Between Educationalization and Appropriation: Selected Writings on the History of Modern Educational Systems

11. ‘Rien ne va plus …’ The Collapse of the Colonial Educational Structures in Zaïre (1960-1995)

11 ‘Rien ne va plus …’ The Collapse of the Colonial Educational Structures in Zaïre (1960-1995)* M. Depaepe ❙ ❙ Starting Point: The Paternalistic Educational Project of the Belgians In a previous study the author and his co-author compared the educational project in the Belgian Congo (1908-1960) with a runaway locomotive that, in spite of all the good intentions, drove to self-destruction (Depaepe & Van Rompaey, 1995:225). What did we intend by use of this image taken from Emile Zola’s novel La bête humaine (1890)? Rather than wanting to breathe new life into the stereotypical, often leftist-revisionist coloured discourse of the‘missionaryasanaccomplicetoacohortthatwasoutforeconomicprofit’ (Rodney, 1976), we found that colonial educational historiography, more sharply still than Western educational history, exposes the systemic faults and the paradoxes of the Western modernization and ‘educationalization’ linked to it (Depaepe, 1995). Just as the unwashed masses in Europe under the influence of the Enlightenment had to be equipped with a socially desirable, bourgeois code of behaviour, the “negroes” were to be “civilized” in the course of the twentieth century. This “civilization process” took place in Africa not only at an accelerated pace but also under intensified social pressure because it had lo be implanted in an “alien” culture (Yates, 1980). Not without irony, one can note that educational history in the Congo forms a grotesque reflection of the Belgian history. The “school controversy” of the 1950s that spread to the colony – up till then the Catholic missions had a virtual monopoly on education (Depaepe, Debaere & Van Rompaey, 1992) – is a revealing example of this. * Originally published in: Education and Society. International journal in education and sociology, XVI,1 (1998) 37-53. Part III: The Colonial Context – From Educationalization to Appropriation? 242 ❙ ❙ Previous History: Education in the Service of Evangelization and Colonization Partially in response to the intensified colonial interest at the end of the last century, Leopold II presented the “civilization mission” of the Belgians as the moral complement of colonization (Hostelet, 1954). For this, he called upon Catholic missionaries from the mother country, and they, until far into the twentieth century, tried to socialize the autochthons, as well as possible by means of education. The objective was to make them docile helpers of the colonial system. Broadening of horizons of awareness was not a direct objective. Insofar as critical thinking ultimately happened to be promoted, it was not much more than an undesirable side effect. The cooperation between the church and the state in educational policy, sealed by the conventions of 1906 between the Congo Free State and the Holy See and renewed by the so-called De Jonghe conventions of 1925/1929 envisaged only a ‘gradual’ development of the Congolese people (Markowitz, 1973). In practice, this meant that a rather wait-and-see attitude was adopted for the development of general secondary and higher education for the autochthons. Attention was largely focussed on mass primary education in the villages and cities. Rather than as an intellectual centre, the school was considered to be a means for moralizing and evangelizing the masses with Christian doctrine. The physical labour the children had to perform in the service of the missions also contributed to this (Kita Kyankenge Masandi, 1982). One wanted to avoid the formation of an embittered class of semi-intellectuals and semi-civilized people, which could become a hotbed of dissatisfaction and revolutionary and nationalistic ideas. At the time of Congolese independence, in 1960, only 0.1% of all the Congolese students attended higher education, a figure that contrasted sharply with the 0.4% for Africa at the time and the 3% for the world as a whole (Ekwa, 1965:75). In the mother country, the paternalistic action of the Belgians was presented as a legitimate and extremely desirable development (Vints, 1984). The ‘brilliant’ and far-seeing King Leopold II had not only seen to it that little Belgium, against the liking of his ‘small-minded’ subjects, had acquired an enormous colony, but he was also said to be the great benefactor of the Congolese themselves or the ‘Bula Matari’ (literally, he who can make the rocks explode) (Depaepe, 1994). Thanks to colonization and evangelization, the negroes were permanently saved from the hands of the Arabian slave dealers, who cruelly recruited their victims. An army of missionaries, not without danger to their own lives, stood ready to bring 243 ‘Rien ne va plus …’ The Collapse of the Colonial Educational Structures...