Were a catechism of conservation ever to be written, there would surely
be an article of faith emphasising the importance of tropical biodiversity
to the future of humankind. Here, known only to the forest’s guardians,
we are told, lie cures to all our ills. And this, according to the populist
view, is the raison d’etre of ethnobotany – to extract these vital agents
for the ultimate good of humanity. The result is a descriptive science with
its roots far back in history. John Gerard’s Herbal of 1597 was perhaps
the first comprehensive ethnobotanical study of the northern European tribe,
with descriptions of all the herbal remedies used by apothecaries of his
day. Even such everyday plants as willow had uses, its sap being used ‘to
take away things that hinder the fight’.

We still use willow sap in much the same way as Gerard prescribed, except
that we now manufacture the active ingredient and take it in tablet form.
It is aspirin. Tracing the path from Gerard’s apothecaries to the bottle
in the bathroom cabinet tells us much about how our culture has changed
over the intervening three-and-a-half centuries. It is not just that the
Enlightenment provided the intellectual framework within which questions
about the active agent in willow sap could be asked, but also that the availability
of aspirin itself has subtly changed our own society and culture. Just
ask an angina sufferer.

William Balee adopts this approach in his admirable study of plant use
by the Ka’apor people of northeast Brazil. A party of eco-tourists stumbling
upon a Ka’apor village will see, through their rose-tinted sunglasses, a
society in apparent equilibrium with its environment.

Every few years the Ka’apor clear a patch of forest and plant it with
manioc (cassava), bananas, watermelons and a host of other crops. They select
particular termite-resistant trees to provide house posts, extract poisons
from forest plants to stun fish and have a multitude of herbal remedies.
Moreover, their lifestyle actually increases the biodiversity of the forest
surrounding them.

Yet appearances can be deceptive. Many of their crops are not indigenous
to South America. To grow a plant requires not just the seed, but also
information on how to grow it and knowledge that the end product will be
worth the investment. Each introduction, therefore, provides clues to the
other ethnic groups with whom the Ka’apor have been in contact.

The staple food of the Ka’apor is the tuber of manioc that has to be
prepared carefully before it is eaten to remove toxic cyanide compounds.
By contrast, the leaves of manioc are eschewed, although they are nontoxic
and highly favoured in other parts of the world. Discovery of the nutritional
value of the roots implies a measure of empirical enquiry, while avoidance
of the shoots appears irrational.

Yet the Ka’apor are a pre-literate society, and they rely on the oral
tradition to maintain ethnobotanical knowledge. This places an upper limit
on the amount of knowledge that can be retained and forces what Balee describes
as a ‘mental economy’ to purge irrelevant facts. Given the richness of local
vegetation, the habit of eating manioc leaves may simply never have developed
and the possibility that they may be edible need never have been contemplated.

One feature of societies reliant upon the oral tradition is a lack of
awareness of alternatives to the established body of facts. Ideas may change
gradually over time through experimentation, but without the means of making
permanent records, the current generation may be unaware that innovation
has taken place. Permanent records also remove the limitation which a single
mind places upon knowledge. So the 636 ‘species’ that the Ka’apor recognise
as distinct can be expanded to the 30 000 plus plants that Linnean botany
recognises in the Amazonian basin.

The Ka’apor have, fundamentally, a practical approach to botany based
around their own immediate needs. This, argues Balee, needs to be appreciated
by those who want to incorporate indigenous knowledge into rational development
schemes for the Amazonian basin. The Ka’apor have an excellent knowledge
of short-term processes, yet, because of the limitations of oral transmission,
this ‘does not perforce imply rationalistic knowledge of long-term ecological
and successional processes that involve several human generations’. For
that to happen, the Ka’apor will need a means of preserving knowledge. But
that is the first step towards ‘civilisation’, the track record of which,
in Amazonia, leaves a lot to be desired.

Martyn Kelly is a botanist and science writer.

As a science lecturer in Nigeria I found this an everyday problem. I
was forced to dictation pace by students who hung on my every word in the
absence of textbooks in a library that had, to all intents and purposes,
stopped buying new books when the currency was devalued in the mid-1980s.
But what was the alternative?

Book shops did stock imported textbooks – mainly low-cost editions of
standard British textbooks sold under the imprint of the Educational Low-cost
Book Scheme (ELBS), which the British Council administers. However, even
these cost more than most students lived on each week.

The obvious question was: ‘Why not produce the textbooks locally?’ This,
after all, would immediately overcome one of the major problems (apart
from cost) of most imported textbooks: their lack of relevance to local
conditions. Standard biology texts usually have scores of examples from
temperate ecosystems and next to none from tropical ones. Tropical ecosystems
are more complex, yet most of the information about them remains stuck
in the primary literature – less ‘user-friendly’ to an already bemused
undergraduate.

Several of my colleagues wanted to write textbooks. However, with greater
administrative and teaching burdens facing them than their British counterparts,
plus their and Nigeria’s dire financial circumstances, they had little spare
time to spend on such dreams. Writing a book may promise money at some indeterminate
time in the future, but if the car needs repairing, or school fees need
paying, they must be dealt with straightaway.

Unencumbered by so many other commitments, I set to work on a manuscript
with a colleague to cover a basic course on ‘Experimental Methods’ for undergraduates
and MSc students in biology. Across all Nigerian universities there must,
we reasoned, be a demand and a book published by a local publishing house
should be more than able to compete with imported books. If that was the
theory, the practice proved rather less straightforward.

