10 ‘The British, the French and even the Russians use these methods’: Psychology, Mental Testing and (Trans)Imperial Dynamics of Expertise Production in Late-Colonial Congo

Four decades later, when Kaoze’s innovative essay was long forgotten, a group of Belgian psychologists was preoccupied with the same concerns. By the late 1940s, psychological expertise had acquired an overwhelming legitimacy in the Congo, among both colonial scientists and the political milieux. But the possibility of developing effective and culturally appropriate diagnostic tools to assess the ‘mentality’ and/or the ‘intelligence’ of Central African people on the basis of Western scientific models remained a highly debated question, further complicated by the (new) challenges raised by urban social change and ‘acculturation’. These tensions were certainly not specific to the Belgian empire. As historian Erik Linstrum has shown in his landmark work on psychology in the British Empire, the powerful attraction of psychological techniques in the late-colonial period was inseparable from wider discussions about (in)equality, difference and domination in a context of ‘modernisation’ plans and developmentalist ambitions.4 Erik Linstrum, ‘The Politics of Psychology in the British Empire, 1898–1960’, Past and Present 215 (2012), pp. 195–233; Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Not surprisingly then, these techniques proved particularly attractive in Haut-Katanga’s towns and mining operations.

This chapter explores some of the specific forms and meanings of these discussions – and of the sudden authority of psychological expertise – in late-colonial Congo, including the industrial centres of the Copperbelt. As we shall see, their history is closely connected to the new scientific ambitions towards changing urban society that emerged during the same period, notably in Katanga’s mining towns, where the emergence of a supposedly new type of African urban modernity, combined with the need for cutting-edge industrial productivity, necessitated expert assessment and new methods of analysis.5 Benjamin Rubbers and Marc Poncelet, ‘Sociologie coloniale au Congo belge: Les études sur le Katanga industriel et urbain à la veille de l’Indépendance’, Génèses 99, 2 (2015), pp. 93–112. See also Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Restoring Order, Inducing Change: Imagining a “New (Wo)man” in the Belgian Colonial Empire in the 1950s’, Comparativ 28, 6 (2018), pp. 97–116. This history raises important questions about the ambiguous uses of expertise in an empire with a very specific history in the realm of knowledge production. As the few studies devoted to this history have shown,6 In comparison with other empires, the landscape of colonial sciences in the Belgian empire remains underexplored. See however Marc Poncelet, ‘Sciences sociales, colonisation et développement, une histoire sociale du siècle d’africanisme belge’, PhD in Sociology, University of Lille I, 1996; Marc Poncelet, L’invention des sciences coloniales belges (Paris: Karthala, 2009); Ruben Mantels, Geleerd in de tropen: Leuven, Congo & de wetenschap, 1885–1960 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007). knowledge production in the humanities in the Belgian Congo was, until the late 1940s, almost exclusively in the hands of non-scientists (i.e. of colonial administrators, former magistrates and missionaries). Moreover, in the 1950s, when the landscape of ‘colonial sciences’ became more ‘scientific’ and more professionalised, it may be asked if it was completely ‘colonial’ anymore.

The limits of the analytical category of ‘colonial sciences’ have been discussed by historians of other empires, an observation that also reveals a history shared across imperial borders.7 See for example William Beinart, Karen Brown and Daniel Gilfoyle, ‘Experts and Expertise in Colonial Africa Reconsidered: Science and the Interpenetration of Knowledge’, African Affairs 108, 432 (2009), pp. 413–33; Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’, Isis 96, 1 (2005), pp. 56–63; Frederick Cooper, ‘Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa’, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 10, 1 (2004), pp. 9–38. On the Belgian case, see Myriam Mertens and Guillaume Lachenal, ‘The History of “Belgian” Tropical Medicine from a Cross-Border Perspective’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 90, 4 (2012), pp. 1249–71. In the Congolese Copperbelt, as in the Belgian empire in general, psychological expertise was clearly built through exchanges and interactions across national and imperial borders, as this chapter demonstrates. There has been, in recent years, a growing interest in conceptualising empire and science as networks connected by various and multidirectional circulations.8 Benedikt Stuchtey, Science across the European Empires 1800–1950 (London: German Historical Institute, 2005); Brett M. Bennet and Joseph M. Hodge (eds), Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800–1970 (New York: Palgrave, 2011). The role of cross-border exchanges in establishing scholarly collaborations, research agendas and the complex dynamics between science and the politics of empire have attracted renewed attention (especially among historians of the British Empire), either through an imperial framework (flows of exchanges within the empire) and, more recently, through an inter-imperial framework (flows of exchanges between empires). As this chapter underlines, these registers were in no way mutually exclusive, as already suggested by recent historiographical debates about the dynamics of ‘imperial globalisation’ and the fluid intersections between the international, the imperial and the colonial.9 Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovky (eds), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer, 1870–1930 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro (eds), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (New York: Palgrave, 2018).

The history of psychological expertise and more precisely of mental testing in the Belgian Congo provides a particularly revealing terrain to analyse these issues. On the one hand, psychology occupied an in-between space in the traditional categorisation of the scientific landscape (social sciences vs ‘hard’ sciences). On the other hand, the Belgian empire always had a special and complex relationship to internationalism and inter-imperial comparisons. During the scramble for Africa, King Léopold II used strategies of internationalisation to assert the legitimacy of his rule (and to position Brussels as a centre of international expertise on colonial questions)10 Pierre Singaravélou, ‘Les stratégies d’internationalisation de la question coloniale et la construction transnationale d’une science de la colonisation à la fin du XIXe siècle’, Monde(s), 1, 1 (2012), pp. 135–57. . But the global dimension of the ‘red rubber’ campaign against the Belgian Congo’s atrocities instilled an enduring distrust of international interference in its colonial affairs. As historian Guy Vanthemsche demonstrates, these concerns fed paranoid anxieties among Belgian colonial leaders, that their sovereignty over Congo was threatened, that rival colonial powers and international institutions were sceptical of Belgium’s ability to succeed as an imperial power, and that there was an urgent need to demonstrate that Belgium was not only up to the task, but better than the others.11 Guy Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, 1885–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 109–111. The Belgian colonial worldview always remained sensitive about colonial comparisons. Inter-imperial allusions were used to assert the legitimacy of Congo’s supposed ‘model’ colonial practice, deploying discourses of ‘best-ness’ and exemplarity. At the same time, inter-imperial references, while often used to decide between policy options, were publicly played down in favour of the dominant rhetorical process of imperial self-definition that asserted an allegedly ‘unique’ style of colonial governance built on Belgian expertise and ‘know-how’.12 See for example Amandine Lauro, ‘To our Colonial Troops, Greetings from the Far-Away Homeland’: Race, Security and (Inter-)Imperial Anxieties in the Discussion on Colonial Troops in World War One Belgium’, Journal of Belgian History, 48, 1/2 (2018), pp. 34–55.

