cheap technological fixes to serve societies in the global North, but rather recognising the vast contributions that Africans have made to global epistemologies, without losing sight of the asymmetries inherent in South-North knowledge exchanges. Lessons learned might apply to fields other than those discussed here and go far beyond 'reverse innovation'.
Once the Bowker family from South Newton, Wiltshire, in southern England arrived on the allotted 1500 acres of land in 1820, they started copying their Xhosa, Khoekhoe and Mfengu neighbours who had cultivated the land and had been experienced pastoralists for centuries. They first built a wattle-and-daub house, using a technique that had been widely spread in Africa for at least six thousand years. Long grass was taken for the thatched roof as was done by 'everyone both black and white'. 1 From the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s, the white settlers and the amaXhosa, amaMfengu and Khoesan in the area were in close contact and shared their knowledge. Settlers' attitude towards Africans is highly ambiguous at the time, as articles in the Graham's Town Journal show. In this period, for instance, the Bowker children attended Sunday School meetings together with 'the native children who were residing in the neighbourhood beneath the shade of a large thorn tree'. They described their African school colleagues as 'willing scholars' who progressed and enjoyed their regular mutual exchange with them. 2 The farm school that Miles Bowker estab-The original version of this chapter was revised as an incorrect image was placed for Fig. 2.2. The correction to this chapter can be found at
This chapter weaves three arguments together and analyses how changed practices, development of theories and classifications are interlinked. Firstly, it focuses on how Barber and her colleagues at the Cape actively contributed to evolving ornithological practices. It then examines how she constructed theories of her own, before analysing, by way of example, a discussion between Barber and Trimen on the naming and classification of butterflies. In the last decade, a number of historians of science have shown that important scientific practices and theories emerged in the global South. 1 This chapter aims to contribute to this ongoing scholarship by arguing that the Cape Colony was not only a venue for fieldwork or a laboratory for testing Northern theories, but also a space where modern science was established in its own right. Shaping new OrnithOlOgical practiceS Ornithology has generally been understood as a Euro-American discipline which emerged in the three decades between 1820 and 1850. 2 Nancy J. Jacobs, a historian of ornithology in Africa, for instance, has recently published a monograph containing a chapter with the telling title 'Ornithology Comes to Southern Africa, 1700-1900', in which she presents a case study of how imperial, racial and scientific status was negotiated between 'European ornithologists' and 'African vernacular birders' through scientific naming, species description and specimen collecting. 3 According to
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