South Africa: Creationist paradise

The top (blue) bar indicates the percentage of adults who have heard of Charles Darwin and at least a little about his theory of evolution. South Africa comes in at the bottom of the class at a meagre 27%.

The bottom (red) bar indicates the percentage of adults who have both heard of Darwin and know a bit about his theory, and agreed with the opinion that “enough scientific evidence exists to support Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution”. So here South Africa just sneaked in ahead of Islamic Egypt – at just 12% (42% of the 27% above) . Great.

So what accounts for this lamentable situation? After all, South Africa has provided the world with some of its best known fossils and other evidence of evolution described by scientific superstars. Evolution should be as much a part of South African consciousness as, say is soccer. What makes South Africa a creationist paradise?

The obvious problem must be education. The fact that only 27% of adults have a at least a nodding acquaintance with Darwin and that he had something to do with the theory of evolution must be blamed fairly and squarely on poor education.

South Africa has had a long history of poor education. During the apartheid years black people were subject to what was called “Bantu Education” whose aim was to produce a class of labourers – hewers of wood and drawers of water. Religion was also heavily promoted amongst them and it was greedily accepted. There was no room for the teaching of foreign concepts like evolution there.

The privileged whites fell under a system called “Christian National Education”, which promoted a deeply conservative, Calvinist world view which simply had no place for evolution.  It was certainly not taught in schools besides some vague references to it in biology lessons. None of the current teachers were therefore schooled in evolutionary theory.

The current dispensation is not much better. Besides ill-equipped teachers, society at large remains a highly superstitious one with only about 15% of people reporting no religion. But on top of that is the race obsession of South Africans, particularly that of the government. But how would that effect views on evolution?

The following quotes culled from an article on introducing evolution into the curriculum illustrate both the religious and racial objections to evolution:

Josef de Beer, a lecturer in the faculty of education at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), said teachers of evolution might have religious concerns. “My experience in teaching evolution in a foundation-year programme at the University of Pretoria is that many students find evolution problematic because of their religious beliefs.”

At a recent conference at UJ, where teachers were trained in evolution, a teacher said: “I am disappointed about the fact that evolution attacks God’s creation. It also mixes Genesis with idol worshippers of Babylon, which were never there when God created planet Earth.”

Another said he thought the topic should be voluntary because he didn’t think it suitable for people who believe in God. “I am totally against evolution,” another teacher said.

Matters came to a head after snippets of a video, Tiny Humans: Finding Hobbits in Flores, was shown. The video traces the origin of tiny prehistoric humans somewhere on an Indonesian island. They are depicted as short and dark-skinned people. This offended some black teachers. They said that evolution was a racist theory. It “terribly undermines black people, everything bad gets a black colour. It means blacks were apes,” they said.

Sigh… What can you say? Well, I did say something when this article was published last year and you can read my (published) response below the fold: Read more