This summer, on Sunday 21st of July, the International Botanical Congress in Madrid officially opened. But on the Thursday before a nomenclature session which had run for six days eventually ended with a decision taken by vote – 351 to 205 – to eliminate certain offensive names of plant species.
The first step concerns the word caffra. It is a common suffix in some plants, such as Erythrina caffra. From now on caffra will be replaced by affra, so that Erythrina caffra will be known as Erythrina affra. This is because caffra is a bad word, alluding to an Arabic word for ‘infidel’ (which at some point was adopted as a racial term in South Africa), while affra is a good word, alluding to Africa. If that was the first step, then the second step is that the nomenclature session also decided that a committee will be created to consider the names of plants associated with controversial figures from the past: though this will only apply to plants named after 2026, and therefore not reach as far as renaming plants which were originally named for slave traders or despots.
This has been reported on in the Guardian and in Nature and in Science. But the important texts are academic articles. The first is ‘Restoring Indigenous Names in Taxonomy’ in Communications Biology 3 (2020), by Len Norman Gillman and Shane Donald Wright. The article argues that the established principle that species should be named by those who first discover them should be adjusted to include the fact that it is likely that indigenous peoples had names for them long before, say, Captain Cook arrived. This is a good point: though it misses the fact that the Maori, say, did not name species according to Linnaean principles or with any scientifically classificatory intention in mind. Also, as critics have noticed, there is often barely anything other than extremely recent evidence of specific indigenous names for obscure plants. It is good to see that one of the authors has some indigenous blood. Sometimes it is possible to imagine that these subjects are entirely suffused by white privilege and condescension and science.
The second article is more relevant to the decision taken in the summer since it concerns the word caffra. In 2021, two scholars published in 2021 an article in TAXON, the journal of the International Association for Plant Taxonomy. Its cumbersome title is “Proposal to add a new Article 61.6 to permanently and retroactively eliminate epithets with the root caf[e]r- or caff[e]r- from the nomenclature of algae, fungi and plants”. The article is two pages long: it comes in at around a thousand words, which is shorter than this piece. It is also not scientific, but political. The authors of this piece are Gideon F. Smith and Estrela Figueiredo. Smith is white. He has written forty books and is South Africa’s greatest expert on succulent plants. Estrela Figueiredo is white. I dislike the word ‘white’. However, these scholars are not black, indigenous or ethnic or whatever the unnecessary word should be, so white will have to do. So when they say that certain epithets are “highly offensive”, and they refuse to say to whom, it is not clear whether the words are offensive to any blacks who happen to be standing next to the tree called Erythrina caffra, or rather to privileged whites with a guilty conscience and a socially mediated instinct to parade their awareness of such a conscience along with a punitive inclination to censure those who do not similarly parade theirs.
Take this from the article…
The epithet caf[f][e]r, should, we are told, be “eliminated permanently and retroactively”.
Translation:
It shall not exist.
Nay, it never existed.
What is the explanation? They say “because the epithets derived from the Arabic word meaning ‘infidel’ are highly offensive, they are to be eliminated”. Forgive the style: with its reified offensiveness, not necessarily needing anyone to be offended, and its positively dystopian use of the passive: “they are to be eliminated”. And then there is this, the coup de grace:
It is time for the nomenclature of algae, fungi and plants to get to grips with what has been perceived, at least by some, as its colonial past, and deliberately, completely and irreversibly eliminate the use of such offending epithets from scientific plant names.
Notice that the proposed change will also be irreversible.
Translation:
It shall not exist.
It never existed.
And it shall never exist.
What is the fuss about? What is the problem with this word caffer? I recognised the word, for it exists in Turkish as gavur. It also means ‘infidel’, as is ultimately taken from Arabic. It has nothing – nothing – NOTHING – intrinsically to do with race. It refers to those who do not believe that Allah is the only God and Muhammad is his prophet. ‘Infidel’ is a familiar word in English: it refers to anyone who does not believe that Jesus was the Christ. It can be a ‘slur’, I suppose: since it can be used pejoratively. And it can be used for foreigners. But, as everyone in the Church of England knows, or should know, Africans are usually better Christians than the English.
The point is this. It might be the case that in South Africa this word has shifted, so it has become a ‘racial slur’ or ‘highly offensive epithet’. But it is not so everywhere else; it is just a faith word, used of those without faith. Why should we be imposing a particular and local dislike of a distorted use of a word on the entire world?
The whole thing is preposterous, and part of its preposterousness is that the preposterous people engaged in this preposterousness are not aware of how preposterous it is.
One hesitates to be flippant, but – if only all our problems could be solved by the removal of one letter from a word! Just as we change the infamous word ‘caffra’ to ‘affra’, why not change another infamous word? There is a word which current codes ask us not to name but only to allude to (so that it resembles the God of the Israelites, whose tetragrammatonic name was never heard). There is nothing worse than ‘the N-word’: a strange sort of unmentionable which we have to mention. Why don’t we change this word by deleting the N? We could even invent an etymology for it by claiming that the word is now to be derived from the admirable German-American historian George Iggers, who happens to have been the first white man to have been initiated into the black fraternity Phi Beta Sigma at Howard University, Washington DC, in 1957 (incidentally, the same university at which Kamala Harris studied in the 1980s). Iggers is surely a great exemplar. The word, shorn of its N, could be used from now on simply to mean anyone who does not discriminate racially. How about that for the decolonisation of language?
The problem is, alas, that we are straining to impose a single language on the entire world, and that, at the moment, this is coinciding with a simulated, indeed, symbolic sympathy for supposedly marginalised people in history. Everyone with even the slightest capacity for connected thought must be aware that there is no end to the possible reforms which could be suggested once we decide that certain words are spots on the eternal sunshine of the taxonomic mind.
Back to the geniuses of the International Botanical Congress (who are spared the ravages of a capacity for connected thought). I wonder if any of them have noticed that affra, since it is derived from Africa, is a word of dismayingly colonial aspect, since it was a Roman – and hence imperial – word for a province forming most of what we now consider the Libyan coast. Even worse, this word was even more imperially extended by ignorant Europeans so it became the word for the entire, unknown and at first unconquered continent beneath.
In a year or two, our secular saints will be falling over themselves to ‘decolonise’ affra.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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