Social Science & Imperial Projects

Professor Martin Thomas Professor of History, University of Exeter; ISRF Mid-Career Fellow2015-16

It might seem unsurprising that Western imperialists, their governments and supporters harnessed science and technology to advance the cause of empire. The means by which they did so are increasingly analyzed by historians through the prism of globalization, which frames the mechanics of scientific advancement in the context of transnational networks, the migration – voluntary or forced – of people, and the diffusion of knowledge as new technologies proliferated worldwide. At a more practical, but no less significant level, certain scientific achievements, from tin canning to viral prophylaxis, from steam ships to machine guns, have been singled out as particularly crucial to empire-builders, especially in the long nineteenth century of so-called ‘high imperialism’, which ended in 1914.

It is perhaps more unsettling to remind ourselves that social science, too, became integral to Western imperial projects. More than that, certain branches of the social sciences were, from their inception, deeply implicated in colonialism. Sometimes they offered academic validation for it. At other times leading social scientists worked directly with state authorities to contain or even repress anti-colonial opposition within particular territories. In this context, the social scientific villains of the piece have typically been identified as firstgeneration social anthropologists, ethnographers, and, latterly, select groups of social psychologists. They are variously accused of first developing, then applying, ideas of scientific racism to colonial subject peoples and of pathologizing manifestations of anti-colonial protest as evidence of mental disorder or collective psychosis. This article offers a few snapshots of these processes at work.

In the case of the French Empire, after the First World War ideas of how best to administer dependent territories emerged from the confluence of three factors. First was the professionalization of the colonial service. Second was the surging popularity of the social sciences within French academia. And third was the belief shared by bureaucrats and social scientists that ethnography was a uniquely colonial discipline with scientific precepts that would enable officials not just to administer dependent peoples but to understand them as well. 1

Those individuals who personified all three elements were best placed to put the new thinking into practice. Leading ethnographers boasted extensive colonial experience. Perhaps the most influential, Maurice Delafosse, was a former director of political affairs in the federal government of French West Africa. Another West Africa veteran, Henri Labouret, made ethnography integral to the curriculum of the École Coloniale, the college for trainee empire administrators on the avenue de l’Observatoire in Paris. Delafosse and Labouret persuaded other long-serving officials in French Africa that ethnology and its close cousin social anthropology were bedrocks of successful colonial government. 2 Their chief disciple was Georges Hardy, appointed to head the École Coloniale in 1926. 3 Hardy’s innovation was to marry these ‘colonial sciences’ with practical courses of instruction – a programme of social scientific ideas translatable into administrative practice.

Officials trained in Hardy’s methods venerated ethnographic ‘fieldwork’ as a prerequisite for sound policy choices. It was not that simple. Ethnography came loaded with presumptions and prejudices in regard to colonized societies and their limited ability to cope with economic modernization. Industrial diversification, urbanization and the spread of waged labour were thus interpreted as socially destabilizing, even morally wrong. Puritanical, ascetic Islam was dangerous and ‘un-African’, heterodox Sufism supposedly more malleable and tolerant. 4 Party politics and European-style jury trial, both predicated on adversarial argument, were, the ethnographers insisted, too much for African minds to handle. 5 Needs and wants were better articulated through traditional means – customary law (although officials remained hazy about what this was), chiefly courts, and village elders. 6 Scientific colonialism, in other words, revealed as much about its practitioners beliefs as about those of their colonial subjects.

The numbers of anthropologists roaming colonial Africa were much smaller than the ranks of other scientifically trained personnel - agronomists, medical specialists and engineers - who filled the ranks of colonial administrations after the Second World War. But the anthropologists were perhaps more influential in determining the actions of governments. 7 Eager officials pointed to anthropological studies of ‘tribal custom’, local ‘folklore’ and ‘authentic tradition’ to justify colonial tutelage as a work of social conservation. 8 No matter that the sheen of academic objectivity legitimized policies that typecast Africans in particular ways, consigning them to a pre-modern status in which industrialization, advanced education and gender equality became foreign-borne ills to be avoided. 9 Others see baser motives in this ‘politics of retraditionalization’. 10 Stripped of cultural baggage about remaking colonial societies in the French image, this ‘scientific colonialism’ signified a turn towards low-cost, high-extraction administration. 11 At its heart was the ‘bargain of collaboration’ with local elites – the chiefs, mandarins, and village elders who made the system work. The bargain preserved their titles and limited legal and tax-raising powers. They upheld rural order and furnished the authorities with revenue, labour and military recruits in return. The ‘science’, in other words, was more rhetorical than real.

With French democracy restored in 1944-5 after four years of Nazi occupation, the new political leadership in Paris made unlikely imperialists. Most were ideologically left-of-centre. Several leading government figures had been imprisoned for resistance activities. Some, like Marseille Mayor Gaston Defferre, built powerful regional political networks that exploited their proud records of resistance. Other discrete groups – Jean Monnet’s dirigiste planners and Pierre Mendès France’s political economists - were technocratic modernisers. Their reformist sympathies translated into commitment to mobilize state resources to develop colonial economies, improve welfare provision, and raise living standards. Most significant to us here, even the community of French colonial anthropologists, although bitterly divided in their wartime responses to the racial discrimination of the wartime Vichy state, shifted after the war in tune with the newly-founded United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), which, in 1950, formally condemned scientific racism, dismissing received wisdom about hierarchies of civilization as a pernicious myth. 12 But any notion that France had repudiated ‘scientific colonialism’ would soon be belied by its repression of anticolonial groups from Vietnam to Algeria.

