What is in a name? Lots, as the Madrid International Botanical Congress is to find this July

What do Hernan Cortes, Thomas Jefferson, Cecil Rhodes, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Zedong have in common?

They are all men, you would say. Umm…okay. Try a bit harder. They are important figures in the history of humanity. Right. Anything else? They are controversial.

Gotcha! Yes. That is correct. And because they are controversial, an event being held next month could have wide-ranging implications: for humanity and for our planet’s biodiversity.

Hola Madrid!

The 20th International Botanical Congress will meet in the Spanish capital of Madrid from July 21-27, 2024.

It will decide on whether plants named after people who are considered racist, sexist or unacceptable by today’s standards of morality are to be renamed or not.

The Congress last met seven years ago. Since then, a number of proposals have been made regarding changing names of life forms (including plants, animals and fungi) considered offensive today. The Nomenclature Section will take calls on this.

It is the latest chapter in the ongoing culture wars. Earlier, the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s death saw similar actions.

For instance, monuments and statues dedicated to notable historical figures from the past were defaced, vandalised, destroyed or toppled.

These figures included explorer Christopher Columbus; US Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson; Confederate general and ‘Marble Man’, Robert Edward Lee; British slave trader Edward Colston and Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Even the Father of Indian Independence, Mahatma Gandhi, was not spared. Gandhi has been on the radar of critics who cite his negative disposition towards black Africans in colonial South Africa. His attitudes towards caste in India too have come under scrutiny.

Meanwhile, that same year, the Washington Redskins American Football team changed its name, which had extremely racist and pejorative connotations regarding indigenous Americans’ skin colour.

Now, this same lens will seemingly be extended towards controversial figures who have life forms like plants named after them.

‘A complicated, controversial history’

The naming and classification of life forms, or taxonomy, is usually attributed to the Swede, Carl Linnaeus, who came out with the first edition of his seminal, authoritative work, Systema Naturae, in 1735.

While the Linnaean system has been followed till now globally, its development for the last 300 years has been more or less parallel with European colonialism, which started with the discovery of the Americas by Columbus and ended, at least in name, after World War II.

As journalist and author, Zach St. George, noted in his exhaustive analysis for Yale University this January, the names of several life forms in the Linnaean system thus reflect the times when they were named after mostly white, western European men during the heydays of colonialism.

For instance, there is the Cortez’s slime mold beetle. It is named after Hernan Cortes, the Spanish Conquistador who infamously destroyed the mesoamerican Aztec Empire with support from local allies like the interpreter La Malinche and the Tlaxcallans.

There is…believe or not…Hitler’s beetle, Mao’s symmetrodont, Lenin’s ichyosaur, Cecil Rhodes’s kinetoplastid and the twinleaf, also known as Jeffersonia diphylla in the Linnaean system.

While Hitler, Mao and Lenin belong to the 20th century and stand incriminated of the loss of millions of human lives, Rhodes and Jefferson were feted in their lifetimes but are unacceptable today, in part because of the magnitude of their actions.

Jefferson, the third US President and a Founding Father, sired an entire family with his slave, Sally Hemmings, in his plantation Monticello in the US state of Virginia. In addition to the stain of being a slave holder — the transatlantic slave trade wrenched millions of Africans from their homelands and caused them unbearable pain and misery — Jefferson’s act of siring a family with a female slave is unacceptable in today’s times, when gender equality is non-negotiable.

Yet another deeply offensive name is Caffra, given to several life forms in Africa, as St. George notes. It goes back to the days of European exploration. Though derived from Kafir, the Arabic term in the Quran that means disbeliever or infidel, European explorers and colonists also gave the name to the black peoples of southern Africa, where it is today considered similar to the N-word in the US. The late Nelson Mandela, in his book Long Walk to Freedom, describes occasions when he was abused with the infamous K-word.

Is it feasible?

However, as St. George notes in his piece, while scientists have made several proposals — removing these offensive names, renaming the life forms after indigenous peoples, or even not naming life forms after people at all — many others disagree.

Critics point out that the exercise could be too humongous. Others, as St George found out, stated that the costs would have to be borne by taxonomists in poor and developing countries in the tropics by this action of people in the Global North who ‘merely want to virtue-signal’.

Yet others took it to a higher plane. No human being is blameless. And finally, those like Ukrainian botanist Sergei Mosyakin told St. George that it would be too ‘illiberal’.

Mosyakin, in fact, has proposed a middle path. He suggests adding a disclaimer that will warn people of the history of the times when the names were given.

The suggested disclaimer states: “Scientific names of algae, fungi, and plants were created and modified over the centuries by many authors of various national, ethnic, cultural, religious, political, historical, and other backgrounds, identities, origins, and traditions. Such names reflect the rich but also complicated and sometimes controversial history of scientific explorations and biological nomenclature.”

It adds: “Anyone using the scientific names of taxa governed by this Code should be aware that this Code is not intended for judging, evaluating, changing, rejecting, or censoring such names because of ethical, cultural, religious, political, social, ideological, and/or other principles, criteria, and procedures, except for those explicitly prescribed in this Code.”

What decisions the Congress in Madrid takes remains to be seen. But one thing is certain. As William Faulkner said once, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”