I felt myself flush with shame. I glanced down at my notepad, and skipped over several equally fatuous questions. I could always pad out the interview material with reminiscences from childhood friends … stock footage of Cape Town schools in the thirties … whatever.

“You’ve said elsewhere that you were hooked on physics by the time you were ten: you knew it was what you wanted to do for the rest of your life – for purely personal reasons, to satisfy your own curiosity. But … when do you think you began to consider the wider arena in which science operates? When did you start to become aware of the economic, social, and political factors?”

Mosala responded calmly, perfectly composed again. “About two years later, I suppose. That was when I started reading Muteba Kazadi.”

She hadn’t mentioned this in any of the earlier interviews I’d seen – and it was lucky I’d stumbled on the name when researching PACDF, or I would have looked extremely foolish at this point. Muteba who?

“So you were influenced by technolibération ?”

“Of course.” She frowned slightly, bemused – as if I’d just asked her if she’d ever heard of Albert Einstein. I wasn’t even sure if she was being honest, or whether she was still just helpfully, cynically, trying to accommodate SeeNet’s demand for clichés – but then, that was the price I paid for asking her to play the game.

She said, “Muteba spelled out the role of science more clearly than anyone else at the time. And in a couple of sentences, he could … incinerate any doubts I might have had about ransacking the entire planetary storehouse of culture and science, and taking exactly what I wanted.” She hesitated, then recited:

“When Leopold the Second rises from the grave

Saying, ‘My conscience plagues me, take back

This un-Belgian ivory and rubber and gold!’

Then I will renounce my ill-gotten un-African gains

And piously abandon the calculus and all its offspring

To … I know not whom, for Newton and Leibniz both

Died childless.”

I laughed. Mosala said soberly, “You’ve no idea what it was like, though, to have that one sane voice cutting through all the noise. The anti-science, traditionalist backlash didn’t really hit South Africa until the forties – but when it did, so many people in public life who’d spoken perfect sense until then seemed to cave in, one way or another … until science was somehow either the rightful ‘property’ of ‘the West’ – which Africa didn’t need or want anyway … or it was nothing but a weapon of cultural assimilation and genocide.”

“It has been used as exactly that.”