To illustrate the point, let’s look briefly at a somewhat forgotten 1947 rebellion against French colonial rule on the island of Madagascar. There, the French ethnographer and social psychologist Octave Mannoni, a long-serving official in Madagascar’s colonial administration, depicted the notoriously brutal repression of the Malagasy revolt as a form of ‘theatrical violence’. Mass killings of villagers and novel forms of murder such as the dropping of victims from aircraft were demonstrative acts intended to restore order to the minds of an indigenous population whom Mannoni considered psychologically dependent on the unflinching discipline of external authority. 13 Not surprisingly, Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan psychiatrist who famously championed the emancipatory potential, as much mentally as culturally, of revolutionary anti-colonialism, found Mannoni’s views repugnant. In his 1952 work Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon excoriated Mannoni, who by this point had written a best-selling book purportedly explaining the Malagasy rebels’ mental processes. In Prospero and Caliban: the psychology of colonization Mannoni reduced their actions to a caricature of psychological dependency. According to Mannoni, the leaders of Madagascar’s anti-colonial opposition, the Mouvement Démocratique de la Rénovation Malgache (MDRM), were sufficiently educated to recognize their reliance on French tutelage but were insufficiently mature to achieve genuine autonomy psychologically or politically. The great majority of their followers, in this reading, cleaved to the MDRM because they felt betrayed by a weak wartime administration, whose firm guiding hand they craved. Fanon rightly exposed the racial stereotyping at the core of Mannoni’s interpretation. He took issue with the psychiatrist’s unwillingness to concede that Malagasy were reacting rationally against decades of economic exploitation and cultural denigration. 14 The point, though, is that French government officials would continue to cite Mannoni’s work over Fanon’s for years to come.

France, though, was by no means alone among the ranks of imperial powers in using scientific language and, to a degree, social scientific method and findings to justify continuing colonial rule. As the pace of decolonization quickened after the Second World War, British colonial Africa offered striking, and disturbing, instances of this mobilization of social science to serve imperial interest. Take Kenya, for instance. There, Jomo Kenyatta’s fledgling Kenya African Union (KAU) gained a stronger foothold in the late 1940s. Political space also opened up for the KAU’s radical offshoot, the Mau Mau (literally translatable as the ‘greedy eaters’ of chiefly elders’ authority). KAU leaders struggled to bridge the cultural and generational divides between their rural supporters in Kikuyuland and the more confrontational trade union activism and youth politics of post-war Nairobi. 15 Even so, what startled the colonial administration most about the emergence of the nonviolent KAU was its apparently ‘pan-tribal’ – for which we might read ‘national’ - basis of support. 16 What alarmed them about Mau Mau was precisely the reverse: its sectarian violence and it secretiveness. 17

These two features coalesced in British official minds thanks to highly sensationalist reports from field ethnographers working under the aegis of the colonial authorities. During the early 1950s, accounts flooded into district and central administrative offices of Mau Mau oathing ceremonies in which tens of thousands in Central Kenya pledged support, often in small groups and frequently under duress. 18 Equally effective as instruments of political mobilization and social discipline, oathing ceremonies drew on Kikuyu religious practice. Earlier dramatic increases in the numbers making oaths of allegiance to the KAU were instrumental to the efforts of younger, Nairobibased militants to usurp the party’s established leadership of rural elders typified by Kenyatta and another senior Kikuyu chief, Koinange wa Mbiyu. By 1951 the party had acquired a younger, more militant aspect. 19

Where declarations of support for the KAU were conventionally political and limited in number, Mau Mau oathing was ritualized and conducted on an enormous scale. Exaggerated, vulgarized accounts of these newer oathing ceremonies became staples of settler conversation and British press accounts. Their garishness sought to demonize Mau Mau by proving the movement’s backwardness, its deviancy and its cruelty. Numerous reports from district administrators, officially sponsored ethnographers and government-appointed psychologists interpreted oathing through the cosmologies of early modern witchcraft. Ceremonies, which often involved animal sacrifice and the eating of raw goat meat, were interpreted in highly sexualized terms as frenzied acts of satanic depravity. 20 New initiates, estimated to number around ninety per cent of the population in parts of Kenya’s Central Highlands, were thereby represented as having been duped. Either they were coerced into compliance or they fell into a trance-like state in which all reason and inhibition was lost.

