Charles Darwin stopped at Cape Town during the voyage of the Beagle, and some in that city are using Darwin's birthday to commemorate his visit. But some South Africans are ashamed at how his theory of evolution was used by early supporters of apartheid. Correspondent Rhoda Metcalfe reports.
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MARCO WERMAN: Charles Darwin is being remembered today far from where he was born and died. From Argentina, to Pakistan, to Australia, people are gathering to discuss the legacy of the world's most influential naturalist. In South Africa, that legacy is mixed. Scientists there are proud of the role their country played in the life of Charles Darwin, but some are ashamed of how Darwin's ideas were used early in the nation's history. Rhoda Metcalfe has the story from Cape Town.
RHODA METCALFE: As a young man, Charles Darwin traveled the world aboard the HMS Beagle. The ship famously took him to South America, and the Galapagos Islands. What's less well known is the stop the crew made here, at the southern tip of Africa, in 1836.
WILMOT JAMES: And it was on the return journey home. The sailors all wanted to get home, but Fitzroy, the captain, was an instrument man. The South African Observatory had just opened here, so they wanted to see the observatory. Darwin, of course, wanted to geologize, as they called it, so he stepped off.
METCALFE: Wilmot James is a geneticist, and chief organizer of Cape Town's 200th anniversary celebration of Darwin's birth. James wants the world to know the interesting role South Africa played in Darwin's life and work. Although Darwin himself downplayed it in his journals, the young scientist spent 18 days roaming the Cape peninsula on horseback. James says it was winter, and the weather was miserable.
JAMES: It probably rained a lot. It was probably gray, and there was a lot of haze around. We know he was always chronically ill; his tummy was sore. He probably wasn't in good shape. His comments are all that this is a miserable place to visit.
METCALFE: James is standing above a stretch of seaside rocks in Cape Town. Darwin is known to have come here and been deeply impressed. The rocks shift abruptly from black to white. Darwin realized they'd been fused in a volcanic catastrophe that would also have changed the habitat for plants and animals here. The idea was key to his later theories on how new species evolve. Even more influential during his Cape Town visit was a dinner party Darwin attended.
BRIAN WARNER: Behind us – in fact, if you look over there to the right – Wynberg Hill is there. They lived just on the other side.
METCALFE: On a grassy slope overlooking Cape Town, Brian Warner points to a distant neighborhood. Warner is a biographer of Jon Herschel, who was a world-renowned British astronomer living at the Cape at the time of Darwin's visit. Herschel was here to study the Southern sky, but he was fascinated by all of nature, including the Cape's unusual indigenous plants. He kept a garden; studied them. Shortly before Darwin's arrival, Warner says Herschel began speculating on the very question that would one day make Darwin famous. How do species evolve?
WARNER: He wrote a very substantial letter three months before Darwin arrived here, commenting on the possibility here of seeing species disappear and new species arrive.
METCALFE: Herschel invited Darwin, and the Beagle's Captain Fitzroy to dinner. Little is known about what they discussed that evening, but Warner said the conversation clearly impressed young Darwin.
WARNER: Charles Darwin says that Sir John Herschel talked very little, but everything he said was very important.
METCALFE: Warner and other researchers believe during that dinner Herschel planted, or at least fertilized ideas on evolution, in Darwin's mind; ideas that Darwin later developed and published in his ground-breaking book, "The Origin of Species."
WARNER: Remember, to this point in the Beagle voyage, he had not been thinking about evolution, transmutation, as such. He only started his first notebook on transmutation a year later, when he got back to England. That was the beginning of "The Origin of Species."
METCALFE: Alongside Darwin's intriguing visit to Cape Town lies a darker chapter in South Africa's connection to Darwin.
ALAN MORRIS: Can I show you one display? Walk around on the other side here.
METCALFE: Alan Morris is a forensic anthropologist. He leads the way through Cape Town's Museum of Natural History, and stops in a dark, empty corner.
MORRIS: There was a display here which I knew had been closed, which was a display of a group of San hunter gatherers, criticized by a very small, but vociferous group of people who say that this treats these people as if they're primitives.
METCALFE: Morris explains the museum closed down the exhibit in an effort to erase any leftover taint from the Apartheid era; a time when black ethnic communities, like the San, were often depicted by museums as childlike, inferior species. They were treated that way, too, by the Apartheid government. For more than 40 years, Apartheid leaders divided South Africa's black and mixed-race communities, and forced them to live in separate so-called homelands. Morris explains that Apartheid leaders justified their actions by adopting a twisted take on Darwin's ideas, known as Social Darwinism. In this theory, ethnic communities were believed to be progressing along separate evolutionary tracks, just like animals species.
MORRIS: So we could talk about Tswana culture, or Zulu culture, as being like a species. The people are part of it. They're ingrained within it. There was no room for individuals to move between cultures. The natural order of things was divided humanity.
METCALFE: Darwin himself never supported this notion. He believed that humans are all part of the same species, and he speculated that all humans originated in Africa. It was a controversial idea in his time, but research has proven him right. In fact, just four hours down the coast from where Darwin came ashore in South Africa, scientists recently dug up artifacts from what they believe could be the oldest community of modern humans. Again, Wilmot James.
JAMES: It's an extraordinary coincidence. Darwin passes through the Cape, thinks human beings came from Africa, traveled around the Cape without knowing that he was actually very close to a candidate site of human origins.
METCALFE: Cape Town's city leaders hope to capitalize on Darwin's intriguing visit during this year's Darwin celebrations. This week they're erecting the first of a series of commemorative plaques that will mark the route Darwin took during his stay. They're calling it the Darwin Trail, and hope tourists will be inspired to follow it. For The World, I'm Rhoda Metcalfe, in Cape Town.
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