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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the role of ‘science for development’ in future-making discourses from Belgian colonial institute INEAC through archival research and oral history interviews, focusing on the differences in those discourses when they are targeting the ‘developer’ versus the ‘to-be-developed’.

Paper long abstract:

Agriculture was a fundamental building block in a lot of colonial development ideas. Developing and modernising agriculture was expected to feed growing industrial centres, to build robust export and internal market economies, and to transform rural Africans. The Institut national pour l’Etude agronomique du Congo Belge (INEAC) was founded to carry out the scientific research that would enable all of these outcomes. As such, INEAC is a good case study for looking at the role of science in future-making development schemes and discourses. INEAC had to sell their potential to both the Belgian colonial government and to the Congolese farmers. In this paper I want to tease out how their ‘promised futures’ varied between these audiences through archival research and interviews with Congolese in Yangambi, where the central INEAC research station was established. I will analyse how they presented ‘science for development’ to the colonial rulers and colonised subjects, where they differed in focus and approach, and why. What did they promise as their contribution to the colonial ‘mission’ and how did they present their methods to get there? How did they communicate about science and the futures it would make accessible to the Congolese they helped ‘train’ in various agricultural settlement schemes? Further, to what extent did they present science as a professional future in itself to their Congolese employees, who were involved in everything from field labour to lab and collection work? This last issue became central in the transition to independence.