First, with an economy in crisis, few authors trust a publishing house
ever to pay royalties. Publishers, for their part, often insist that the
authors put up the production costs before they print a book. The result
is something akin to what is known in Britain as ‘vanity publishing’.

To a writer familiar with the Western way of doing things, this is clearly
unsatisfactory. As they are spared most of the financial risk, publishers
do not need to look long and hard at the commercial prospects of a book.
Moreover, as distribution is up to the author, rather than the publisher,
it is difficult to reach beyond the local area.

By this stage, though, I had strayed far from the familiar shores of
my own culture. I was deep in a West African society where the griots –
or ‘professional praise singers’ – were still common. Prospective authors
may have to put up cash to see their work published, but there are ways
in which it can quickly be recouped. This is done by means of an elaborate
ritual known as the ‘launching ceremony’, with local celebrities and leaders
giving speeches in praise of a book and its author, and then buying copies
for sums many times greater than the cover price. The greater the sum, the
greater the applause. (The discrepancy between the large sums that they
donate and their annual salaries, in the case of high government officials,
seems to go unremarked.)

But help was at hand for the others, too, with their launching ceremonies.
We, however, were spared this process as my co-author had a friend who managed
a small but growing commercially oriented imprint, based in their home town
of Enugu in southern Nigeria. We even managed to get a small advance on
royalties which at least covered our costs. The galley proofs, produced
by desktop publisher and laser printer, appeared within a few weeks and
needed fewer corrections than most I have received from Western publishers.
The book was eventually published, after some delay, in August last year
in time for the new academic year.

The nearest comparable book in the ELBS series costs £4.95. Ours,
admittedly slimmer and less comprehensive, costs about £2 in local
currency for the normal edition and £1.25 for an edition produced
on newsprint. Interestingly, research on school textbooks in the developing
world has shown that, so long as the covers and bindings are of good quality,
textbooks printed on newsprint last as long as those printed on high-quality
paper. We hoped that the result of our labours would be a product available
to a much larger number of students than was previously the case.

Is there a moral in this tale? When I started, I thought that writing
a textbook in Nigeria would be the same as writing one in Britain. Up to
a point, it was. What I did not appreciate was the different cultural processes
involved. Without a local co-author I would never have learnt the intricacies
of the system, nor had the benefit of his tribal allegiances in finding
a publisher.

Expatriate ‘experts’ pointed to the poor state of the publishing industry
in Nigeria as justification for not supporting a project to write more textbooks.
Like so much modern development, it was judged simply by the standards of
the Western marketplace. They should talk to Mr Asomugha, my publisher:
he complains that he does not get enough manuscripts.

Either way, the students are the losers. The present recession in Nigeria
has been going on for long enough for younger lecturers themselves to have
suffered book shortages during their degrees. This is not a good basis for
training the next generation. And it is more than just an academic issue:
this will be the training, after all, for virtually all professionals in
Nigeria – the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa – into the next
century.

Martyn Kelly is a freelance writer who taught for two years at the University
of Jos, Nigeria

If ever a textbook needed a bit of hype, it is this one. Palaeobotany
is not a subject guaranteed to make an enthusiast of a modern undergraduate.
Three years ago, however, I had to prepare a 20-lecture course on palaeobotany
with no previous experience of the area and only a library copy of the first
edition of Palaeobotany and the Evolution of Plants to help me. Wilson Stewart’s
clear and readable approach brought the subject alive for me. It also highlighted
exciting possibilities for using palaeobotany not merely as an adjunct to
courses in anatomy and morphology, but also for developing powers of rhetoric
and reason in my students. The palaeobotanist, after all, is not dealing
with hard experimental evidence, but with a complicated jigsaw of facts
and suppositions for which a variety of plausible interpretations exists.

The second edition of this book has Gar Rothwell joining Stewart to
produce a longer, and considerably revised, volume. Once again, copious
illustrations of a generally high standard supplement a clear, readable
text. If I have a criticism, it is the lack of reference to biochemical
and molecular biological approaches to phylogeny. Perhaps, however, presentation
of classical palaeobotany in such an attractive format will itself prompt
questions that can be answered only by molecular techniques.

Molecular biologists who develop a taste for such musings could do worse
than turn to Paula Rudall’s Anatomy of Flowering Plants to refresh their
knowledge of those parts that the modern biology degree rarely reaches.
If this book looks familiar, it is because the first edition was part of
Edward Arnold’s Studies in Biology series. When Hodder & Stoughton bought
Edward Arnold last year, the entire biology catalogue was sold to Cambridge
University Press, which is bringing out new editions of some titles from
the series. Anatomy of Flowering Plants exemplifies the crisp, lucid format
that has made the series almost ubiquitous on undergraduate bio=logists’
reading lists. At £11.95 for less than 100 pages of text, however,
it must count as ‘affordable’ rather than ‘value for money’. A fuller glossary
would be useful, as would a greater attempt to relate plant structure to
function.

