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Paballo Chauke and Shannon Morreira examine a drive by the University of Cape Town (UCT) to cultivate a more inclusive academic environment after a campus statue of nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil Rhodes was toppled in April 2015.

Chauke, a bioinformatics coordinator and environmental geography PhD student at the South African university, fears that the term \\u2018decolonization\\u2019 has lost much of its meaning since the statue fell, and is now at risk of becoming a mere buzzword, used by people to seem open-minded. He says: \\u201cI\\u2019m worried that people think it\\u2019s all going to be strawberries and cream, it\\u2019s going to be peaceful, it\\u2019s going to be nice, and people want to feel good, people want to feel comfortable.\\u201d

For Chauke, collaborating with other academics from Africa takes priority over the \\u2018standard\\u2019 practice of partnering with people from Europe and North America.

UCT anthropologist Shannon Morreira says: \\u201cIf we think about decolonization in African science, it\\u2019s not saying throw out the contemporary knowledge systems we have, but it\\u2019s saying build them up, diversify them, so that other knowledge systems can be brought in as well.\\u201d

This is the third episode of an eight-part series on science in Africa, presented by Akin Jimoh, chief editor of Nature Africa.

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