American Scientist

Elizabeth Rasekoala is the president and a founding member of African Gong, a network of organizations from across Africa working to improve public understanding of and engagement with science and technology. In 2023, she edited and published the book Race and Sociocultural Inclusion in Science Communication (Bristol University Press). She also gave the keynote address at the Inclusive SciComm Symposium in October 2023. She has been working on science communication, meaning scientists communicating with the public about their work, since her early career as a chemical engineer. She spoke to senior features editor Katie L. Burke. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you begin your career, and how did that lead you to science communication?

Science communication has been a passion, something that I’ve done alongside my full-time career as a chemical engineer in industry. What I’ve been doing in science communication has been about giving back to and advancing the field.

The spark came when I moved from my home country, Nigeria, to do postgraduate studies in chemical engineering in a UK university in the late 1980s. I didn’t know I was Black until I got there. We had postgraduate students from every part of the world. But none of the students of color were from the United Kingdom. And when you looked at the undergraduate level, there was not a single Black British student in the three-year undergraduate course. Not one.

I was struck by this profound racial dichotomy, and I will always be grateful that I had a supervisor professor whom I was able to have very straightforward conversations with at this early stage. I remember asking him, “Prof, what the heck is going on here?” And he was absolutely candid. No defensiveness. He said, “We have a problem here in our British science education system. It is rank with hypocrisy. We go round the world telling everybody how fantastic our education system is. African students like you can come into this university, and yet Black children going through our education system in the UK will never be able to come here—not because they are academically unable, but because our education system disadvantages them in these subjects.” Just a 15-minute walk from that university was a huge conurbation of mainly Black British and African Caribbean peoples. And they might as well have been on another planet. That was the beginning, then, for me to pull together people in networks—hence, African Gong in later years.

Once you had that realization, how did you start these networks?

My first network was the African Caribbean Network for Science and Technology in the United Kingdom. I brought together colleagues and peers to start engagement in inner city schools at primary and secondary levels. That was when we saw that science communication was a critical factor in terms of how young Black kids perceived science, themselves as scientists or not, and access and attainment issues.

We put together an excellent write-up on this: “The Black Hole in Science Ranks,” which I was fortunate to present at the American Educational Research Association in 1998 in San Diego. That was an eye-opener for many colleagues. That took us from the school system into the science communication arena.

How did African Gong begin?

In 2016, I gave a keynote speech at Ecsite [the European Network of Science Centres and Museums] in Graz, Austria. In the 1990s, I was the only Black person at Ecsite out of about 100 people. In 2016, I found myself delivering a keynote speech to an audience of just over 1,000 people. I could literally stand there and count the number of people of color present to be about 10.

In other parts of the Global South, I have engaged with different science communication networks, such as RedPOP [Red de Popularización de la Ciencia y la Tecnología en América Latina y el Caribe (Latin American and Caribbean Network for the Popularization of Science and Technology)] in Latin America. I remember challenging the Brazilians: In a country of 200 million people—56 percent of whom identify as Afro-Brazilian—I have never seen an Afro-Brazilian in any science communication event in Brazil. This country has the largest number of people of African descent outside the African continent. I saw this racial dichotomy in Latin America, and I saw it in Asia. And I began to realize what a massive global problem this is.

In 2014, we had a big science communication conference in Salvador, the most African part of Brazil. You walk on the road, and everybody looks like me. Then at this conference center, we found that the only people of color there were us—about 12 Africans, and not one single Afro-Brazilian.

That was when we decided to come together to set up this network. We were the last regional science communication network to be formed. There was Ecsite in Europe; RedPOP in Latin America and the Caribbean; ASPAC [Asia Pacific Network of Science and Technology Centres] in the Asia-Pacific; and NAMES [North Africa and Middle East Science Centers Network] in North Africa and the Middle East.

Your approach centering African languages in science communication is unique. How has your experience with various languages affected your perspective on science communication?

My mother is Benin and my father is Yoruba, so we spoke those two languages at home. But in Nigeria alone we have more than 200 languages and dialects. My mom speaks eight languages. When I was younger, I was speaking four, five, six—and that was all before English.

Part of the legacy of the colonial experience is this entrenched dominance of European languages. We all learn science in school in European languages. The opportunities to develop science vocabulary in our local Indigenous African languages are very limited. With most other topics, we are able to speak without having this whole framing in a European language. But when it comes to science, we have no other option but to switch into English or French or Portuguese.

If we restrict science communication on our continent to European languages, we are simply going to engage with a small urban elite. If you go to the rural areas where most of our people live, nobody speaks in English. A science communication exercise in English would totally lose everybody, even within the urban areas. If we want to break out of this elitist bubble, we have to use local African languages.

In 2020 African Gong partnered with the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences to offer science communication workshops to their master’s students, located in several different African countries. These workshops were in English yet encouraged the participants to develop outreach about their research in their Indigenous African languages. How did this idea come about, and how did you implement it?

The challenge has been getting science communication firmly on the agenda in terms of policy—because if these things don’t get into the policy space, resources are never allocated. The policy space had been a struggle until 2014, when the African Union Commission brought into place the Science, Technology, and Innovation Strategy for Africa. That was a real “wow” moment to have continental recognition for science communication.

African scientists and researchers were being expected to communicate their research, but nobody was giving them the capacity in terms of skills, aptitude, motivation, or any kinds of tools to do the job. Then, we realized that in a sense it’s a good thing that there’s nothing on the ground, because we can avoid the baggage of Eurocentric hegemonic norms and create a wholly Afrocentric science communication capacity-building program. What a wonderful opportunity.

