4250 words

Reducing “intelligence” to the brain is nothing new. This has been the path hereditarians have taken in the new millennium to try to show that the hereditarian hypothesis is true. This is basically mind-brain identity as I have argued before. Why are African countries so different from other more developed countries? The hereditarian assumes that biology must be a factor, and it is there where they try to find the answer. This was what British Eugenicists in Kenya tried to show—that the brain of the Kenyan explained how and why East Africa is so different in comparison to Europe regarding civilizational accomplishments.

In this article, I will discuss eugenic attitudes on Kenyans and their attempted reduction of intelligence to the brain, how these attitudes and beliefs went with them which grew out of Galtonian beliefs, and how such beliefs never died out.

Eugenics in Kenya

Eugenic ideas on race and intelligence appeared in Kenya in the 1930s since it promised biological solutions to social problems (Campbell, 2007, 2012). Of course these ideas grew from the heartland of eugenics where it began, from Francis Galton. So it’s no surprise that Britons who went to Kenya held those ideals. Moreover, the attitudes that the Britons settlers had in Kenya on the law in regard to Africans seems reminiscent of Jim Crow America:

The law must be a tool used on behalf of whites to bend Africans to their will. It must be personal and racially biased, the punishment swift and sharp. (Shadle, 2010)

This story begins with F. Vint (1934) and and Henry Gordon (1934) (who was in Kenya beginning in 1925). (See Mahone, 2007.) Gordon met Vint while he was a visiting doctor at the Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi (Tilley, 2005: 235). Both of these men attempted to show that Africans were inferior to Europeans in intelligence, and used physical brain measures to attempt to show this.

Vint used two measures—brain weight and brain structure. He also argued that the pyramidal cell layer of the Kenyan brain was only 84 percent of the European brain. Vint used others’ comparisons of European’s brains for these studies, never studying them on his own. So he concluded that the average Kenyan reached only the development of a 7 or 8 year old European. While Vint (1934) argued that the brain of the Kenyan was 152 grams less than the average brain of the European, he didn’t explicitly claim in this paper that this would then lead to differences in intelligence. We can infer that this was an implication of the argument based on his other papers. Campbell (2007: 75) quotes Vint in his article A Preliminary Note on the Cell Content of the Prefrontal Cortex of the East African Native on the subject of brain weight and intelligence:

Thus from the both the average weight of the African brain and measurements of its prefrontal cortex I have arrived, in this preliminary investigation, at the conclusion that the stage of mental development reached by the average native is that of the average European boy of between 7 and 8 years of age.

Note the similarity between this and Lynn’s claim that Bushman IQ is 54 which corresponds to that of European 8 year olds. (See this article for a refutation of that claim.) So Vint believed that he had found the reason for racial backwardness, and this is of course through reduction to biology. Campbell (2007: 60) also tells us how the eugenic movement in Kenya grew out of British eugenic ideas along with the brain reductionism they espoused:

Eugenics in Kenya grew out of the theories disseminated from Britain; the application of current ideas about the transmission of innate characteristics, in particular intelligence, shaped a new and extreme eugenic interpretation of racial difference. The Kenyan eugenicists did not, however, use the most obvious methods, such as pedigrees, statistics and intelligence testing, which were applied by British eugenicists when assessing the intelligence of large social groups. When examining race, an area in which British eugenics had not prescribed a methodology, the Kenyan doctors most radically made histological counts of brain cells and physical measurements of brain capacity. This led to the adoption of a particularly pathologising theory about biological inferiority in the East African brain.

Gordon (1934) found an average cranial capacity of 1,316 cc in comparison to an average cranial capacity of 1,481 cc in European. This led to the conclusion that the Kenyan brain was both quantitatively and qualitatively inferior in comparison to the European brain. This of course meant that the brain was what we need to look at as this would show differences in intelligence between groups of people that we could actually measure. Gordon (1934: 231-232) describes some of Vint’s research on the brain, stating that physical and environmental causes must not be discounted:

Dr. Vint’s report on bis naked-eye and microscopic examintion of one hundred brains of normal male adults is to be published shortly in the Journal of Anatomy; but in order that we may have a little more light on the question of whether the East African cerebrum is, on the average, on a lower biological level than the European cerebrum, I may mention these facts:

In the areas of the cortex examined, Dr. Vint found a total inferinrity in quantity, as compared with the European, of 14-8 percent. His naked-eye examination revealed a significant simplicity of convolutional pattern and many features generally called primitive; e.g. the lunate sulcus, described by Professor Elliot Smith, was present in seventy of the one hundred brains. The microscopic examination showed the important supragranular layer of the cortex to be deficient in all the six areas that Von Economo examined, and the cells of these areas to be deficient very markedly in size, arrangement and in differentiation.

These, I think, are enough of Dr. Vint’s new facts to make us feel that the deficiencies found in examination of the living are indeed associated with suggestive deficiency in the native cerebrum; that we are in fact confronted in the East African with a brain on a lower biological level. This, I submit, is a matter requiring investigation by the highest expert skill into the question of heredity or environment or both.

However, going back above to what Campbell stated about Kenyan eugenicists not using tests, Gordon (1934) states that the Binet was “quite unsuitable“, while the Porteus maze test was “both suitable and to native liking.” Gordon stated that although the sample was too small to draw a definitive conclusion, the results trended inline with Vint’s measures of the brain at puberty as described by Gordon. Gordon, it seemed, had a negative view on cross-cultural comparisons between whites and blacks:

I find, on coming out of the darkness and confusion of Africa into the clear and tranquil air of European psychological thought and practice, that mental tests and mental ages by themselves are largely depended upon for the diagnosis of amentia. I venture to say only this: In my experience of many thousands of natives, intelligence in its ordinary connotation is present amongst them often to an enviable degree; nevertheiess, I believe we may do the native injustice and even injury if we are content to estimate his “intelligence” only in terms of his apparent ability to cope with the exactions of European scholastic education. Moreover, in the present state of psychological knowledge it seems to me that any use of mental tests as a means of comparison between European and African—races of widely different physical and social heritage and environment—carries the risk of misleading African education and legislative policy. The field for research by the trained psychologist of broad outlook is enormous in East Africa; his presence would be welcome. (Gordon, 1934)

Nevertheless, despite Gordon’s surprisingly negative view on the cross-cultural validity of tests, he did still believe that to ameliorate amentia in the native population that eugenic measures must be undertaken.

