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Botanists who have converged on the Spanish capital of Madrid for the 20th International Botanical Congress from July 21-27, 2024, have taken a landmark decision even before the event starts.
They have voted to remove an extremely offensive term from the scientific names of over 200 plant species, The Guardian has reported.
However, in place of the old term, the new names of the plants will reflect their origins in the African continent.
A decision on these lines had been widely expected in the runup to the event. The coming days could bring about more such decisions, as botanists discuss whether the scientific names of plants named after Hernan Cortes, Thomas Jefferson, Cecil Rhodes, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong should be changed as many of their actions are not morally acceptable in today’s age.
The term that will undergo a change is Caffra, given to several life forms in Africa. It goes back to the days of European exploration.
Though derived from Kafir, the Arabic term in the Quran that means disbeliever or infidel, European explorers and colonists also gave the name to the black peoples of southern Africa.
The word acquired racially offensive and deeply pejorative overtones after the Afrikaner-dominated National Party under Daniel Francois Malan took power in South Africa in 1948.
Afrikaners are the descendants of Dutchmen, Huguenots (French Protestants fleeing religious persecution in Europe), Germans as well as other European ethnicities, who arrived as settlers in South Africa after Dutchman Jan van Riebeeck laid the foundation of the Dutch Cape Colony in 1652. The Colony was intended as a way station for ships of the Dutch Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (East India Company) rounding the Cape of Good Hope at Africa’s southern tip on their way to the Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia, and other Dutch colonial possessions in East Asia.
Among those abused with the term was the late Nelson Mandela. In his book Long Walk to Freedom, he describes occasions when he was abused with it by Afrikaner policemen at the height of apartheid in South Africa, which Malan’s National Party implemented as policy to segregate the country’s White, Black, Asian and Coloured groups.
The K-Word in South Africa and Namibia is considered similar to the N-word in the US.
However, the botanists who discussed the issue for a week, came up with a smart solution.
“Then a special case was voted in another part of the code: species with epithets derived from the root caf[f][e]r-. This word is nowadays extremely pejorative for people from Africa. But, it was not always so; the negative connotations started in the middle of the 20th century,” Spanish botanist Sonia Molino explained in an X ‘thread’.
“This means that, before it was offensive, many species were described with that root simply to denote that a plant grew in Africa. But no or almost no plant was named like that after it became pejorative, which I think is very significant,” she added.
She noted that the “consequence today is that it is very difficult to talk about such plants there, as it is a word that is even banned in some regions, creating a real communication problem”.
“This was discussed in the nomenclature section and finally the proposal was approved, which consists of removing the letter “c” from these plants, so that it remains as “afra” “afrorum” or “afrum”. It is an exception for this particular case,” concluded Molino.
The Guardian pointed out that over 200 species of plants, fungi and algae will see their names change soon. For instance, the coast coral tree will be known as Erythrina affra instead of Erythrina caffra.