If plant anatomy is given only cursory treatment in most modern biology
degrees, this is due in part to the rapid development of the science, which
makes comprehensive coverage impossible. There exists a very real danger
of the overall cohesion between subdisciplines being lost as degree courses
become more and more specialised. For this reason it is gratifying to see
more and more textbook writers adopting a ‘vertically integrated’ approach
to their subject. Plant pathology is a subject that demands such an approach
and Principles of Plant Pathology leads the undergraduate through the essential
aspects of microbiology, physiology, genetics and epidemiology relevant
to plant disease. New to the second edition is a section on molecular biological
aspects of pathogenicity and defence, although the application of molecular
techniques to breeding for disease resistance is not covered at all. This
is a surprising omission for a textbook in this field, not only because
this is an area where there have been many advances in recent years, but
also because understanding the mechanisms of recognition, defence and counter-defence
has led to some basic biological insights.

David Lawlor’s Photosynthesis adopts a much more innovative approach,
combining information from a wide spread of subdisci-plines, from molecular
biology right through to environmental physiology. This unites information
previously only available in a series of general textbooks – biochemistry,
physiology and so on – and also demonstrates how much more can be understood
from an integrated approach. It is a textbook that a lecturer could recommend
confidently to a first-year class, knowing that the introductory chapters
will cover immediate needs, while subsequent chapters contain sufficient
information for most second and third-year courses.

Lawlor deals particularly well with the evolution of photosynthesis
in general and of the chloroplast in particular. New insights from molecular
biology raise fascinating questions about the relation-ship between the
genetic material of the nucleus and the chloroplast. For example, the enzyme
rabisco, which initially traps carbon dioxide, sometimes has one subunit
encoded in the nucleus and one in the chloroplast. Examples such as this
illustrate the complexity of the debate about the origin of eukaryotic
cells.

An entirely different approach is adopted in Primary Succession on Land.
It is not a textbook as such, but the published proceedings of a seminar
organised by the British Ecological Society in 1989. It merits inclusion
in this review because, considered together, the symposiums and special
publication series of the British Ecological Society represent a marvellous
resource of in-depth and authoritative reviews which are ideal for advanced
undergraduate reading. The present volume goes out of its way to extend
coverage beyond descriptions of higher plant successions into the realms
of microbial ecology and ecophysiology. Several contributors, for example,
emphasise the role of nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in
ameliorating soil conditions and permitting other organisms to invade. From
these simple microscopic filaments invading bare earth and rock surfaces,
we are led to the tropical forests of Krakatoa, where ecological succession
has been studied since the volcanic eruption in 1883. Not only do we see
that the composition of ecosystems changes, but this book illustrates clearly
how different ecological processes change in importance over time.

Finally, I must mention Joseph Arditti’s Fundamentals of Orchid Biology,
a vast and authoritative tome of about 700 A4 pages. Arditti manages to
cover almost every aspect of orchid biology and the history of orchid study
in an accessible and readable style. There is material in this book to complement
almost any course taught under the broad umbrella of botany or plant science.
A marvellous book to have in a library: at £75, however, it represents
more than 10 per cent of a student loan, so any lecturer who makes it a
course text deserves to be lynched.

Martyn Kelly is a NRA Research Fellow at the University of Durham.

* * *

Paleobotany and the Evolution of Plants (second edition) by Wilson N.
Stewart and Gar W. Rothwell, Cambridge University Press, pp 521, £29.95

Anatomy of Flowering Plants (second edition) by Paula Rudall, Cambridge
University Press, pp 110, £11.95 pbk

Principles of Plant Pathology (second edition) by J. G. Manners, Cambridge
University Press, pp 343, £45 hbk, £16.95 pbk

Photosynthesis: Molecular, Physiological and Environmental Processes
(second edition) by David W. Lawlor, Longman, pp 318, £19.99 pbk

Primary Succession on Land edited by J. Miles and D. W. H. Walton,
Blackwell, pp 309, £35

Fundamentals of Orchid Biology by Joseph Arditti, Wiley, pp 691, £75

Seen from a cosy office in Britain, this decision may be vital to maintaining
academic standards. Seen from a university in the developing world, it becomes
a substantial obstacle to academic acclaim, to the extent that it is usually
far easier to submit papers to locally published journals of lower prestige.
Publication in Western (sorry, ‘international’) journals becomes a lottery:
maybe it will meet with a sympathetic reviewer or editor, or one with the
time to put right the English.

Viewed from the wrong side of the tracks, the whole rigmarole of publishing
can in fact appear to be a sort of academic apartheid. The Western editor
in rejecting a submission would reply with something along the lines of
it being his job to maintain academic standards (definitely), his/her journal
being oversubscribed with papers (almost certainly if it is a good one),
and he or she not having the time to act as a goodwill ambassador to every
reasonably promising scientist from the developing world (possibly). It
may be instructive to look a little more closely at the problem from the
other vantage point for a change.

Nigeria is a particularly good place from which to make this case. As
an artificial creation of Victorian foreign policy, it contains a broad
mix of ethnic groups, tensions between whom spilled over into the Biafran
war in the late 1960s. Consequently, university entrance policy in Nigeria
today tries to balance the pursuit of excellence with encouragement to minority
groups who, for reasons of history (or more accurately, British colonial
policy) have had widely differing levels of access to higher education and,
consequently, to the professions and influential jobs. The situation is
far from ideal, but it is better than nothing.

Contrast this with the situation which prevails when a Nigerian scientist
ventures onto the world academic stage: no compromises and virtually no
support for academically disadvantaged groups. Submit a paper – the best
of your work, performed under conditions which would make most Western scientists
give up – and any illusions you may have held about the universality of
science stand to be shattered. Very different to the Western milieu where
e-mail, desktop publishing and the like are opening up new and more efficient
routes for the dissemination of scientific results.

