Development as Experiment: Science and State Building in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, 1930-1970 (original) (raw)
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Rapport des experts. Commission Spéciale chargée d'examiner l'état independent du Congo et le passé colonial de la Belgique au Congo, au Rwanda et au Burundi, ses consequences et les suites qu'il convient d'y réserver., 2021
Original, English version of the text from: Rapport des experts. Commission Spéciale chargée d'examiner l'état independent du Congo et le passé colonial de la Belgique au Congo, au Rwanda et au Burundi, ses consequences et les suites qu'il convient d'y réserver. Chambre des représentants de Belgique. 26 Octobre 2021.Doc 55 1462/002 Available in French and Dutch. Please use official documents for citations purposes.
Putting knowledge in its place: science, colonialism, and the postcolonial
Postcolonial Studies, 2009
This special issue of Postcolonial Studies is divided into two parts. In the first, three leading scholars of postcolonial science studies*a philosopher, an anthropologist, and an historian (although each wears several hats)*have been asked to contribute short, programmatic essays on a theme of their choosing, focusing less on providing a 'state of the field' and more on directions for future research and analysis. In the second part, three historians have offered papers on topics of particular current interest: the history of cartography and colonialism; botany and empire; and the history of method outside Europe. In the essay below, I offer an overview of secondary scholarship on, in turn, colonialism and science, and postcolonial technoscience, before turning to a discussion of the articles making up the issue. The idea that science and technology were among the gifts that Western imperial powers brought to their colonies was an integral part of the discourse of the 'civilizing mission,' one vaunted by both proponents and critics of the methods of colonialism. 1 'The political unity of India, more consolidated, and extending further than it ever did under the Great Moguls,' wrote Karl Marx in 1853, 'was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.' The fruits of science, that is, could achieve by peaceful means what had previously only been possible through violence. Elites within colonized nations, while rejecting the notion that science was imported from the West, often shared such sentiments about science's positive and transformative powers, speaking a 'language of modernity' that*however uneasily*allied them with imperialist officials. 2 Decolonization movements, however, quickly began to call into question any vision of science as a positive enterprise that merely accompanied*and did not aid or support*a rapacious colonialism. In 1959, Frantz Fanon's essay on 'Medicine and Colonialism' made clear to French audiences that the complicity of doctors with state-sanctioned barbarism was not limited to the National Socialist atrocities punished in the Nuremberg trials a dozen years earlier. Medical officials and psychologists played an integral role in the oppressive and interrogative practices of 'a dying colonialism.' 3 Soon thereafter, Phillip Curtin's works on European 'images' of Africa described the medical breakthroughs, particularly with regard to quinine prophylaxis, that had made possible the widespread colonisation of the continent's interior. 4 Medicine, in Daniel Headrick's later terminology, was one of the
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In her book, Science and Colonial Expansion, 1 Lucille Brockway has explored some of the relationships between colonial expansion and the scientific apparatus. However, in her sympathetic treatment and implicit definition of the subject, there are assumptions about both the scientific and the colonial world which rest on a perhaps unavoidable Western ethnocentric view of the world, even though Brockway and her book are explicitly anticolonial and procolonized.
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Science diplomacy is usually discussed as a post-Second World War phenomenon. However, the links between science and diplomacy can be traced to earlier periods. This case analyzes one example related to the European colonization of Africa in the late nineteenth century, known as the “Scramble for Africa”. Scientists usually perform only advisory roles in politics. In this case, a scientist attained important political responsibilities, ultimately becoming Minister of Foreign Affairs and conducting formal diplomatic negotiations. This scientist was José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823–1907), a nineteenth-century Portuguese zoologist. Bocage’s knowledge of African geography acquired via his scientific studies and at the head of the Lisbon Geographical Society, as well as the scientific, colonial, and political networks he joined or formed allowed for his political rise. Once in a position of power, he placed knowledgeable Portuguese personalities at the center of colonial discussions with powerful rival countries, such as France and Germany, ultimately seizing some colonial victories for Portugal in Africa. This case shows that while science diplomacy can be a tool for cooperation, it can also be used to gain competitive advantage over rivals.
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