The first part of this chapter explores the ways in which these ambiguities played out in the emergence of psychological expertise in the Congo after the Second World War. The following section analyses the work of leading figures of psychological research conducted in the Congo, notably in industrial contexts and in the psychological laboratory of Union Minière du Haut-Katanga. Contrary to previous work on the subject,13 The history of colonial psychology in the Belgian Congo has already been partly explored by Poncelet, ‘Sciences sociales’, pp. 688–98; by the world-renowned Belgian artist Vincent Meessen (who created several exhibitions contrasting the work of colonial psychologists André Ombredane and Robert Maistriaux with that of Congolese artist Tshela Tendu in 2013, 2015 and 2017, ‘Patterns for (Re)cognition’ (Brussels: Snoeck & Bozar, 2017)); and in my own preliminary research published online: see notably Amandine Lauro, ‘Sur les traces de la psychologie ethnique – 2/2’, 22 June 2017, https://amandinelauro.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/sur-les-traces-de-la-psychologie-ethnique-et-plus-si-affinites-22 (accessed 21 February 2020). More recently and on the exclusive basis of published material, see also Marc Depaepe, ‘Tests, Measurements, and Selection in the Belgian Congo during the 1950s: the End of Racist Clichés?’ Paedagogica Historica 55, 3 (2019), pp. 493–510. this analysis is based on new archival material and unexplored sources that enabled investigation not only of the published intellectual work of these figures, but also the conditions of its production (from their sponsorship to the experimental challenges they faced in the field) and the technocratic uses that were made of their results, both in administrative and industrial contexts. The focus on the respective trans-imperial/transnational connections of these scholars also sheds new light on the multi-layered role of psychological expertise in sustaining and reconfiguring racial assumptions and (late) colonial imperial politics, including the intensifying internationalisation of colonial circuits of expertise production, whose Belgian-Congolese resonances are explored in the chapter’s final section.

These changes raised new questions and new demands for expertise about Congolese cognitive abilities, including (alleged) patterns of how intelligence develops and the potential educational adaptations required (of programmes as well as pedagogical methods).1 Marc Depaepe, ‘Belgian Images of the Psycho‐pedagogical Potential of the Congolese during the Colonial Era, 1908–1960’, Paedagogica Historica 45, 6 (2009), pp. 707–25. On the history of colonial education in the Congo, see Charles Tshimanga, Jeunesse, formation et société au Congo/Kinshasa, 1890–1960 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). As Linstrum has shown for the British Empire, such changes also raised technical challenges, as school places remained insufficient for the number of young people seeking secondary education. ‘Rational’ tests were therefore required to select the most promising candidates. At the other end of the scale, industrial employers, particularly from Katanga, regularly complained – like their counterparts in Central and Southern Africa – about the lack of qualified Africans for the growing number of skilled jobs, and the impediment this placed on productivity and wider economic development.2 Linstrum, ‘The Politics of Psychology’, pp. 225–6. See also Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 146 ff. For companies as well, devising efficient tools of selection and skilling required expert knowledge. The scientific authority of (applied) psychological methods of investigation and, more specifically, of testing prospective workers’ aptitudes, appeared an ideal way to optimise logics of selection while avoiding any substantive reflection on the structural consequences of Belgian’s limited investment in the education of its Congolese subjects. While these concerns were shared across empires in Africa, the extreme reluctance of Belgian colonial rulers to develop an indigenous educated elite meant that they took a distinct form in the Belgian Congo.

More concretely, the origins of intelligence testing in the Belgian Congo can be found in inter-imperial influences as much as in metropolitan ones. In Belgium as elsewhere in Europe, intelligence testing developed in the early inter-war period. ‘Scientific’ metrics of intelligence had emerged at the turn of the century on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was only after the First World War that mental testing expanded both in industry and education. Notions of merit, aptitude and efficiency were at the heart of this practice, but eugenicist ideals were also influential.3 For example, Adrian Wooldridge, Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1880–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994): John Samuel Carson, The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). On the more specific connections between the development of mental testing in colonial empires and Euro-American eugenic movements, see Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 85 and 108–12. In Belgium, psychometrics were first used in industrial contexts and in the surveillance of juvenile delinquents and mentally deficient children, before being implemented on a far greater scale after 1945, notably in educational contexts.4 Eric Geerkens, La rationalisation dans l’industrie belge de l’Entre-deux-guerres (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 2004); Veerle Massin, ‘Measuring Delinquency: The Observation, Scientific Assessment and Testing of Delinquent Girls in 20th-Century Belgium’, Journal of Belgian History, 46, 1 (2016), pp. 105–33; Patrick Sacré, Historiek van de PMS-Centra: bijdrage tot de studie van de geschiedenis van de PMS- begeleiding in België (Brussels: VUB Press, 1993), Ch. 3. Meanwhile, in the early 1920s, the Minister of Colonies had launched a discussion about the potential development of ‘physio-psychological’ tests and laboratories in the Belgian Congo’s emerging industrial centres, especially in Katanga. Contacts were made with the Bourse de Travail (Katanga’s parastatal recruitment bureau) but its officers, still struggling to recruit workers, dismissed the proposal.5 See the epistolary exchanges of October and November 1922 in African Archives (hereafter AA), MOI (3558). Nevertheless, the policies of workforce stabilisation pioneered by Union Minière from the 1930s, and their wider implementation across the colony after the Second World War, fuelled interest both in such testing and in potential inter-imperial exchanges on the subject.

