At first blush, the question may seem race-obsessed and silly. After all, a person's attitude to science surely does not depend only on his or her race. But looked at over the broad sweep of our recent history, it is in fact a vital question, for democratic and apartheid South Africa have both understood science through race, with important consequences for us all.

What science meant to whites during the years of minority rule was complicated. Generations of white leaders were uncomfortably aware that they lived on the periphery of Western civilisation; the greatest achievements of their culture were always hatched by people an ocean away.

They invested heavily in scientific training and research, but feared that no matter how hard they tried, everything they produced would be derivative and second best.

And yet, scientific achievement was one of the things that they believed distinguished white from black civilisation. When whites invented missiles that could hit a target on another continent, or put a person on the moon, white South Africans owned these as their achievements, a sign that they were more advanced than the black people over whom they ruled.

That's a pretty awkward relationship with science. To feel both superior and inferior, both highly advanced and yet falling behind, is a difficult business.

That is why white South Africans got so dizzy with excitement on those rare occasions when they found themselves at the cutting edge of high technology, like when Chris Barnard became a national legend for performing the world's first heart transplant. It was, in a strange sense, confirmation that white South Africans were truly and meaningfully white.

And so, when the ANC came to power, it was clear that South Africa's relationship with science would have to change. Initially, the signs looked good. The ANC was a highly modernist organisation. While in exile, it invested a lot, if not in scientific training then certainly in the crafts of high technology, sending many of its cadres to study engineering and medicine. It seemed that the organisation was up to the task of breaking the link between race and science.

But once the ANC was in power, things quickly changed. The organisation may have embraced science in the abstract, but in the real world, scientific expertise was located in institutions and people it did not trust. Almost from the beginning, it found affinity with dodgy figures on the margins of science.

The most dramatic manifestation of this took shape in Thabo Mbeki's position on HIV/Aids. First, the then deputy president backed Virodene, a demonstrably ineffective and toxic treatment produced by a researcher with fraudulent professional credentials. Then Mbeki attached himself to a fringe online movement claiming that HIV did not cause Aids.

This is only the most famous example; the ANC's uneasy relationship with science is manifest all over the government. In the run-up to last year's global climate summit in Durban, the Department of International Relations distributed a draft position paper claiming that climate change was a hoax funded by Western governments who wanted to make money by forcing developing countries to buy green technology. The paper was eventually suppressed, but the fact that senior civil servants wanted to take it to the world as South Africa's position tells us something about the mood in the government.

One wonders what it will take for South Africa's governors to get beyond the idea that scientific knowledge has been captured by forces hostile to Africans.

It won't be long before most of the scientists and high technicians this country produces are black.

Surely, then, the idea that science is the property of enemies will fade? But that is too hopeful an answer. Scientific investigation will always be an international endeavour and South Africa will forever be on its margins; no matter how many local scientists are black, being comfortable with science will always require being comfortable with knowledge produced on foreign shores.

I suspect that South Africa's rulers will argue about science for a long time to come. At the heart of their dispute lies the question of what it means to be both modern and black. One side calls itself cosmopolitan and accuses the other of being backward. The other side calls itself soberly African and accuses the cosmopolitans of being naive about the West.

The irony, of course, is that as long as this unease about science continues, the ghost of the old apartheid idea that scientific endeavour is in essence a white achievement hovers in the background, refusing to die.