ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

On Testing Children: Measuring Bodies, Minds and the East “African personality”

• In Event: Racialising Humans

English Abstract

Clink, click, snap, tap: the sounds of rattling bells, stacking cubes and lifted arms filled the clinics, nurseries, schools, mothers’ clubs and homes of mid-century East Africa, where children’s developmental “milestones” were rendered visible, testable and quantifiable. Testers used weighing scales, tape measures, cubes, questionnaires and in the bid to understand inner selves, projective tests. Through these choreographed encounters, scientists produced photographs, charts, films and reports that became both scientific data and visual archives of East African childhoods. In Uganda and Kenya as across much of the colonised world the late 1940s saw growing interest in the scientific measurement and testing of child development. Psychologists, anthropologists and paediatricians turned to East Africa as a comparative site, transporting with them instruments such as the Iowa-Harvard growth curves, Gesell scales, Terman-Merrill test and Thematic Apperception Tests. Standardised on small samples of Euro-American children, these tools presumed universal applicability yet repeatedly revealed their limits. At times, East African children were grouped together and placed at different stages on a universal scale and at other times, their developmental trajectories escaped capture by the tests altogether. To explain these discrepancies, scientists invoked broader narratives of social and political transition, casting East African societies as perpetually in rapid flux. This paper examines these encounters as sites where universal claims of developmental science were contested and where plural worlds of childhoods became visible. It argues that the frictions between imported tools and realities faced with exposed the culturally situated nature of scientific knowledge.

Author

• Pokuaa Oduro-Bonsrah