How censorship is used to suppress black achievements in math

What is it about?

After the end of apartheid in South Africa, blacks got admission to South African Universities. Though they paid high fees, they are regularly failed by the faculty which is still white-dominated. This led to the agitation “Rhodes must fall” to decolonise the university. In this context, I was asked to comment on an offensive article purporting to decolonise mathematics, which started with the premise "Much, though certainly not all, mathematics is the work of dead white men". (Hence, by implication, blacks and women are bad at mathematics, and must be taught to think like the white, male creators of the subject.) I responded with a counter-article, "To decolonise math stand up to its false history and bad philosophy" which was published by the Conversation (global edition), in October 2016. Some of the points I made enraged closet racists in South Africa. For example, I said that black Africans in Egypt understood fractions since the days of the Rhind papyrus, while Greeks and Romans could not manage fractions. (How do you write a fraction in Roman numerals?) Fractions were first introduced in the European math syllabus only around 1572, three THOUSAND years after the Rhind papyrus. What mathematics did white men invent, I wondered, if they lagged so far behind blacks even as regards elementary fractions? I further said that there was nil evidence for “Euclid” the purported white Greek father of mathematics, and that my challenge prize of around USD 3000 for the slightest evidence for Euclid was standing unclaimed for a decade. I explained that the real author of “Euclid’s” Elements was a black woman who was raped and killed in a church for her advocacy of “heretical” beliefs about mathematics and religion. (The black woman appears on the cover of my 2012 book Euclid and Jesus, which tells her story.) The article in Conversation went viral but was immediately censored by its South Africa editor. Many others, across the world, who had carried the article, subsequently took it down. But, no one, until today, has pointed to any error of fact or argument in my article which is reproduced in full in this article in the Journal of Black Studies. Censorship is being used to preserve falsehoods against blacks.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The stock history of science is biased against blacks, and it falsely credits Greeks with many Egyptian achievements. This false history was and is used to denigrate blacks. Any challenge to those falsehoods is maintained solely by censorship because the arguments supporting Greek achievements in math are weak. The journal article also has a new take on an old controversy. Western historians of Egyptian mathematics, like Gillings, have argued that, despite building magnificent pyramids, the Egyptians did not even know the “Pythagorean theorem”. In this article, I argue to the contrary that it was the early Greeks who did not understand the “Pythagorean theorem”, since it actually involves square roots, and early Greeks knew no way to calculate square roots, which are found in the Rhind papyrus.

Perspectives