As Linstrum shows, the Second World War was a turning point in the development of imperial intelligence testing, in which the British Empire was the leader.6 Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 120 & foll. British wartime authorities developed psychological testing in their quest for effective methods of evaluation and assignment for millions of new recruits. At the end of the war, Belgian authorities became interested in this new expertise. When, in 1946, delegates from the Belgian metropolitan army were sent to Britain to investigate its army’s new psychotechnical selection tools, they enquired about their colonial deployment. This Belgian delegation was apparently warmly welcomed: the British War Office shared the results of its latest ‘confidential’ experiments on East African forces.7 AA, FP (2614), ‘Selection of the Natives in Africa’, report, s.d. (December 1946 – January 1947?). Delegates came back impressed, and ashamed of having no answer when their British counterparts asked what had been done in this regard in the Congo. The Belgian Minister of Colonies expressed great interest in their report. The appeal of these techniques for the Force Publique (the Congolese colonial army) was strong at a time when ‘winds of change seem to blow on the Dark Continent’; the promotion of Congolese non-commissioned officers, requiring new systems of selection and appointment, was envisioned as a potential ‘proactive’ response to this new context.8 AA, FP (2614), Minister of Defense to Minister of Colonies, 21 December 1946. In Brussels, a search was launched for suitable candidates for a future team of psychometric experts. In the colony however, Force Publique commanders were less than excited. They had also sought foreign expertise, but in doing so had favoured other circuits of knowledge circulation, circuits that were less trans-imperial but no less international: they had chosen to go to South Africa.

South Africa already had a solid tradition of scientific, administrative and above all industrial engagement in mental testing procedures. While some South African studies of racial intelligence comparison had already been criticised in international scientific circles in the 1930s, the country’s expertise on applied psychometrics was still widely acknowledged.9 Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 197 & foll.; Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 106 & foll. Colonial Belgian medical officers of the Force Publique visited the Johannesburg-based South African National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) a few months after its establishment in early 1946. It is unclear how the connection was established, but the Belgian delegation returned convinced of the relevance of these techniques, yet apprehensive of the work required, particularly in adapting Western testing methods for use with African people. Their subsequent exchanges with the Ministry of Colonies reveal competing visions of scientific legitimacy in post-war colonial knowledge production. They also reveal the ways in which such competing visions could be nourished and/or justified by different international connections. For the Force Publique in Léopoldville, the development of efficient psychotechnical expertise must be anchored in ‘colonial sciences’ and therefore established by a specialist in ‘the mentality of the natives’ who would be trained in psychology at a later stage.10 AA, FP (2614), Commander in Chief of the Force Publique and Governor General to Minister of Colonies, 13 February 1947. For some metropolitan administrators however, the appeal of such expertise lay precisely in the fact that it was not specifically ‘colonial’ but rather ‘modern’ and global. It thus offered the prospect of a technocratic and efficient government of minds and of people, one that could equally be applied to the reformed methods of colonial planning. They therefore recommended recruiting a Western expert in applied psychology to develop such programmes, who could be initiated into colonial specificities at a later stage.11 AA FP (2614), reports and epistolary exchanges in 1946–47.

These discussions reveal the growing importance of psychological expertise in the late 1940s, not only among the colonial administration but also among colonial companies. In this context, Union Minière was a leading force, with inter-imperial connections of its own. These connections remain difficult to trace, but on the other side of the Copperbelt border, Northern Rhodesian mining companies were pioneers in the use of aptitude testing in industrial areas (well in advance of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute which only subsidised research on this topic from the 1960s).12 Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 160–61 and Linstrum, Ruling Minds, p. 79. Very little is known about the use of psychometrics by Northern Rhodesian industrial companies before the mid-1960s, notably because this use did not lead to any significant publications before this decade: see e.g. S. H. Irvine, ‘Ability Testing in English-Speaking Africa: An Overview of Predictive and Comparative Studies’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, 34 (1963), pp. 44–55. Given the current state of research, a comparison with their Congolese counterparts remains therefore extremely difficult. At a 1949 meeting in Brussels on to the future use of psychological testing by colonial administrators, the Union Minière delegate expressed astonishment at the persistent scepticism of some members of the colonial medical aristocracy towards such testing procedures. The UMHK delegate declared that the ‘British, the French and even the Russians use these methods’, and proceeded to name-drop famous psychology professors from prestigious European and US universities who supported their use; in this way he used Belgium’s sensitivity to inter-imperial comparison to defend the legitimacy of psychological testing. As an actor of strategic importance in the Belgian colonial landscape and the global mineral economy, Union Minière’s voice was not only well-informed but also influential.

From a larger perspective, psychology also served as a powerful ideological device among Europeans in post-Second World War Congo. In popular publications, colonial writers, ideologues and missionaries talked more than ever about the ‘psychology of the native’ in a modernist lexicon that often replaced previous references to the ‘mentality of the primitive’. This new vocabulary was convenient: it allowed the evocation of the supposedly ‘innate’ features of the Congolese état d’esprit (state of mind) alongside the challenges of ‘modernity’ and ‘acculturation’ in the context of intensifying urbanisation.13 As in other contexts, as shown by Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 155 & foll. and Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), Ch. 5. On the specificities of the Belgian-Congolese context, see Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Restoring Order, Inducing Change’, pp. 97–116. These combined preoccupations would offer a breeding ground for the development of research funding opportunities sponsored by the colonial state and companies in the 1950s. While Copperbelt urban centres were not the only focus of this new research, Union Minière was particularly invested in the development of this new kind of analysis.