Local and regional journals, not surprisingly, thrive under these conditions.
Here work is judged by the standards of your peers, rather than those of
distant untouchables who for the most part have very little understanding
of the conditions under which you work. If academic standards in these journals
sometimes appear a little wanting, remember that they are being compared
with publications who often reject all but the creme de la creme.

Moreover, these publications usually circulate little further afield
than their country of publication. Microbiologist colleagues at Jos, where
I was working, were busy forging links between the traditional herbal medicines
(‘juju’) and modern science. Few outside Nigeria will be able to read about
this work. In a year when tropical biodiversity has received such a high
profile in the West, is it not ironical that most of the basic applied research
in this field is not made more widely available to the international community?

I am not suggesting any quick answers or magic solutions. These would
either require editors to spend more time helping authors in the developing
world (who may need not just references to relevant papers they have missed,
but possibly photocopies of those papers as well), or more money (to pay
others to do this). Neither of these is likely to be forthcoming in the
present academic and economic climate. Just to point out the problem may
be enough to set people (referees in particular) thinking.

But what of my paper? Worthy of publication (implied one reviewer) but
not in this journal. Still on a short-term contract, I need a paper in a
‘respectable’ journal to boost my curriculum vitae. But, if it is about
the ecology of West Africa what is the justification for publishing it in
a journal too expensive for most African institutions to afford? The original
motive for my project was to investigate the practical relevance of the
ecology of streams in West Africa. The relevance will be lost unless it
is read by fellow scientists in West Africa. I’m resubmitting it to a local
journal and my CV will have to look after itself.

Martyn Kelly is a research fellow at the University of Durham.

But Joseph has managed to make a lot of his PhD, a survey of the incidence
of the disease onchocerciasis (river blindness) in a part of Nigeria on
the Cameroon border. Not an exciting project on paper, perhaps, but fairly
typical of PhD topics here. Surveys hold the great attraction for students
everywhere of a nice plump thesis at the end (for plump read ‘unfailable’
in studentspeak), but Joseph’s does not fall into the too-common category
of a mass of half-digested figures. Nor does it, in the name of development,
perform a scientific study of a particular subject divorced from the views,
opinions and participation of the local people.

Joseph starts by studying the prevalence of the disease and its symptoms,
and relating these to the biting rates of the fly vectors in different parts
of the valley. Straightforward scientific stuff. But he then goes on to
look at the link between the symptoms and economic behaviour. For example,
the farmer likes having fields close to the river because the soil is more
fertile and he can extend his growing season into the dry season by irrigation.
He prefers to work in the early morning and evening when it is cooler. And
this is when the flies, which breed in the river, are also most active.
So, many farmers catch onchocerciasis. The housewife stays in the compound
cooking and housekeeping and goes to the river only a couple of times each
day to collect water. She gets bitten there, but not as much as her farmer
husband. And so on.

It makes interesting reading and demonstrates just how closely intertwined
are the disease and its epidemiology with the society and culture of the
region. Understand this, and you have a far better idea of where to concentrate
control measures in order to reduce the prevalence of the disease (which
can reach 100 per cent in some parts). And, as onchocerciasis debilitates
rather than kills, control would have a substantial economic effect in the
region.

But there is a final twist to the tale. The last section of Joseph’s
thesis goes on to look at how the villagers themselves perceive the disease.
They, after all, have been living with it for generations and have absorbed
it into their folklore. Furthermore, their attitude to it will also affect
the success of control measures, especially if they link contagion and contraction
of the disease with the spirit world rather than with the parasite Onchocerca
volvulus or with Simulium damnosum, its fly vector.

Another interesting point about Joseph is his obvious enthusiasm for
spending time in the field. To a New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ reader subject to the vagaries
of the British weather, field work in the African bush may seem attractive.
The realities of scorching sun, torrential rain, biting insects, bad roads,
indifferent sanitation and so on can soon reverse that impression. This
is even more true for an African, for whom there is no exotic appeal in
the awkwardness of these remote parts. Consequently, field work is often
seen as a necessary evil.

Not so for Joseph, who positively revels in field work and relates well
to the local tribe. The practical help he has offered, alongside his sampling,
has led the villagers to offer him an honorary chieftaincy title, a high
honour indeed. (He has turned this down, asking them to wait until there
are some tangible results from his efforts.)

So why do I tell this story? Because in it lies hope and potential disaster
for tropical Africa in general and Nigeria in particular. Hope, because
their own system (albeit with a little help from a mission school) is clearly
capable of producing excellent development-oriented scientists, well aware
of the practicalities of rural development. Joseph has energy and is prepared
to question conventional wisdom. By virtue of his knowledge of the language
and his black skin he can be more easily accepted by rural communities than
any white person. And, he does have a genuine interest in rural development
where many in Africa have learnt the buzz words, but are basically in it
for personal gain.

When he finishes his PhD, Joseph will go back to his own university,
probably as a Lecturer II. He will surely motivate some of the brightest
final-year and MSc students, especially those whose projects he supervises.
But he will be kept inordinately busy with teaching and examining large
classes of students lower down the ladder and will have relatively little
time for his own research, let alone for extended periods of field work.
For all this trouble he will earn less than £500 per year: not enough
to let him buy even an old Volkswagen Beetle.

