White Views of Black Minds: Schooling in King Leopold's Congo

Abstract

RESEARCH on the educability of Africans in the past focused narrowly on the learning process: could blacks learn as well as whites? Did they learn in the same manner? (1) More recently attention has turned to broader themes. One recent interpretation of white views about black minds holds that philosophical and psychological preconceptions influenced both the amount and the type of schooling provided for blacks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (2) Other recent works suggest the past psychological focus has obscured the basic question of who should be educated and for what purposes? (3) Thus, one may ask, were white views about black minds only philosophical and psychological guides to pedagogical practice or were they also bulwarks to perpetuate class and caste structures? Moreover, how did such white views serve the self-interests of those who expounded them? This essay examines these questions during the formative years of the educational system in Belgian Africa-the Leopoldian Period (1879-1908). The educational system then established underwent little change until after World War II. As elsewhere in Africa, Christian missionaries operated almost all of the schools in the Belgian Congo until 1960, the year of political independence for Zaire. Missionaries opened the first western-type school in 1879; in 1908 (when King Leopold's Congo Independent State was annexed by the Belgian Parliament) 99 percent of pupils attended Protestantand Catholic-run schools and in 1960 the percentage had declined to only 97 percent. Starting with a survey of missionary views concerning African educability this essay traces the influence of those views upon educational practices and concludes with a discussion of the pragmatic functions of white views. The conclusions are based upon the reading of some five-hundred volumes of missionary letters, diaries, autobiographies, and annual reports, together with relevant sections of the Belgian colonial archives.