Less than one year after his appointment, Ombredane left for a first mission in the Belgian Congo. Nothing suggests a previous interest in colonial questions. Evidence suggests he was commissioned by the Minister of Colonies to lead a reconnaissance mission: Ombredane was seemingly asked to conduct exploratory research to develop psychotechnical tools for the colony. His fieldwork notebooks and publications show his astonishment with colonial racism and the mediocrity of Belgian ‘experts’ he met there.3 Royal Museum for Central Africa archives (hereafter RMCA) ‘Carnets de note André Ombredane’, DA.8, in particular notebooks 9, 10 and 11, In 1951, he was again commissioned by the colonial administration, this time by the new Fund for Native Welfare (Fonds du Bien-Être Indigène) to experiment in aptitude and personality testing, in collaboration with Kasai’s mining company, Forminière.4 Forminière was particularly involved in diamond-mining in Kasai. Ombredane led several subsequent missions in the Congo, funded variously by the Fund for Native Welfare,5 Fonds du Bien-Être Indigène, Une œuvre de coopération au développement: quinze années d’activité du Fonds du Bien-Etre Indigène au Congo, au Rwanda et au Burundi, 1948–1963 (Brussels FBI, 1964), pp. 130 & foll. colonial companies, his university, and even by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).6 ULB archives, A. Ombredane personal file, minutes, meeting of the CEMUBAC – Psychology Section, 9 March 1956. In 1952 UNESCO included Ombredane in an international team assembled to study ‘the psychology of the film experience’ in Africa,7 ‘Enquête filmique au Congo belge par le Docteur Ombredane’, Ouest-France, 7 March 1956; Francine Robaye, ‘Propos inédits du professeur Ombredane sur les niveaux de compréhension du film par les noirs congolais’, Bulletin du Centre d’études et recherches psychotechniques, 8 (1959), pp. 15–23. in the context of the organisation’s campaign for the use of cinema in education in ‘developing countries’.8 Zoë Druick, ‘UNESCO, Film, and Education: Mediating Postwar Paradigms of Communication’ in Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (eds), Useful Cinema (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 81–102. Meanwhile, Ombredane published his first articles on his Congolese experiences. While his results were consistent with the anti-racist stance of UNESCO, they were probably not those that the colonial administration had expected.

Ombredane’s most important article was published in 1951 in L’Année Psychologique, the leading French-language cognitive psychology journal. Entitled ‘Principles for a Psychological Study of the Blacks in the Belgian Congo’, it centred on a provocative statement: most colonial notions regarding Congolese people’s intelligence were stereotypes. 9 André Ombredane, ‘Principes pour une étude psychologique des Noirs du Congo belge’, L’Année Psychologique 50 (1949), pp. 521–47. Ombredane chose to approach the making of these stereotypes from a psychological perspective: he analysed interviews with Europeans introduced to him as experts in colonial questions, but whom Ombredane turned into subjects of psychological investigation. In what he termed a ‘catechism’ for psychological research in colonial Africa, Ombredane also insisted that cultural biases were inherent in psychological testing.10 Ombredane, ‘Principes’, p. 547. Even non-verbal tests contained culturally specific visual hints, all the more given that both the context and the very idea of such testing was unfamiliar to those tested. In an original way for the time, for the Belgian Congo and for an applied scientist, Ombredane emphasised the problems arising from the colonial context on the conditions of knowledge production – and even its very possibility. ‘The more or less brutal and caustic [grinçante] acquiescence’ demanded by colonial rule and the ‘behavioural constraints’ it imposed on Congolese people, he declared, necessarily affected their reactions to tests, and scientists should therefore be cautious about their validity.11 Ibid., p. 525. Ombredane also insisted that the differences arising from test subjects’ varied level of schooling should not be interpreted in terms of ‘intelligence’ or ‘evolution’, but rather as an acquired familiarity with European visual culture and intellectual mechanisms.

Ombredane’s work was not however free from primitivist clichés or essentialist assumptions about ‘African culture’. Many of his assertions, like other late-colonial experts, raised the possibility of arguing ‘for cultural difference, without being read as arguing for racial difference’.12 Megan Vaughan, ‘Introduction’, in Sloan Mahone and Megan Vaughan (eds) Psychiatry and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007), p. 9. His work was also based more on observation of than on interaction with his subjects,13 Gerd Spittler, ‘L’anthropologie du travail en Afrique. Traditions allemandes et françaises’ in Hélène D’Almeida Topor et al. (eds), Le travail en Afrique noire: Représentations et pratiques à l’époque contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 2003), pp. 17–42, pp. 27–28. and he never credited the Congolese testing/research assistants whose anonymous contributions can nevertheless be glimpsed in fieldwork photographs. Nonetheless, after trying various test models, he concluded that ‘to go in blind in testing and to compare the results to those of the Whites without giving it second thoughts’ would produce ‘results which mean nothing’.14 Ombredane, ‘Principles’, p. 547. The political significance of these conclusions was also reflected in his publication strategy: one year later, Ombredane participated in a special issue of the Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist journal Présence Africaine, alongside scholars such as sociologist Georges Balandier and anthropologist Michel Leiris.15 André Ombredane, ‘Les techniques de fortune dans le travail coutumier des Noirs’, Présence Africaine 13, 1 (1952), pp. 58–68.

André Ombredane’s work raises questions about ‘science’ produced in a colonial context, here commissioned and funded by the colonial state, but whose results did not support the intellectual and political foundations of colonialism, questions that have been at the heart of recent explorations of knowledge production in late-colonial Africa.16 Similar conclusions have already been made by Linstrum, ‘The Politics of Psychology’. With regard to Ombredane, the issue arises of the relevance of the knowledge he produced for his funders. It is for instance unclear in what ways much of his intellectual work was useful for the mining companies that funded his research. Explaining this is not aided by the tendency of many scientists to adopt conflicting positions depending on their audience. Ombredane made many promises to his various funders, while his personal notebooks show that from the start he intended to orient his research in different ways. In his publications and in numerous press interviews, he never openly criticised colonial rule and policies; as Helen Tilley has noted, criticising racial sciences did not necessarily mean criticising racial domination.17 Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 218. In his private notebooks however, Ombredane expressed his disdain for the Belgian colonial administration in general and his benefactor in particular: ‘Fund for Native Welfare? What welfare? They make constructions that impoverish the customary work of the Blacks and represent for them only forced labour [corvées]. Wouldn’t it be better to start with providing them with enough food?’18 RMCA, ‘Carnets de note André Ombredane’, DA.8, Notebook 18.

