Since the 1990s, controversial debates on colonial facts have been held in Belgian universities and have focused in particular on Belgium's responsibilities in relation to the colonization of the Congo (the current DRC). Various reports (United Nations, 2019; Parliamentary Commission, Experts' Report, 2021) show the increase of research on these issues and the need to make them more complex. Indeed, most studies still seem to focus on aspects related to "race" without also introducing "gender" or "class" relations in the history of the colonization of Congo (Parliamentary Commission, Experts' Report, 2021). Inspired by the work of intersectional scholars (Crenshaw, 2005), the interest of this presentation is to show how intersectionality can reshape the work on colonial history in Congo, and in particular on the history of education of Congolese girls. In addition to the intersectional lens, the presentation will focus on how a genealogical approach might be of interest to scholars whose goal is to deconstruct past and present (post)colonial discourses and practices. More precisely, the objective of this presentation is to retrace the framework of literature that led to thinking about an intersectional genealogy of educational devices for girls, during the Belgian Congo (1908-1960). Indeed, both genealogy and intersectionality are approaches that open up a new dialogue in the History of education (Coloma, 2011; Rogers, 2019). They allow for the articulation of multiple relations of domination relating to “class”, “gender”, “race” and “age” in order to problematize their historicity within various educational settings addressed to girls. Following Michel Foucault's (1997) methodological lead, combined with intersectionality, this research is structured around the following concern: to understand how schools for Congolese girls, between 1908 and 1960, did rely on an entangled multiplicity of subjugations such as “age”, “class”, “gender” and “race”.

In this respect, research on the history of education of girls has identified a social project addressed to Congolese women developed throughout the first half of the 20th century: girls should be educated in schools to become good Christian mothers, to take care of their children and the households, and to be capable of civilizing their own “African” family and social environment (Kita, 2004; Lauro, 2020). Compared to White middle-class women, perceived as the moral guardians of education and their family, racialized women in Belgian Congo were seen as “illegitimate” mothers and in need of being “educated” to 'Europeanness' (Stoler, 2013). This raises several questions: how have women been implicated in the maintenance of colonial discourse? What are the specificities of the colonial society of Belgian Congo in the representation of women, in terms of “gender”, “race”, “class” and “age”? And what role did educational devices play? 

Therefore, the idea of educating a woman who could meet the standards of “motherhood” and “Europeanness” became the issue of 20th century of colonial women's education which reproduced the pattern of civilizing ideology (McClintock, 1995). Such is an ideology that justifies violence against those considered “unadapted” (working classes) and “savage” (colonized classes), in the name of progress (André & Poncelet, 2013). It is precisely this vision of progress that we can relate to and deal with in the contemporary school curricula (Parliamentary Commission, experts' report, 2021).

Foucauldian genealogy introduces us to a detailed study of power and its metamorphoses, based on the discontinuities between the various periods, with back-and-forth movements between past and present (Revel, 2002). In order to make Foucauldian genealogy more complex and respond to its controversies (Coloma, 2011), I have combined it with the theory of intersectionality, which allows for an analysis of multiple co-imbrications of power relations. Indeed, focusing on Congolese girls allows us to think jointly about the intersection of the question of childhood ("age"), of women ("gender"), of the social milieu ("class"), and of the colonial relationship ("race"). More precisely, the question is to identify and analyze the technical instruments of the schools (programs, places, etc.) that make these forms of power possible. The sources used have mainly been the colonial archives in Belgium (archives: MRAC of Tervuren, Archives Federal Public Service of Foreign Affairs, KADOC archives of Leuven, General Archives of the Kingdom of the Joseph Cuvelier Depot) which show an interesting corpus on how the girls' schools were run in practice, on the colonial administration of the schools and on the teaching work of the missionary nuns. In addition to archives, the other materials used are the writings of Michel Foucault (1975; 2003) on the history of the school, but also of childhood and the family. However, Foucault did not include feminist or postcolonial studies in his analyses, thus presenting an un-gendered and un-racialized history of educational settings. To address these shortcomings, I have taken up the research of Silvia Federici (2015; 2019) which extends Foucault's analysis by establishing a genealogy of forms of women's subjugation throughout the history of Western societies. In addition, postcolonial studies, especially those of Ann L. Stoler (2002; 2013), show the impossibility of thinking about the genealogy of Western societies without thinking about colonial situations: pedagogical and governmental discourses and practices have been constituted by multiple back-and-forths between the “metropoles” and the “colonies”. The devices of European Empires and States are thus mutually and historically constitutive in the construction of relations of domination (Stoler, 2013).

Through the intersection of archives and literature, specific aspects of girls' education in Belgian Congo have emerged: a correlation between the arrival of White women, the disappearance of “ménagère” (forms of "concubines"), and a more institutionalized women's education (1924). In this respect, the archives show that the word housework appears most often in the school curricula of girls, in particular from 1928 until the decolonization. This shows the birth of a new social place for most of the Congolese women in colonial society: the housewife. The encounter between the colonial situations and the strong influence of the Catholic Chruch underlines the intersection of domination(s), entailed in schools' curricula, to which girls were subject: because of their being women, Black, and belonging to a lower class, girls had to exclusively learn the arts of the household and how to properly take care of their children. The Congolese girl must be educated in “Europeaness”, but she is out of step with the Belgian girl: she is racialized by colonial society, and she suffers oppression a century later than the Belgian one. In fact, towards the second half of the 19th century, while in Belgium both lower- and middle-class women began to have access to secondary and higher education (Di Spurio, 2019), in the 20th century girls in Congo still continued to have very little schooling or stopped at middle school level, where the main orientation remains the household school (Depaepe, & Lembagusala Kikumbi, 2018). All these discontinuities and conjunctures show the interest to problematize an intersectional genealogy of girls' education in Belgian Congo. It is interesting to question how the history of the education of “Diversity” in the colonies (in this case "racialized" girls in the Congo) is ontologically constitutive of the European history of education.

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