Joseph wants to leave Nigeria and get a job somewhere else in Africa.
Conditions in several southern African countries such as Botswana and newly
independent Namibia are much more attractive and he has even applied for
a post in South Africa. It is ironical, given Western impressions of South
Africa, that many Africans actually regard parts the Cape, rather than Johannesburg,
as being a more attractive option than some of independent Africa.

He is intelligent and will probably succeed. Who can blame him? Nigeria’s
loss will certainly be someone else’s gain. But where does that leave Nigeria,
as its brightest minds join an increasing brain drain, leaving the mediocre
to form the next generation of academics and, therefore, act as teachers
and inspirers of youth? Perhaps he could join an organisation such as the
United Nations Development Programme or the World Health Organization if
the right opportunity arose. He could certainly contribute more to some
of their programmes than many of the overpaid expatriates working for them
now. But finding that break is not easy. I’m writing him a reference for
a university in Natal and, quite honestly, I wish him luck.

Martyn Kelly was senior lecturer in botany at the University of Jos,
Nigeria.

African Gardens and Orchards by Hugues Dupriez and Philippe De Leener,
Macmillan Press, pp 333, £12.99 pbk

Fortunately, the days are long past when an agricultural adviser in
Africa saw his or her task simply in terms of teaching the natives how to
use a plough. We now recognise that African farming systems are ecologically
well adapted to the harsh conditions that pervade most of the continent.
The great change of the past 20 years has been a steadily increasing respect
on the part of Western development specialists and scientists for traditional
knowledge.

It is not just in agriculture that this revolution has taken place.
More and more use, albeit selective, is being made of traditional methods
of health care. Traditional birth attendents are seen as cost-effective
agents of primary health care and research on the pharmacological basis
of traditional remedies is booming.

This makes the publication of Daniel Abbiw’s Useful Plants of Ghana
by Intermediate Technology and Kew extremely timely as it recognises the
great value of what might be termed ‘indigenous intermediate technology’.
Intermediate technology has an almost romantic attraction to the jaded post-industrial
mind, yet, without the crucial local perspective, it can easily become guilty
of what Shiva Naipaul scathingly dismissed as ‘teaching the primitive how
to be primitive’.

What is striking to a reader of this book, as much as to a visitor to
West Africa, is the vast number of uses which plants still have in a society
where mineral resources and foreign currency are not available to permit
the large-scale replacement of plants by metals and plastics. The index
is full of surprising entries such as ‘lorry’ and, turning to the relevant
page, we find that the West African ‘mammy wagon’ is composed, from the
chassis up, almost entirely of wood. For the cognoscenti, Abbiw lists the
species used.

The longest chapter is devoted to potions and medicines, though no comment
is made on the relative contributions of pharmacological and shamanistic
effects in each case. Perhaps the two can never be truly separated, even
in Western medicine. That some traditional remedies have definite pharmacological
effects is indisputable: one cure for ringworm infection listed by Abbiw
was actually tested in vitro in my department last year, with positive results.
One example among many, I admit, but it serves to illustrate the need to
respect the knowledge of the traditional healers.

Where herbal remedies do not work, however, they can be extremely dangerous,
as the time necessary for the herbal cure to be tried and fail gives a small
cancer time to become large, a broken bone time to set wrongly, an inflamed
appendix time to burst and so on. However, herbalists and juju men will
be an integral part of African healthcare for a long time, simply because
they are cheap, accessible and familiar. The great challenge facing health
planners is to integrate Western and tradi-tional medicine to achieve a
synthesis that is both accessible and reliable.

African Gardens and Orchards concentrates on how to grow plants. Although
aimed at school and college students in Africa, it may well prove an indispensable
guide for agriculturalists and development workers about to leave for Africa.
It has something of a ‘handbook’ feel, listing crops and giving details
of when to plant, what diseases to expect, how to graft and so on. The emphasis
is towards small-scale farming, with sections giving simple scientific explanations
of the basis of widely used techniques such as inter-cropping and the use
of ridges.

Nonetheless, I felt that much of the book is aimed more at people with
exams to pass than crops to grow. Grace, who farms the land around my house,
might not know what a ‘niche’ is, but she can intercrop maize, potato, melons
and groundnuts, planting each on the part of the ridge which will best meet
its drainage requirements. Part of her farm is on an acre of steep, rock-covered
hillside and to describe the distribution of crops as random would be to
insult her. She consciously decides just where to place each plant.

There is some overlap between the two books. Abbiw, for example, lists
plants with insecticidal and fungicidal properties while Dupriez and De
Leener explain how to extract the active ingredients from such plants and
spray them onto your crops. This is likely to appeal to a farmer, more because
of the high cost of chemical pesticides than because of the health and environmental
problems with their use which Dupriez and De Leener explain at some length.

The book is aimed at people who will probably go on to become teachers
and extension agents and who, through their education, are likely to lose
contact with their rural roots. For these people, seeing examples of the
use of local materials and traditional control measures in print will confer
on them a certain legitimacy and respectability, without which they might
simply be dismissed as ‘bush’, that is to say primitive.

My final comment is on the price of the two books: both are bargains
at Western prices, thanks to various grants; however my experience in Nigeria
suggests that £2 is as much as most students can afford for a textbook.
Both books belong on Third World rather than Western bookshelves and it
would be a tragedy if more realistic pricing could not be arranged for these
countries.

Martyn Kelly is a senior lecturer in botany at the University of Jos
in Nigeria.