Union Minière’s interest in such techniques complemented the preoccupations of the Catholic Church in Katanga. Both church and company were worried about André Ombredane’s first research visits, because of his connections with Union Minière’s rival Forminière,22 KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 154–5 – 6.003, L. Wallef to F. de Hemptinne, 29 September 1952, and his affiliation with the non-Catholic Free University of Brussels. This generated concern that his psychological expertise might be infused, as one Catholic professor suggested, ‘with a spirit of anti-missionary criticism’.23 KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 155–6 – 6.004, J. Nuttin, note (October 1953). Mission leaders were aware of the growing authority of psychological expertise and its potential influence at a time when their virtual monopoly over colonial education was being questioned.24 Patrick Boyle, ‘School Wars: Church, State, and the Death of the Congo’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 33, 3 (1995), pp. 451–68. Church leaders were clear that ‘we are presently in a phase in which all the educational work of the missionaries is at risk of losing its efficiency and prestige, if we don’t try to establish it on a more solid basis’.25 KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 155–6 – 6.004. J. Nuttin, Confidential Note, n.d. (1953). From the start, Union Minière intended the (Catholic) University of Leuven to be a privileged institutional partner of the future Centre.26 Mantels, Geleerd in de Tropen, pp. 156–7. They generously paid two of Leuven’s most famous psychology professors (ecclesiastic Joseph Nuttin and psychiatrist Charles Mertens de Wilmars) to plan the Centre and supervise its operations.27 See the epistolary exchanges in KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 156–7 – 6.005.

The leading role of these Leuven psychologists did not mean that the Centre’s connections were limited to Belgium and its empire. By the international standards of the time, the Centre’s team was well-qualified: its first director Paul Verhaegen and his colleagues were involved in international networks and published in international journals.28 On more details on the published work of Paul Verhaegen, see Depaepe, ‘Tests’, pp. 497–8. At least two of them had received scholarships to study psychology and/or anthropology in the United States. In the context of a growing Americanisation of research, these connections provided important intellectual credentials. While these connections remained Western and Atlantic, they were sometimes wider still, as the case of Maria Leblanc (1926–1959), one of the very few women in the field, illustrates. A young graduate in psychology involved in an international organisation of lay missionaries, Leblanc was studying at the University of Chicago when she was advised by one of her former Leuven professors to apply for a position at the Centre. When she learned her application had been successful, she trained in African studies and took anthropology classes (at the University of Chicago, a world-class university in this field), and arranged discussions with students from African countries to obtain reading recommendations.29 KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, box 156–7 – 6.005, M. Leblanc to J. Nuttin, 1 April and 19 November 1953. This was a very different initiation to Africa than was usually provided to new colonial employees at the Belgian Université Coloniale, where most professors were former Belgian colonial administrators.

Given this background, the reluctance of some Centre employees to use some of the proposed testing procedures appears more understandable. During the second half of the 1950s, the Centre was closely involved in aptitude/intelligence testing and the professional placement of both adult Union Minière employees and their children. Its experts were preoccupied with the cultural biases involved in psychological testing. As their reports reveal, they spent almost two years researching and testing the validity and necessary adaptations of various models. In 1955, while their psychometric toolkit was finally ready, their annual report made clear they were not entirely confident of their choices and that, at least with regards to Union Minière’s aim of establishing rational selection for secondary schools, it remained impossible ‘to predict the success’ of pupils on the basis of testing. They could certainly eliminate the ‘duffers and the retards’ and select the ‘particularly gifted’, but going further would mean selecting ‘at random’.30 Belgium State Archives, UMHK archives (hereafter UMHK), I 29, 672, ‘Les cancres et les débiles’: Trimestrial report of the Centre of Psychology and Pedagogy, September–December 1955 Their advice to the company was that every Congolese (male) child should be offered a place in general secondary schools while the start of his specialised, professional training should be delayed.31 UMHK I 29, 672, conclusions of several reports between 1954 and 1958. Not surprisingly, tensions with the company management emerged in the late 1950s. Several team members criticised the company’s utilitarian vision for the Centre,32 Jean-Louis Laroche even denounced in 1957 the ‘censorship’ of his work by the company and the impossibility to develop proper scientific research within the centre: KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 155–6 – 6.004, J.-L. Laroche to J. Nuttin, 9 January 1957, and one even questioned the absence of Congolese psychologists, regrettable given the challenges posed by the necessary ‘Africanisation’ of testing protocols.33 KUL, Collection J. Nuttin, 155–6 – 6.004, J.-L. Laroche to J. Nuttin, 6 August 1956. This was however one of the only instances where Congolese assistants were mentioned: the staff of the Centre of Psychology and Pedagogy appears to have remained completely white until independence.

In 1952 and 1953, Maistriaux was appointed and funded by the Minister of Colonies for two three-month missions in the Congo. Their objective was twofold: to provide a general ‘scientific’ overview of the ‘real’ level of intelligence of Congolese people, and to devise testing methods to be used as tools of professional selection and educational placement in the colony. That Maistriaux had always been an armchair psychologist, with no clinical or even experimental experience, does not seem to have been a problem for the colonial administration. That he was a complete beginner in colonial issues was, however, an impediment that had to be solved. The authorities therefore supported what may be understood as inter-imperial training visits to the Department of (physical) Anthropology at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and to the French Colonial Health Headquarters in Marseille, where Maistriaux witnessed intelligence testing of West-African tirailleurs (French colonial infantry).39 Robert Maistriaux, L’Intelligence noire et son destin (Brussels: Problèmes d’Afrique centrale, s.d. (1957), pp. 3–11. He also networked with a French research centre founded in the 1930s, the Institut de Psychologie des Peuples.40 Frédéric Carbonel, ‘Origines et développement de l’Institut Havrais de Sociologie économique et de Psychologie des Peuples’, Les Cahiers Internationaux de Psychologie Sociale 77, 1 (2008), pp. 69–86. This Institute was not exactly a centre of scientific innovation; closely tied to the French colonial milieux, its work continued the French tradition of psychologie ethnique, a ‘psychology without psychologists’ that sought to identify the collective psychological traits of so-called ethnic groups and their racial, environmental and cultural determinants.41 Pierre Singaravélou, ‘De la psychologie coloniale à la géographie psychologique: Itinéraire, entre science et littérature, d’une discipline éphémère dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, L’Homme et la société 167/168/169 (2008), pp. 119–48, p. 120. This discipline was already on the international scientific margins in the inter-war period and by the 1950s the Institut was a relic of what was generally regarded as a disreputable tradition of ‘applied colonial science’. Maistriaux was virtually the only psychologist working in the 1950s Belgian Congo to refer to their publications. In return, the Institut’s journal published Maistriaux’s first ‘colonial’ article in 1955: this reported the results of his first investigation in the Congo, in a special issue alongside an article by a self-proclaimed supporter of ‘racial psychology’ comparing the IQs of the ‘black’, ‘yellow’ and ‘white’ races.42 Robert Maistriaux, ‘La sous-évolution des Noirs d’Afrique: sa nature, ses causes, ses remèdes’, Revue de Psychologie des Peuples, 10 (1955), pp. 167 & foll., pp. 997 & foll. George Heuse, ‘Race, racisme et antiracisme’, Revue de Psychologie des Peuples, 10, 4 (1955), pp. 378–81, pp. 368 & foll. Even if Maistriaux’s professional itinerary was less cosmopolitan than Ombredane’s, his (colonial) career was therefore not without its international connections. They were certainly constructed primarily along inter-imperial (rather than inter-national) lines, but they illustrate the multiple possibilities of scholarly networks and exchanges and the multiple intellectual/political affinities that they could both reflect and produce.43 Frederick Cooper, ‘Development’; Heather Ellis, ‘Collaboration and knowledge exchange between scholars in Britain and the Empire, 1830–1914’ in Heike Jöns, Peter Meusburger and Michael Heffernan (eds), Mobilities of Knowledge (Springer: New York, 2017), pp. 141–55.

