3 Binary Synthesis, Epistemic Naturalism and Subjectivities: Perspectives for Understanding Gender, Science and Technology in Africa Damian U. Opata Introduction CODESRIA’s 2003 Gender Institute on Gender, Science and Technology was an exceedingly important one. Science and technology have, for more than three hun- dred years, been the most important factors shaping the modern world. In the process, they have revolutionised gender relations in both the home and the workplace. As Alvin Toffler (1999:9) notes, ‘the most important economic development of our lifetime has been the rise of a new system for creating wealth, based no longer on muscle but on mind.’ A new knowledge system come into being, resulting from the study and practice of science and technology. Before Toffler, Shirley Burggraf (1997) had written: Two hundred years is just a blink in evolutionary time, but within two centuries, we have developed from a frontier economy in which women were dependent on men for economic and physical survival (hunting, tilling the land, fighting) to an indus- trial economy with care taking, clerical, retail, and processing jobs at which women could support themselves at a low level but were still dependent on man for earning better wages and for fighting wars, to a post industrial economy based on knowl- edge, information, and service skills at which women seem to be as naturally adept as men. In spite of this major and irreversible development in the social division of labour along gender lines, the momentous revulsion over gender inequity felt by Western feminists has continued to be steadily and increasingly stimulated since at least the