Much to his surprise, I told him that there weren’t any. Not strictly
true. There is the Flora of West Tropical Africa, a hefty tome which adopts
a strict taxonomic approach. Fine for a systematic botanist but not for
a lay visitor. There is no illustrated field guide equivalent to those of
Keble-Martin and his imitators for the British flora, or even to Serle and
Morel’s guide to the birds of West Africa (published by Collins).

Moreover, I said, there were very few Nigerians who had the sort of
natural history knowledge that he was after. There was plenty of botanical
knowledge among the rural poor, but it would be difficult to relate to Western
systems of knowledge and, anyway, he would have to learn a local language
in order to gain access to it.

It forced me to address a question which had intrigued me for some time.
The tropics, of all places, are a natural historian’s paradise, yet virtually
all of the standard texts in West Africa are written by Westerners. Hutchinson
and Dalziel, authors of the main West African flora, Hepper and Keay, its
two revisors, and Serle and Morel, authors of the popular guide to bird
life are all Europeans. So why are there no local contributions?

In the West, the modern colourful identification guides play an important
role in nurturing an interest in natural history and laying the foundation
for an ecological training. It is the illustrated guides to plants of Fitter,
Rose and others that are the training manuals of British botanists in universities
and polytechnics. This basic knowledge can later be applied to the more
austere approach of Clapham, Tutin and Warburg/Moore, the ‘standard’ British
flora.

So, without the sort of profusely illustrated nature guide to which
we in Britain are so used, it is far more difficult for people to gain an
interest in natural history for its own sake. Conversely, without a ready
public no publisher wants to spend considerable sums to produce a nature
guide, particularly of a tropical region where the flora and fauna are that
much larger anyway. Stalemate.

There is, however, one other aspect to the problem. Where did our interest
in natural history come from? The practical country lore of herbal remedies,
soil characteristics and so on is a traditional skill of people who live
close to the land. But natural history for its own sake is an aesthetic
pastime of people largely divorced from the land. It has become respectable
to crawl around a field in search of a rare orchid and, at the same time,
publishers have found a ready market for books designed to encourage this.

Perhaps it is a reaction to the urban life into which so many of us
are forced. It is a lifestyle that, though we largely accept and are grateful
for, a small part of our psyche rebels against.

But we have been largely urban societies for over a century. Countries
in the Third World, despite the enormous growth rates of cities, are still
largely rural. The people have not yet reached the point where they have
started to react against the urban life. In fact, in West Africa, the word
‘bush’ is still used in a derogatory sense against things considered to
be primitive.

Couple to this high temperatures, snakes in the grass, tsetse flies
and all of the other things that can make walking in the African bush unpleasant
and you have the roots of the reasons why the aesthetic type of natural
history has not really taken off in the Third World.

The implications of this are profound, as it reinforces the separation
of the rural folk and city-dwellers (including virtually all the scientists).
The disciplines where this is felt most strongly are ecology and the environmental
sciences, where newcomers have neither a basic grounding nor an inclination
to learn about their flora and fauna. This, in turn, makes Third World nations
less effective at dealing with environmental problems themselves. And, as
the environment lies at the root of so many of Africa’s problems, this is
surely a matter of some concern.

Martyn Kelly is in the botany department at the University of Jos, in
Nigeria.

I mention this to introduce the topic of how Western higher education
institutions treat overseas postgraduate students and how much the average
PhD supervisor or MSc coordinator recognises the problems these students
face. Even if they have seen the culture from which the student comes, have
they ever tried to see their own culture, and their institution, through
the student’s eyes? The unspoken consensus is often that such students are
in Britain, so they must play by British rules; a peculiarly reactionary
attitude for a usually liberal profession.

The problem has been accentuated in recent years as universities look
to overseas student fees as a source of revenue. So, instead of questioning
it, the appropriateness of the system for these students is taken for granted
and more and more postgraduates are encouraged to come to Britain.

Even relatively simple pieces of apparatus can highlight the extent
of the culture gap. A British research student will have encountered automatic
pipettes and spectrophotometers in undergraduate class practicals and can
be tossed into a laboratory and told to get on with it. Research students
from the Third World may never have seen such things before, either at undergraduate
or MSc level. Yet the British supervisor, seeing paper qualifications, is
surprised and alarmed when the new students have problems in the early stages
of practical work.

The scenario can be repeated not only with apparatus that is more sophisticated
and expensive than an automatic pipette, but often with equipment that is
cheaper. Perhaps the relative cost of consumables was so high as to preclude
more than a minimum of undergraduate laboratory work.

How might this lack of exposure to practical techniques effect these
students’ development as scientists? Or, to put it another way, how much
of ‘science’ is an unteachable craft learnt through trial and error and
essentially ‘hands-off’ experience at the laboratory bench?

Even where laboratory work can be done, a poor library may affect the
researcher’s ability to evaluate correctly the significance of their results
and, thus, to pose the next question – creating a feedback loop which may
spiral the researcher further and further from mainstream research.

This, however, is the environment in which newly arrived Third World
postgraduates have trained and have gained their perception of science.
It is also the environment to which most of the students will return when
they finish their training. So exactly what role does and should the three-year
interlude in the West play? Enhancement of stature? A vital step to future
promotion? A thorough foundation on which to base a research career? Take
your pick. I would guess that the supervisor sees the last point as the
key one, while the student may well be thinking more in terms of the first
two. The frustrations of trying to continue to research to a Western standard
in the Third World may soon undermine the good intentions even of those
who think the third point important.