In the Congo, Maistriaux conducted experimental psychological tests in diverse rural and urban locations, notably in Katanga, so as to avoid ethnic and ‘environmental’ biases. Helped by a colonial official appointed to assist him, Maistriaux did not however share the scruples of Ombredane (or even UMHK’s team of psychologists) regarding potential cultural biases of tests directly imported from the Western world. Once he had rejected verbal tests and slightly simplified others, he was confident in the relevance of his findings, soon to be known as the ‘Batterie Maistriaux’. This was an assembly of various intelligence/mental aptitude tests (such as the Raven Progressive Matrices, the Kohs Cubes Test or the Golden-Sheerer Stick Test), mostly developed in Western contexts. In order to ensure its validity, Maistriaux made sure to double-check his results once back in Belgium. There, he compared them with tests of a population he considered had ‘similar’ cognitive abilities as most Congolese subjects: Belgian children considered ‘mentally retarded’. Not surprisingly, he concluded that while there was no difference of nature between ‘Black’ and ‘White’ people, there was a significative difference in proportion. While clearly ill at ease with the vocabulary of race, Maistriaux did not avoid discussion of the ‘biological conditions’ in which the intellectual development of Congolese people occurred. He also attributed the low performance of ‘Central African Blacks’ in ‘all exercises requiring abstract intelligence’ to the ‘debilitating influence’ of their ‘environment’ (which supposedly provided little intellectual stimulation) and the inner personality traits of ‘the Black’, referring mainly to his/her ‘great emotionality’ and ‘proverbial idleness’.44 Maistriaux, L’Intelligence noire. See also Ch. Didier Gondola, Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 52–3. In short, this work was well suited to the racial premises of colonial domination as well as its new vocabulary: Maistriaux emphasised to his readership that this was not about ‘primitive minds’ or ‘pre-logical thought’, but instead about different paths of ‘development’.

Even by the standards of the time however, this was poor science45 As already noticed by Mallory Wober, Psychology in Africa (London: International African Institute, 1975), p. 57. and, in a sense, it is precisely this that made Maistriaux’s work appealing to the colonial authorities. Maistriaux’s confidence in the relevance of psychometric tests and in his own results provided the colonial administration with simple answers to complex questions – and allowed for their straightforward translation into bureaucratic uses. From 1954, the Batterie Maistriaux was widely used for the professional selection of African auxiliaries in the administration and the police. The Batterie had several ‘levels’ so that it could be adapted to various contexts and age-groups, and one version became the standard tool of selection for applicants to state-sponsored secondary education. The Belgian colonial archives contain hundreds of such tests, carried out individually and collectively, and always under the strict surveillance of psychotechnical ‘specialists’ – at least in theory. For some specific tests, the ways in which the test subjects approached the problems with which they were faced formed part of their evaluation. But here again, ‘expertise’ proved a relative concept: test evaluations were often approximate, including amateurish comments such as: ‘Hesitant, works at random. The pieces do not fit. Close-minded. Poor coup d’oeil: gross mistakes!’46 AA, GG (7283). Testing Police Academy of Leopoldville, 1957. Traces of the extended use of the Batterie Maistriaux can also be found in AA, GG (5398, 6949, 16510, 18059, 18066 and 19067).

From the mid-1950s, most of these tests were planned and implemented by the Centre Pilote d’Orientation Professionnelle (Pilot Centre for Vocational Guidance) in Léopoldville, founded in 1956, and by its sub-departments in other provinces. The Centre Pilote thus decided the professional fate of thousands of Congolese pupils. It claimed to promote ‘more efficiency and justice in the allocation of energies’ and asserted that ‘one of the biggest hopes of the Congo lays in the ability of Africans to adapt themselves properly to their tasks’.47 Emile Lobet, ‘L’Orientation professionnelle au Congo belge et au Ruanda-Urundi’, Bulletin des séances de l’ARSOM, 3, 4 (1957), pp. 800–816, p. 805. Here again, consistent with Union Minière‘s approach to workforce management and individual aptitudes,48 For an example of the way in which these discourses were presented to Congolese workers, see ‘A chacun sa place’, Mwana Shaba, March 1957, 3, p. 1. ideals of productivity and efficiency in the context of unprecedented economic development were key. But the challenge was also political. In other contexts, discourses regarding the identification of personal merits of Congolese individuals might have served the prospects of Africanisation. But in a colony so reluctant to train and appoint African elites, they appeared merely as sticking plasters on (de)colonial anxieties. In the face of Congolese social disruption and mounting political claims, they promised to find a suitable place for everybody on the reassuring basis of technocratic certitudes. In short, and as Linstrum has shown for the British Empire, aptitude testing offered ‘technical solutions to political problems’.49 Linstrum, Ruling Minds, p. 152. Significantly, the Centre Pilote was featured in several colonial propaganda films, two of which are entirely devoted to its activities. The film Choisis ton avenir (J.-M. Landier, 1957, 11 min.) praised the Centre as a space of social and professional modernity paralleling the colony’s economic development and the fantasy ‘communauté belgo-congolaise’. The film’s staging of racial mixing is a model of its kind, as is its failure. The egalitarian principles which are presented as the basis of the Centre’s work in Léopoldville (in which white and black children pass tests together under the scrutiny of white and black members of staff) are immediately contradicted by images of rural tests which concern only Congolese boys and manual/low-skilled jobs.50 As already underlined in Francis Ramirez and Christian Rolot, Histoire du cinéma colonial au Zaïre, au Rwanda et au Burundi (Tervuren: RMCA, 1985), pp. 212–3. There is in fact a bitter irony in the title of the film (Choisis ton avenir [Choose your Future]) when, for Congolese children, choice was hardly an option.