Not surprisingly, a propaganda war soon developed over the meaning and validity of Mau Mau oaths, and of the movement they endorsed. If, as British official statements insisted, followers of Mau Mau had succumbed to a form of collective psychosis, corrective treatment rather than colonial reform was what was required. So-called ‘counteroathing’ ceremonies became a central plank of counter-insurgency strategy. Theatrical public recantations were organized in which Mau Mau detainees ceremonially repudiated their earlier vows – sometimes kissing a male goat’s foot, spitting and then spurning Mau Mau allegiance. Such performances, instrumental to British ‘rehabilitation’ of their Kenyan captives, perpetuated the idea that Mau Mau was closer to a cult than a political quest for ‘land and freedom’, the movement’s core slogan. 21

The inclination among British colonial administrations to employ cultural anthropologists, ethnographers and, above all, social psychologists in order to compile ‘scientific’ evidence of subject peoples being misled or otherwise radicalized by violent extremists echoed the preoccupation among British, French and other European police and security agencies at the turn of the twentieth century with crowd psychology. These earlier presumptions that ‘the mob’ could be pathologized as an organic mass prone to manipulation and, by extension, to counter-manipulation drew inspiration from French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon’s influential work, the Psychology of Crowds [La psychologie des foules (1895)]. While it is tempting to consign Le Bon’s thinking to the anxieties of fin de siècle societies confronting industrialization and poorly-regulated urbanization, it’s worth recalling that his basic contention – namely, that crowds of demonstrators behaved as a collective in scientifically predictable ways – continued to inform strategies of riot control in the European empires to the last days of decolonization.

When combined with abiding racist stereotypes about the emotional, unintellectual, and consequently apolitical behaviour of some colonial subject communities, the results were poisonous. During a wave of late 1950s demonstrations against the twin authority of the British Crown and the white Rhodesians who directed the Central African Federation of South Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi), ‘on the spot’ colonial officials watched with a mixture of shock and surprise as the people of Nyasaland mobilized against British and white Rhodesian domination. Why? Historian Megan Vaughan highlights the persistence among colonial health professionals, psychologists, magistrates and police of crudely racist stereotypes about Africans, their mental acuity, and supposed lack of initiative. Commenting on the incidence of suicide, or rather, its presumed absence, in Nyasaland, Vaughan notes that ‘“Africans” were generally held to be a happy-go-lucky “race” of people with few cares in the world.’ They were alleged to attribute any worries they did have to the malign influence of others, ‘via the medium of witchcraft or the intervention of spirits. African people’, so the argument went, ‘did not suffer from introspection and guilt, and so one rarely encountered depressive illness among them.’ 22

These layers of prejudice and lazy thinking about Africans lacking political conviction or much capacity for self-reflection were gradually stripped away by well-organized public protests coordinated by Hastings Banda’s Nyasaland African Congress. Once again, social psychology was used – or, rather, misused – to infantilise colonial subjects and to delegitimize political opposition as a manifestation of mental disorder or the malign influence of ‘outsiders’.

In this brief survey of colonialism’s manipulation of social science, let’s turn finally to the Portuguese Empire, from the late 1920s until the Carnation Revolution of 1974 under the yoke of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. Salazar’s regime always depicted its colonial administration as a ‘scientific occupation’ supposedly informed by the rational study of dependent peoples, the maximization of their economic potential, and benevolent, albeit authoritarian, government. 23 Where the Portuguese empire differed was in its stubborn adherence to this ideology of domination after 1945, at a time when other imperial states were adopting strategies of modernization and greater political inclusion in an effort to assuage international criticism and breathe new life into their empires.

Undeterred by decolonization’s momentum elsewhere, the Salazarist regime developed an entire political vocabulary to justify continued Portuguese control of African territory. The categorizations employed to describe the empire’s component territories and peoples were refined by social scientists, most notably the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. As in the French case, black African colonies were re-designated as ‘overseas possessions’. In Freyre’s conception, the colonial power, Portuguese colonial settlers, and the colonized peoples formed a single ‘pan-Lusitanian’ community linked by shared language, acquired European customs, and the imposition of Portuguese civil and criminal law. The very designations ‘Angolan’, ‘Mozambican’ or ‘African’ were declared outmoded. Adopting Freyre’s idea of ‘Lusotropicalism’, Salazar’s dictatorship insisted that the entire empire was composed of Portuguese, albeit of various colours and aptitudes and with markedly different political rights and economic opportunities. The lived experience for black Africans was much different. The Salazarist colonial state was, if anything, more stringent in its application of rigid racial categories than the other European empires whose practices it derided. Designation of the terms ‘civilisado’ and ‘indigena’ was formally codified in two decisive legislative instruments: the Colonial Act of 1930 and the Organic Charter of the Portuguese Empire, promulgated in 1933. Taken together, these laws set out the juridical framework for differential rights and legal punishments in Portugal’s African territories, which remained in place for decades.

In Portuguese Africa, as in other regions of the global South living under European imperial authority, social science was exploited, whether to delegitimize popular protest, to dismiss political grievances as evidence of mental disorder, or to pathologize entire communities as prone to collective psychosis. Little wonder that fieldworkers in disciplines as diverse as cultural anthropology and social psychology have been keen to put distance between their methods and objectives and those of some of their disciplinary forebears in the formerly colonized regions of the global South.