By
Obododimma Oha
I summoned
courage recently and bought a book in mathematics, but the softer side of
mathematics! The book, Mathematical Ideas by Charles D. Miller, Vern E. Heeren, and
John Hornsby, had been lying there in the bend-down bookshop near the
university. The disinterest in reading, what more a text in a frightening
discipline like mathematics, must have contributed to the text being unsold for
months. And so, what was the consequence? This buyer God-sent had to pick the
dreaded text at a give-away price! The seller and other sellers of snacks
nearby must have been wondering whether the buyer was led by an evil spirit or
he was simply trying to disturb his brain. Why was he rushing in where angels
in academia even fear to tread?
But the
seller and other people did not know that my “madness” has something to it.
Many years ago, when only a secondary school student, I missed the opportunity
of possessing mathematics textbooks, simply because I did not want to be a
burden of a sort on my father with recommended mathematics books, for
instance, Ordinary Level Mathematics by Harwood Clarke and F.G.J. Norton. The
almighty text was popularly called “Harwood Clarke,” simple. When I saw a copy
at a bend-down bookshop recently, I quickly bought it and it occupies a prized
place, not only on my bookshelf but also on my mind, especially the part in
charge of memory. So, you can now understand the spirit that took me close to
what I should dread; in fact, a discipline that is considered also a terrorist!
One other
reason for wanting to buy the book, Mathematical
Ideas, is that it brings up a historical and cultural angle to mathematics.
I opened the book and saw that, whereas mathematical ideas from the Arab world,
Europe, and Asia are documented, Africa is generally unrepresented again,
except for the some entries on Ancient Egypt. The contributions on numeration
by Babylonians are there. The ideas of the Ancient Greeks are conspicuously
present. From 3,000 B.C. to the present time, the mathematical thinking of
humans are documented, but that of my African ancestors are missing. And you
start wondering whether the African world merely accompanied or escorted the
rest of the human race to the planet called Earth. Didn’t one see one’s
grandmother calculating her possessions with goat’s droppings or white chalk on
the wall, like Unoka in Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart? Were those not sophisticated enough or not indicative of the
road to abstract thinking?
The politics
of knowledge production amazes me sometimes. Sometimes some are narrated as "knowers" and some as blockheads. Some may be lucky if they are kept at the
margins, while some are completely erased off. That a place has remained
dangerously impenetrable and “dark” does not mean that one has got access to
all the data before generalising. From goat shit to indebtedness encoded on the
wall, we are challenged to see the different shades of mathematical thinking in
cultures. Thus, it is wrong, just so wrong, to write off the contribution of a
world even before encountering it. This is not a matter of being centric,
Afrocentoric or Black-centric!
Whenever I
pick Mathematical Ideas to read
(indeed, it is a very rich text), I know that the absence of my ancestors in this
line of thinking is unfortunately glaring. I am counting the goat’s droppings
and wall markings of their sad erasure.
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