The relationship of colonial Belgium with the UN was a complicated one. Belgian leaders saw the UN (and especially its Information Committee for Non-Autonomous Territories) as a threat to their sovereignty over Congo and were reluctant to provide it with information about colonial management, including for ‘scientific’ purposes. Their hostility was greater than that of French and British imperial authorities, to such an extent that, in 1952, Belgium removed itself from this Committee.2 Vanthemsche, Belgium and the Congo, pp. 138–40. As a result, the Belgian Congo remained largely excluded from UN agency programmes.3 As shown by Paule Bouvier, L’accession du Congo belge à l’indépendance: Essai d’analyse sociologique (Brussels: Institut de Sociologie, 1965), pp. 150–51, cited in Poncelet, Sciences sociales, p. 524. The involvement of Belgian Congo experts in UNESCO’s programmes therefore took a mainly non-institutional form, meaning that the participation of Ombredane in UNESCO’s visual education surveys was the exception rather than the rule. Ironically, while Belgian colonial scientific institutions never received direct funding from UNESCO (unlike in other empires), those same scientific institutions frequently boasted in their official reports about their researchers being invited by UNESCO.4 See for example, Institut pour la recherche scientifique en Afrique centrale, ‘Quatrième rapport annuel 1951’ (Brussels, 1952). This illustrates their ambivalence surrounding an internationalisation that could provide scientific validation despite fears of its potential anti-colonial stance.

In the late 1950s, this ambivalence was particularly well demonstrated in Belgian official discourses about Congo’s educational policies and the ways in which they integrated psychological advances. In this field, as a 1957 Colonial Office press release summarised, Belgium was ‘serving as a model for UNESCO’. In rhetoric typical of the ‘model colony’ discourse, the press release insisted that UNESCO’s new educational doctrine in Africa was entirely consistent with what Belgium had been doing in the Congo for decades.5 Reproduced in the Belgian newspaper La Métropole, 24 September 1957 and mentioned in Chloé Maurel, ‘L’UNESCO de 1945 à 1974’, PhD thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne – Paris I, 2006, p. 559. Flourishing in the 1950s, UNESCO’s projects in ‘fundamental education’ (programmes promoting instruction in basic literacy skills) provided the main ground for the involvement of psychologists as experts in its missions in the colonial world.6 Damiano Matasci, ‘Assessing needs, fostering development: UNESCO, illiteracy and the global politics of education (1945–1960)’, Comparative Education, 53, 1 (2017), pp. 35–53. On UNESCO and psychology, see Linstrum, Ruling Minds, pp. 189 & foll. The fact that the Belgian empire did not participate in these missions, because of its opposition towards UN interference, might explain why there were not more Belgian psychologists involved in these programmes, despite what was a lucrative new market for international consultancy.

These discourses were also symptomatic of tensions between international and imperial scales of expert knowledge production that did not entirely disappear with decolonisation as, again, the question of psychological expertise in (newly independent) Congo shows. Amid the chaos of the Congo crisis of the early 1960s and in the wake of the UN military intervention, UNESCO launched the Unescongo operation (‘Programme d’urgence de l’UNESCO dans le cadre de l’action des Nations Unies pour le maintien des services éducatifs au Congo’, 1960–1965). The mission aimed not only to recruit replacements for the outflow of Belgian teachers so as to allow the school system to function, but also to provide the country with educational experts. Psycho-pedagogical specialists were needed to advise Congolese authorities on the implementation of ‘new’ educational policies and, last but not least, to manage the centres of vocational guidance throughout the Congo. While the Unescongo team was critical of colonial educational policies, its programmes were very much in line with late-colonial ideals of ‘modernisation’, ‘development’ and technocracy. Despite its somewhat reformed vocabulary (‘training for a technological world’7 Gary Fullerton, UNESCO in the Congo (Paris: UNESCO, 1964), p. 25. See also UNESCO archives Digital Library 0000159568, G. Pasartzis, ‘Final Report on Vocational Guidance to UNESCO’ (1965). was the catch-phrase of the time), the mission’s unwavering ‘faith … in the measurability of aptitudes’8 This expression is borrowed from Linstrum, Ruling Minds, p. 190. remained unchanged from the 1950s.

On the ground however, the Unescongo operation was met with criticisms rooted not only in different political interests, but also in conflicting mobilisations of expertise. Indeed, while Unescongo recognised the importance of ‘mental decolonisation’ (in the words of Joseph Ngalula, Congo’s Minister of Education from 1961 to 1963) as a guiding principle of its interventions in schooling programmes, its recommendation for a single, centralised, French-speaking education system was not positively welcomed by all.9 Quoted in Fullerton, UNESCO in the Congo, p. 15. Moïse Tshombe, leader of the Katangese secession, for example, expelled UNESCO’s experts in 1961 – a decision obviously reflecting the Katangese state’s opposition to the UN’s wider role ending the secession.10 Mbuyu Mujinga Kimpesa, ‘L’opération de l’UNESCO au Congo-Léopoldville et le diagnostic des réalités éducatives congolaises: 1960–64’, PhD thesis, University of Geneva, 1983, cited in Maurel, ‘L’UNESCO’, p. 999. But opposition was also expressed by the powerful, Jesuit-run Bureau for Catholic Education (Bureau de l’enseignement catholique – BEC). For years, BEC had a stranglehold on education policy in the Belgian Congo, promoting schooling in vernacular languages, an adapted-yet-traditional curriculum and a mass education system mostly limited to primary schooling. Not surprisingly, it saw UNESCO as a competitor.11 Maurel, ‘L’UNESCO’, p. 1003–4. See also Roger Verbeek, Le Congo en question (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1965), p. 146. With the support of the Catholic Church and of the Bureau international catholique de l’enfance (BICE) (the main Francophone Catholic social organisation for childhood issues), BEC’s opposition to UNESCO’s influence should be understood as a tale of two (competing) internationalisms.

