Mental Testing and the Understanding of Race in Twentieth-Century South Africa

Abstract

The history of the mental testing movement in South Africa largely followed developments in Europe and the United States. Thus, although considerable effort and ingenuity was required to adapt existing tests to suit local conditions, the techniques and debates surrounding their use were almost entirely derived from elsewhere. What is distinctive about mental testing in South Africa is the context in which it developed. In the period up to the end of the Second World War, which forms the prime focus of this study, two major problems dominated South African political thought. The most intractable of these was the ‘solution of the native question’, in other words, the attempt through the policy of segregation to systematize social relations of domination along racial lines.² Within white society the growing nationalist challenge associated with the premiership of J. B. M. Hertzog and efforts to relieve white poverty constitute a central theme. The relationship between the forces represented by racial segregation and white nationalism was integral, because the creation of a unified white nation unthreatened by internal class stratification depended on the exclusion of blacks from equal participation in civil society. In ideological terms this pattern of inclusion and exclusion found expression in contradictory processes within the mental testing movement: poor scores registered by blacks tended to be interpreted in terms of immutable biological heredity, whereas lack of achievement on the part of impoverished whites was most often attributed to environmental (and hence remediable) factors.

This paper is part of a larger project on the history of the concept of race in twentieth-century South Africa. In writing it I am grateful for discussions with Johan Louw and Linda Chisolm, whose written work is cited below. For the purposes of contextual accuracy I have employed terms which, in today’s parlance, would offend many. I have therefore used single inverted commas to indicate where words (like ‘native’) are used in their historical context. If I have not stuck rigidly to this rule, it is only to avoid pedantry.