I worry that part of the above may sound mildly racist; that I am guilty
of the same crime as I complain of in project supervisors. I make the plea
that, as a lecturer currently working in a Third World university, I have
had a chance to compare the forces motivating those in academic life in
two different cultures. As a researcher in Britain I watched postgraduates
from Third World scientific communities struggle to make the adjustment
to Western conditions, but only now can I begin to understand the problems
that these students faced while in Britain and see the pressures they are
under when they return home.

When I proofread work for Arab students I found myself constantly crossing
out the word ‘the’. I later discovered that every noun in Arabic is preceded
by a definite article. This hammered home to me how important were nonscientific
factors in the life of an overseas student. I also noted that relatively
trivial problems such as this could adversely affect a student’s relationship
with his supervisor.

With the current economic climate in British universities, the drive
to attract overseas students (or, more accurately, their money) is unlikely
to abate. And it is unlikely that more than cosmetic changes will be made
to the system to help overseas research students. The onus will be on individual
supervisors, many of whom have no or little experience of the realities
of academic life in the Third World.

This is one more situation where the delusion that science is a purely
objective pastime hinders more than it helps. An ‘Anthropology for PhD Supervisors’
is long overdue, if only to recognise that supervising an overseas student
may be less straightforward than possibly expected. Perhaps more important
is a need for Western academics to face up to whether bringing a student
to the West to study is really the best option for the student and, by proxy,
for Third World science and development.

Martyn Kelly works in the botany department at the University of Jos,
Nigeria.

The difference, then, must lie simply in the amounts of money available,
access to the scientific literature and a conducive environment in which
to work. What I am coming to realise after working in the Third World for
some time is that the framework itself is entirely different.

I have reached this position only by straying into what many fellow
scientists regard as a rather dubious area: that of the sociology of science.
ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s exist to study, not to be studied, and the whole business of
high lighting them to be other than the wholly objective beings of their
(our?) fantasies is disconcerting. Yet, even if we regard ourselves individually
in this light, most of us, I am sure, will be quick to point out that X
is an ambitious, scheming old so-and-so who would dance on his mother’s
grave in order to get a chair or be made an FRS.

Part of the problem is that the structures of science throughout the
Third World are disarmingly familiar, so we expect them to perform in a
familiar way. Nonetheless, it is equally clear the former colonial powers
imposed these structures on cultures which are far from familiar. So why
should we expect the scientists to shed their cultural identities as soon
as they sit down at their desks and workbenches? In other words, if we want
to know what motivates a scientist anywhere, we have to look beyond the
confines of the laboratory to society at large. An important part of this
is knowing the parameters of the ‘reward system’ that operates, and how
these differ between cultures.

I am not going to say the reward system – promotion, membership of an
important committee, DSc and so on – is entirely objective or apolitical
in the West, but I feel reasonably confident in suggesting there is a greater
emphasis on talent (or, at least, productivity) than in the Third World.

Economic conditions have not favoured the advance of science in the
Third World in the same way, so science has not reached a stage where it
is able to lay the basis of a reward system based on merit. Instead, it
remains as a projection of the problems of society at large. Too often,
scientific talent is submerged in mediocrity.

If factors other than talent play a greater role in promotion, where
is the incentive to produce first-class science, especially when it involves
so much more effort than in the West? It is at this point that the commonly
articulated factors such as limited research funds, poor communications
and so on have their impact.

There are other factors as well. In Nigeria, for example, the traditional
structure of society is much more hierarchical, and a greater respect for
age leads to a reluctance to question what one is taught. And, just as in
other spheres of Nigerian society, there is some outright corruption; research
grants are likely to be ‘chopped’ for personal gain.

I paint a bleak picture, which is unfortunate as there are plenty of
good, competent and morally upright scientists among my colleagues, just
as there are unscrupulous scientists in the West. What I want to do is point
out the extent to which the cultural context can influence scientific output.

This is important because in my own field papers regularly appear in
publications such as the Journal of Ecology which indicate it is possible
to do first-class research with no expensive apparatus, and that the tropics
represent an ideal environment for this. As relatively few papers in this
journal (and others like it) originate from institutions in the Third World,
it is important for Western scientists to understand the reasons which inhibit
research output.

Much of the misunderstanding stems from a deep-rooted belief in scientific
universalism – the assumption that Western norms are applicable throughout
the scientific world. What is needed is an altogether different sociology
of science (or academia) to ‘explain’ how science in the Third World works.

The fate of Third World science has some interesting parallels with
the familiar tale of the Green Revolution. High-yielding varieties are replaced
by bright students who have been bred (educated) in the West, yet fail to
succeed in the Third World because of the high cost of inputs (apparatus,
chemicals, journals and so on) necessary to nurture them and a socioeconomic
system to which their training is not adapted.

One day we will learn that West does not mean best; but how long will
this take?

Martyn Kelly is based in the Department of Botany at the University
of Jos in Nigeria.

Some may add to lack of money the poor communications they enjoy with
scientific colleagues elsewhere. The biological journals in the library,
for example, are very limited in number and two to four months out of date.
And in the present economic climate the chances of attending international
conferences are remote.