This competition was not new: even before decolonisation, the prospect of dismantling empires had led Western Catholic leaders to develop new international strategies, notably through the expansion of humanitarian organisations, that sought to counter the influence of communist, secular and/or Anglo-Saxon values in key sectors such as education. The 1957 international conference on African Childhood organised by the BICE and held in Yaoundé was intended as a landmark in this strategy.12 Charlotte Walker-Said, ‘Science and Charity: Rival Catholic Visions for Humanitarian Practice at the End of Empire’, French Politics, Culture and Society, 33, 2 (2015), pp. 33–54, pp. 33–4, 41. It was attended not only by ecclesiastical authorities and colonial bureaucrats, but also by scientists in general and especially by psychologists, the new disciplinary experts on childhood. One specialist was chosen to present to the conference the results of recent scientific experiments about ‘the psychology of the African child’ and to advise on future Catholic educational policies in ‘detribalised’ environments: Belgian psychologist Paul Verhaegen, the director of Union Minière’s psychological research centre, who was also, conveniently for Catholic leaders, one of the few international experts of the topic never involved in ‘rival’ projects funded by UNESCO.13 Paul Verhaegen, ‘Contribution à l’étude de la psychologie de l’enfant africain’ in BICE (ed.), L’enfant africain: L’éducation de l’enfant africain en fonction de son milieu de base et de son orientation d’avenir (Paris: Editions Fleurus, 1960), pp. 107–32.

The official publications of Lovanium’s Department of Psychology and Pedagogy however insisted that psychological expertise ‘meets the need of a young Republic’ and that psychologists ‘face a very big task’. They emphasised the importance given to the Department’s ‘own typical African identity and personality’ and to its ‘adapted African programme and training’.15 Leo Missine, ‘Lovanium University (Congo-Kinshasa) department of psychology and education’, New Africa (January/February 1967), pp. 18–19. These intellectual and political challenges were widely shared in early postcolonial Africa. The decolonisation and the growing internationalisation of African psychology did not mean it had abandoned the ambition of being a ‘useful’ science in the service of the new authorities’ development policies. As a special issue of the International Review of Applied Psychology underlined in 1973, psychologists could play ‘a major role in national development’ if they focused on a ‘clearer understanding of the socio-psychological processes of development’ rather than pursuing ‘recognition of [their] researches by Western scientists’.16 Durganand Sinha, ‘Psychology and the Problems of Developing Countries: A General Overview’, International Review of Applied Psychology, 22, 1 (1973), pp. 5–26, p. 6. As the British psychology professor at Makerere University (Kampala) Mallory Weber emphasised, the political stakes remained important, notably in terms of schooling programmes and vocational aspirations. Indeed, if care was not taken of the psychology of independent Africans, the acceleration of urbanisation and ‘modernisation’ and its (alleged) corollary, ‘unrealistic’ professional and material aspirations, could lead to an escalation of political unrest. Here again, professional guidance and psychology were presented as ideal tools to ‘canalise these aspirations towards more realistic goals’ so as to avoid political unrest.17 Mallory Wober, ‘Some Areas for the Application of Psychological Research in East Africa’, International Review of Applied Psychology, 22, 1 (1973), pp. 41–52, p. 53.

In the same article, Weber underlined the extent to which the field of psychology in Eastern Africa remained in the hands of white ‘foreigners’.18 Ibid., p. 50. This was also the case in the Congo in the first decade after independence. The academic staff of Lovanium’s Department of Psychology and Pedagogy remained predominantly white, with the exception of Michel Karikunzira, a Burundian priest with a PhD degree in Pedagogical Sciences who became Lovanium’s first African professor in January 1960.19 Mantels, Geleerd in de Tropen, p. 267. In 1968, he became the Chancellor of the new University of Bujumbura. The role played by the first generation of university-trained Congolese psychologists in the remaking of psychological knowledge remains to be explored.

At independence however, it seems clear that this expertise, despite its influence and visibility, was neither a topic nor a tool of mobilisation for Congolese elites, with one major exception. This exception was Thomas Kanza (1933–2004), the first university graduate in Congolese history. Kanza graduated from the Belgian University of Leuven in 1956, in the discipline of Psychology and Pedagogy. This was not however his first choice: Kanza wanted initially to study law or medicine, but the Belgian authorities discouraged him, apparently believing that psychology was a politically safer science. They should have known better. In 1959, a few months before independence and on the eve of a successful international political career, Kanza published a short satirical essay on ‘Colonial Vocation in Africa’, in which he used psychological discourses on vocational guidance (with its theories on aptitudes, personality types, educational success, etc.) as metaphors to underline Belgium’s illusions about its ‘colonial vocation’ and the limits of the country’s aptitudes in this regard.20 Thomas Kanza, Propos d’un Congolais naïf: discours sur la vocation coloniale dans l’Afrique de demain (Bruxelles: Les Amis de Présence africaine, 1959). On Kanza at the University of Leuven, see Sam Schutter, ‘1952, Thomas Kanza komt naar Leuven’ in Marnix Beyen, M. Boone, B. De Wever, L. Huet, B. Meijns, et al, Wereldgeschiedenis van Vlaanderen (Antwerp: Polis, 2018), pp. 469–75.

While applied psychology certainly suited the new look of late-colonial Belgian ‘reformed’ paternalism, a closer examination of the bureaucratic characterisation of this knowledge production, and the uses to which it was put, reveals the tensions at play. This can be observed not only in the divergent views of its practitioners about the supposed relationship between race, intelligence and what was perceived as a culture ‘in transition’ towards ‘modernity’, but also in the implementation of policies based on models and tests which were still disputed, as illustrated by the disagreements between Union Minière and its own research laboratory. In this regard, the multiple dynamics of internationalisation at play, first during the emergence of psychological expertise in the Copperbelt and in the Congo at large, and second in its growth in the late 1950s, did nothing to resolve these tensions. Multiple international connections were built along diverse political affinities and competing visions of psychological expertise. The wide-ranging global interest of the period in the assessment of ‘detribalised’ environments, enabled by the importance of Haut-Katanga as a primary testing ground of international psychological expertise, ensured this occurred despite the persistent anxieties of Belgian colonial leaders about international circuits of knowledge production and the threatening inter-imperial comparisons that went with them.