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Shifting Goals of Industrial Education in the Congo, 1878-1908

The history of industrial education in the European-initiated educational systems of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Africa has been and remains controversial. Some scholars maintain that in the late 1800s both the government and missionaries favored, and indeed established, industrial training (Berman, 1974: 530; Foster, 1965). Others insist that, contrary to government wishes, missionaries resisted the establishment of industrial education until the beginning of the twentieth century, when industrial training came into vogue only as a result of “doubts regarding the mental ability of the Black African.” (Lyons, 1975: 148-49). These conflicting observations about industrial education (here meaning both pre-industrial and industrial skills taught for personal as well as occupational use) are based primarily upon the British Protestant experience in West Africa. Experience in Belgian Africa was quite different. This paper will argue that there were two distinct phases in the development of industrial education in the Congo during the Leopoldian era: (1) the late nineteenth century, characterized by the training of a limited few highly skilled craftsmen for missionary service and (2) the early twentieth century, when the skill component of industrial education declined to the teaching of a bit of carpentry as an adjunct to general education, especially for prospective evangelists and catechists. In the second phase, even those missions which originally had prepared skilled craftsmen for their own use now eagerly accepted the watered-down version of industrial education.