Page 35 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

W AFRICA’S BOTANICAL
LEGACY
A rare credit given to a botanist
slave attests to the part Africans
played in science’s expansion

Quassia amara is a beautiful pink flowering
shrub native to South America. Most plants
are named after the famous European men
who discovered them. But this one is named
after an enslaved African – Graman Quassi.
It’s a reminder of the important role that
African people played in the development of
botany. At the beginning of the 18th century,
Quassi was captured in Ghana and forcibly
transported to Surinam, a Dutch colony in
South America. Working on the plantations,
he got to know the local plant life well. Soon
enough, he was using extracts from this
incredible pink shrub, also known as ‘bitter-
wood’, to cure fevers and gut parasites.
When the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus
heard about all this, he was so impressed
that he named the plant Quassia amara after
the Ghanaian. Quassi’s story is inspiring, but
most Africans did not receive this kind
of recognition. Yet they too helped European
botanists understand the plant life of the
New World. From maize and yams to peas
and chocolate, European botanists relied Renaissance man Jagadish Bose made major
on African knowledge to cultivate and study discoveries in biophysics as well as his world-
tropical plant life in the 18th century. changing work in radio and microwave sciences

INDIAN AIRWAVES
W
Quassia amara,
named in honour A polymath and pioneer in microwave optics technology,
of Graman Quassi’s the Indian who heralded an age of mass communication
knowledge of the
bitter wood’s
medicinal properties At midnight on 15 August 1947, the polymath. Born in 1858 in the
first prime minister of independent Bengal Presidency of British India,
India addressed the new nation. Bose studied mathematics, plant
Jawaharlal Nehru famously physiology, biophysics and
declared: “At the stroke of the archaeology. He even wrote
midnight hour, when the world Bengali science fiction at the same
sleeps, India will awake to life and time as HG Wells was pioneering
freedom.” Nehru’s ‘Tryst with the genre in English. But Bose is
Destiny’ speech is considered one most celebrated for his contribution
of the greatest of the 20th century. to the study of radio and micro-
Millions of people listened as the waves. Through a series of
new prime minister’s words were experiments made in Calcutta,
transmitted across the airwaves to Bose proved that electromagnetic
radios in India and beyond. In using waves existed at lengths of just five
the radio, Nehru was relying on the millimetres. He was also the first
work of one of his countrymen born to use a semi-conductor to detect
nearly 100 years earlier. electromagnetic waves, now a
Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858– standard part of any radio or
1937) was the definition of a computer circuit.

Millions of people listened as the
new prime minister’s words were
GETTY/TOPFOTO transmitted across the airwaves

to radios in India and beyond

The Story of Science & Technology 35