That was how we conceptualized the program called Africa Scientifique Leadership, Knowledge, and Skills for Science Communication. It was premised on principles of Afrocentricity—mainstreaming African culture and context, African languages, sociocultural inclusion, scientific culture, and innovation. We targeted this program at the young emerging career level because we wanted transformation and sustainability. When you have limited resources, you need to invest them where they have the most long-term sustainability.

Another key aspect was to make sure that we had gender equity among the participants. And believe you me, in a field such as mathematical sciences where we started, it was a struggle. In 2020, 25 percent of the cohort were female participants. And we have worked since then to take that figure up to 50 percent, which we achieved in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

We realized that the best way to sustain this program was to deliver it in partnership with African institutions, and the first institution that came on board was the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS). And they said, “We have realized that our master’s students have a real challenge communicating their research with the public. Let’s work together.” We had students from different parts of the continent, and that made for very interesting discussions and dynamics. There were students from African francophone countries, anglophone countries, West Africa, Southern Africa, and different regions.

What are some examples of the students’ science communication projects?

One student, Thandiwe Dlamini, went back to Swaziland—now called Eswatini—to work on COVID-19 vaccine uptake. She wanted to enable her church community to deal with antivaccine sentiments. She came up with an activity using complex mathematical theory to engage her church members, adults, and youth. It was all done in her African language. She managed to get 60 percent of them to change their minds after her activity and agree that they would get vaccinated. It was amazing for her to get that success rate.

Another student named Everlyn Chimoto went back to Kenya. She decided to engage with her peers and say, “Folks, we are all using technology, but not in our African languages.” And she started to create a sense of advocacy. She’s now working on this topic for her PhD, using mathematical theory to work on translation systems on the internet that use African languages.

Everlyn was one of the winners of our female excellence awards. In the three-day intensive workshop, we provide two excellence awards for students. It’s a certificate, with a cash prize. That has been a big issue in science communication, in that it’s often done as service and volunteer work, but there are not always incentives to do it. Having an award is about practicing what we preach and realizing that one of the barriers is rewards and incentives.

One of the core elements of Afrocentricity is that our science communication activities should enable us to work with African communities to address real societal challenges that our communities are dealing with. Students came up with proposals about using mathematical probability theory to deal with problem gambling, drunk driving, and optimizing taxi routes. Minibus taxis are critical to transportation in Black and African communities. These are the kinds of science communication activities that you wouldn’t see in a European or U.S. context, but they speak so powerfully to African Indigeneity.

Your recent book brings together scholarship and practice from a wide range of science communicators, and it is especially notable for including scholars in the Global South. What needs in the field were you aiming to address as you put together this book?

We were trying to address three things: The first need was to create a globally inclusive platform where these discourses, knowledge sharing, and paradigm-shifting ideas for transformative change on race and sociocultural inclusion in science communication can come together in a cohesive set of narratives and impactful frames, so that we break through the circular nature of these discourses and challenges.

Second, there was a need to bring to the fore the voices and lived experiences of the many Black, Indigenous, and people of color who have been advocating for race and sociocultural inclusion in science communication across the various regions of the world—many unseen, unheard, and unknown—so that their diverse experiences can bring sharper insights into what transformation in diversity, equity, and inclusion should look like from their pivotal expert perspectives. The little bit that is out there on these issues—with no disrespect—tends to be very tokenistic and extractive, because it is coming from the Eurocentric perspectives of well-intentioned colleagues. They want things to change. They want improvement. But as we say in one of our African proverbs, “It is only the person who is wearing the shoe that can tell you exactly whether it is pinching at the toes or pinching at the heels.”

Third, we wanted to bring to the fore innovative solutions and good practice exemplars that challenge the inertia in the science communication field with regard to sociocultural inclusion issues, so that we can advance the pace of change in contemporary developments in science communication. In short, we want to situate sociocultural inclusion at the core of what defines excellence in the field, rather than continuing to be an optional extra or a nice-to-have. Can we hold the field to account and say if it is not inclusive, it is rubbish? Can we move away from just numbers to look at qualitative assessments of what excellence means in science communication?

My role model was my professor, all the way back in the late 1980s. This topic needs to be addressed with that same degree of candor and straightforwardness, without defensiveness—just tell it as it is.

Did editing your recent book change your thinking in some way, or reveal something new to you?

The research in many of the chapters uncovered the profoundly mind-boggling fact that scientific knowledge cannot be inclusively communicated when it has not also been inclusively generated, researched, and advanced in the first place.

A thread throughout the book explored the Global North–South divide, which prompted the question: How fairly are the fruits of scientific endeavors shared across the globe? Who benefits the most and the least? Again, you don’t think about these issues having an impact in terms of science communication. But they do. The legacies of these perceived inequalities impact trust in science.

How does one sustain a culture of inclusion when institutions are so resistant to change?

We need to break this lack of connection between different regions. That is how you deal with the resistance to change in institutions. If you can’t even get people of color across the Global North and South synergized, having a real cohesive sense of their mutual challenges, then how do we support one another?

After my keynote at the Inclusive SciComm Symposium, I was engaging with one of the African American ladies who was there, and she said, “I thought you had it made in Africa. I didn’t know you were dealing with these issues, too.” So for me, that was a real light bulb moment. It really speaks to the importance of having more of these dialogues.

We need collective activism. And it needs to come from solidarity between practitioners in the Global North and South, across race, gender, and all the other paradigms. No one can do it alone. No one region of the world can do it alone. We need to bring that collective strength and understanding to effect change.

A podcast interview with the scientist: