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Comment by chirau | Hacker News Reader

What's new here? As an African myself I am not surprised at all. History favors its author.

Explorer David Livingstone is credited with discovering the Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. Despite the multitude of accounts and documentation of the locals' Mosi-oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) prior to his arrival. But hey, according to history it seems the locals had never encountered a waterfall a mile wide and hundreds of meters deep whose plunge creates a mini eternal rainforest in the area and the plunge can be heard from a distance away out of sight of the falls themselves.

But yes, it was David Livingstone who "discovered" the falls. Oh, did I mention that from his own account, he was escorted by locals to the falls?

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That's similar to the argument you sometimes hear that Columbus didn't discover America - people already lived there. But from the perspective of Europeans, he certainly did. Similarly, it's not surprising you can "discover" a waterfall if you live right beside it.

Surely, humankind can legitimately claim to discover a planet, even if an alien race might have done so before us.

What is maybe fair is to ask in whose name something was discovered, and how we tell these stories. We can't say Christopher Columbus discovered America for mankind, but it was news to a smaller proportion of people.

Typically for Nobel prizes it's the person who wrote the paper who played the biggest role in early correct identification of the source and causes combined with spreading that in the wider scientific community, it's not merely who recognized it as a unique disease or simply studied it first.

The bar is simply higher and what's being awarded and therefore incentivized is the science part (which includes communication) not simply the discovery.

People running around trying to be the first to label it in their personal diary or in a local community isn't what is being incentivized.

Difference is that Muyembe sent blood samples to man who later had credit for discovery and acknowledges what happened:

> The man who gets the bulk of the credit for discovering Ebola is Dr. Peter Piot. At the time, he was a young microbiologist at the Institute for Tropical Medicine in Belgium. He was the one to receive the blood samples sent by Muyembe. [...] When asked if he feels responsible for writing Muyembe out of history, Piot pauses. "I think that's a fair comment," he says. [...] Piot says at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded. White scientists — with a colonial mentality — parachuted in, took samples, wrote papers that were published in the West and took all of the credit.

It's a bit like discovering the Americas when people already lived there. The falls were discovered and reported for the West by Livingstone.

That doesn't make the discovery less important from a Western history perspective? I guess it's about recognising which truth is being told.

For the North, not the West.

Not in the current version of history, see from Wikipedia:

"On this leg he became the first European to see the Mosi-o-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders") waterfall, which he named Victoria Falls after Queen Victoria."

Wikipedia is a good vehicle for correcting this excessively Eurocentric view of history. It's editable to anyone in the world, and it has always put effort into support all countries and all languages (even some fairly obscure ones). And it's used by everybody across the world. That makes it a great tool for teaching Europeans a bit about the rest of the world. Unlike most western encyclopedias, it's not just written by Europeans and Americans.

Last week I discovered a wonderful sushi restaurant near my work. I told my work friends about it and now we all love it.

It doesn't mean nobody in the world knew about that sushi restaurant before me. It means nobody in my group knew about it, nobody told me, and I found it by personal experience, and shared the information among my community.

So yes, David Livingstone discovered the falls.

We don't constantly have to try to degrade the contributions that western people made to the world just because they're white. Livingstone made huge sacrifices to push on where almost everyone else gave up and he linked together pathways of information that didn't exist before. He did the exploring; he took the risk; he should get credit _for those efforts and sacrifices_ as should the people who sent him. Its ridiculous to try to equate his achievement with the people who were simply born in the areas he explored and lived there as their default state of traditional existence.

That's not a good comparison, unless you're calling yourself the discoverer, i.e. the original discoverer, of the restaurant.

In 2004, Somoto canyon in Nicaragua was ‘discovered’ by Czech scientists despite the fact that it’s surrounded by farmland and has a fairly large stream/river running through the middle of it. Locals were well aware it was there.

Those two stories are different. One is being first Czech who found it for "western civilization" despite farmland of unrelated people being there. Another is receiving blood samples from someone and leaving that someone out of story, because quoting Piot who ended up having credit "at the time of that first Ebola outbreak, African scientists were simply excluded".

Moreover it has consequences: "During this outbreak, Muyembe has also made a decision many thought unthinkable even a few years ago. He decided that all of the blood samples collected during this Ebola epidemic will stay in Congo. Anyone who wants to study this outbreak will have to come to his institute. American scientists, who have led the way in studying Ebola, have privately expressed frustrations. But Piot says the decision was obviously made because of how African scientists have been treated. Western scientists, he says, should get over it."

I think that when you are making the "local farmers" assumption, you are assuming that Muyembe did not had the "real" involvement in research as Piot. There is no reason to assume that.

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