Southern Africa produced little formal racial science before 1900 due to absent universities

Evidence

All blood is shades of red, even as the British thought theirs blue, and the boers definitely took theirs not to be black. Blacks wisely gave no credence to race as such before having it thrust upon them by Europeans. Saul Dubow rightly comments, however, that prior to the twentieth century there was little if any locally sustained work formally undertaken in southern Africa on the “science” of race. For one, local universities in South Africa only emerged in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and so there was almost nothing by way of the institutional apparatus of science until the twentieth century. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1426

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting contrast: colonized peoples had no native race concept until Europeans imposed it — worth exploring the pre-contact perception frameworks of Africans.
• XREF: connects to: The most race-saturated society hosted an academy that neglected studying race itself. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 547