A few colleagues may add the heavy teaching load to their list of woes,
though whether this is a cause or effect of the lack of research facilities
and textbooks is debatable. And I, as a newcomer, would want to include
the suffocating bureaucracy that seems to waste inordinate amounts of my
day. Take all of these factors together and there seem to be plenty of good
reasons why little serious research is performed.

However, one feels all the time that we are skirting around the real
reasons. All of the above, I am sure, are contributory factors, but even
if they were all dealt with overnight, bright and thriving research would
not automatically follow. Japan is a case in point; a country where, I am
told, research facilities are superb. Yet, the quality of fundamental research
in many areas, while competently performed on excellent equipment, often
fails to match that carried out in Western countries. We come, reluctantly,
to the conclusion that whatever is missing lies somewhat deeper than mere
practicalities.

An Indian scientist, Arnab Rai Choudhuri, put his finger on the problem
in 1985 in a paper in the journal Social Studies in Science. He added what
he called ‘proper psychological gestalt’ to the more obvious limiting factors
of money and communication. His reasoning goes a little like this: however
brilliant their teachers, undergraduates in developing countries are less
well schooled in the practice of science than their counterparts in the
West. Their training puts a heavier emphasis on an understanding of the
fundamentals of their discipline as it already exists than on striking out
into the unknown. At this point, the lack of money is clearly a key factor,
but for two reasons. The first is simply a lack of decent equipment on which
the students can learn their craft (my department, for example, owns just
one colorimeter). But the second is far more subtle: their mentors themselves
cannot do any meaningful research. The students know them as teachers of
science and not, through textbooks and the primary literature, as creators
of science.

Science is something that is created elsewhere, as reflected by the
origins of the staff’s doctorates in my own department: five out of seven
PhDs here come from Britain and only two from Nigeria. Likewise, the present
assistant lecturers all want to go to the West to do their PhDs. One of
them explained it to me like this: however good your conception of a research
project in Nigeria, you don’t know the primary literature well enough to
know if it has been done already and you can’t afford the equipment to perform
the experiments. He wants to go to the US to study biotechnology, though
in Nigeria’s present economic climate this is a remote hope.

However, there is more to this ‘proper psychological gestalt’ than simply
frustration: a key component according to Choudhuri is understanding that
science is an ungainly and awkward framework from which the ‘magnificent
structure’ that the student knows from his textbook arises but slowly. At
this point I believe Choudhuri is wrong in assuming that this shock is limited
to non-Western students: a good number of British PhD students start with
a rather glamorous view of research. However, most have dabbled with the
realities of ‘real’ research in their undergraduate projects, so Choudhuri
is probably correct in claiming that the transition to research is more
traumatic for a non-Western student.

If this gestalt is an attitude of mind that can be acquired, it is also
one that can be lost, for example, on return to one’s parent country. It
is tempting to speculate that the evident frustration caused by lack of
money is contagious and engenders an atmosphere that is generally unconducive
to research. These departments represent ‘partial’ science communities that
are, again in Choudhuri’s words, ‘provinces’ of the true ‘met ropolises’
of science in the West. And as they lose their gestalt, they also lose the
ability to imbue this in the next generation of students, thus perpetuating
the cycle. But the gap between these departments and the frontiers of research
is widening all the time, making the chances of catching-up that much more
remote.

Although Choudhuri is pessimistic about the state of science in India,
my impression is that the Indians have at least tried to get on top of this
problem by forming Centres of Advanced Study in various subjects. British
academics are still touchy about the creation of a tiered system of university
departments; however, a developing nation may have no choice. By concentrating
experts in a few well-funded departments the Indians have at least partially
overcome the gestalt problem and these centres produce a steady stream of
quality research. Equipment and communications with the West are still in
short supply but the atmosphere is stimulating, possibly more so than in
most British departments where experts in any one area are rarely concentrated
in this manner. Such centres can cater for only a small elite of students,
but at least it is a start.

In searching for answers to these problems, one again encounters a vicious
circle and suspects that money does play a crucial role: no money, no track
record; no track record, no money, would be a fair assessment of how many
funding bodies operate. The injection of cash must come from the West, yet
here one strays into another ‘grey’ area, this time of academic imperialism/colonialism
(see ‘Western imperialism; Third World pragmatism’, Forum, 10 February).
My experience is that Third World partners in projects are often very much
the poor relations in a parasitic or, at least, commensal relationship.

Injection of cash may not itself provide the necessary ‘pump-priming’
for the gestalt transformation; there must also be intellectual stimulation.
However, the amounts of money and time required are probably too high for
genuine partnerships to develop between Third World scientists and Western
academics who, after all, have their own careers to think of. More often,
research in an exotic part of the world, perhaps loosely allied to a worthy
‘aid’ project, is seen as one of the few ‘perks’ of the otherwise humdrum
existence of an underpaid and undervalued academic.

The cost of making a university in the Third World stand on its own
two feet and consistently produce world-class research is going to be high
because all three parts of the equation – money, good communications and
gestalt – need to be provided. The reality is that funding for higher education
falls between the sweeping vision of large-scale international aid projects
and the low-key ‘intermediate technology’ approach targeted at rural communities.
Creation of a higher education system that does not need to rely on Western
staff or training is simply not a glamorous enough goal. The status quo
is safe: plenty of postgraduate students from developing countries queuing
up to pay exorbitant fees and plenty of oppor tunities for Western scientists
to top-up their suntans.

Martyn Kelly works in the Department of Botany at the University of
Jos, Nigeria.