We can see now how Vint and Gordon attempted to infer mentality from the brain—and of course inferior mentality in the brain of the East African, in this case Kenyans (of course, the tribes that were studied). So due to Vint’s studies, it was proclaimed in this 1933 commentary in Nature titled European Civilisation and African Brains that due to brain differences, “Europeanisation” for the Kenyan just wasn’t possible. It was Gordon’s intention to use the study of racial differences to enact eugenic policies in Kenya. For if Kenyan “backwardness” is due to their intelligence which is due to their deficient brain, then this would have implications for their education and health. Regarding “backwardness”, Gordon (1945: 140) had this to say:

A few of the important questions ancillary to this leading qualitative question are:
(I) Mental deficiency, ignored by the laws of Kenya including the immigration law;
(2) Unprevented preventable diseases;
(3) Miscegenation, present and future;
(4) The introduction of contraceptives to Asiatics and Africans and no appearance of organized family planning.

The second momentous qualitative issue is the accepted “backwardness” of our African group and the question: what is backwardness? This condition, long discussed, has never been investigated; its causes and nature are wholly unknown; the correct treatment for it is wholly unknown. There are some who think they know these things and have unwittingly intensified a situation containing a deep appeal for truth. This situation must inevitably be encountered by a population inquiry.

I have often pointed out that scientific light upon “backwardness ” is required for commonsense thought and action in regard to difficult questions in trusteeship for our Africans, of which I name only the following:
(I) Scholastic education and vocational training;
(2) Mental deficiency and mental disorder;
(3) Alcoholism and drug addiction;
(4) Adult and juvenile crime;
(5) The ayah question;
(6) The urbanization of a backward rural people;
(7) The capacity of the East African Native to acquire British culture.

Such questions cannot be lightly brushed aside or lightly answered by a nation anxious to help up a weaker people; nor is the responsibility of taking charge of that people and its future without scientific answers to such questions one to be lightly continued. It should be more widely known that the differences between the white and the black man are far from being confined to colour, and that to proceed as if the resemblances were all that matters may be a grievous error.

Gordon stated that the most important “resource” for study was the population, which other scientists ignored. Gordon dubbed this the “population problem.” Due to these kinds of eugenic ideas, there were blood banks in Kenya that were racially segregated (Dantzler, 2017). What Gordon, Vint and other Kenyan eugenicists were worried about was amentia, which is intellectual disability or severe mental illness. Although Gordon (1934) did discuss some environmental influences on the brain development of the East African in his talk to the African Circle, Gordon argued for eugenic proposals due to what he claimed to be a high level of amentia in the population which led to decreased intelligence. In this same talk, he discusses the previous research of Vint’s, showing data that the brain growth of the East African was about half as much as that of the European. He also stated that they were inferior to Europeans not only in brain measures, but also in “certain physical and psychophysical attributes, but also in reaction to the mental tests used by the enquiry, although it is not pretended that mental tests suitable to the East African have yet been arrived at (Gordon, 1934: 235). He then stated that only eugenic proposals could fix the inborn attributes of the so-called “aments.” Thus, if there are differences in the brain between Europeans and East Africans, then “efforts to educate the African to the standard of the European could prove to be either futile or disastrous” (Mahone, 2007).

So without a good understanding of eugenics and how it works, then it didn’t make sense to try to develop African civilizations since their inferior mentality due to their brains made it a forgone conclusion that they wouldn’t be able to upkeep what they would need to to be educated and in good health. Thus, to Kenyan eugenicists like Gordon and Vint, Kenyans were biologically inferior due to their brains.

It is worth noting that Gordon didn’t believe that human races were the same species and that the Kenya colony was in danger of degrading due to the emigration of “mentally unstable” Europeans from the upper classed. He did, though, believe that some of them could be cured and become useful in the colony, he did believe that such the “mental unstables” should not have been sent to the colony (Campbell, 2007). Gordon also claimed that high grade “aments” could flourish in a low level society undetected, only being detected once introduced to European civilization.

After Gordon and Vint, came J. C. Carothers who, despite lacking psychiatric training was sent to Kenya as a specialist psychologist (Prince, 1996: 235). He became the director of the Mathari mental hospital in Nairobi in 1938 and held the position until 1950 (Carson, 1997) while studying the “insane” at the Mathari mental hospital (Carothers, 1947). Although he seemed to be influenced by Gordon and Vint, and seemed to share the same brain reductionism as them, he looked at it from an environmental tilt although he did not discount heredity in being a factor in racial differences. Carothers claimed that mental illness and cognitive/mental deficiency are “normal physical state[s]” in the African:

In searching for a plausible theory of African psychology, Carothers attempted to explain a perceived difference between Africans and Europeans. He notes gross variation in physical characteristics, such as skin color, which he then correlates with supposed differences in cognitive capability. He quotes Sequeira, the renowned dermatologist, in support:

“both the cerebral cortex and the epidermis are derived from the same elementary embryonic layer–the epiblast….It should therefore not be surprising on embryological grounds to find differences in the characters of the cerebral cortex in different races (2).”

Carothers also investigated the general shape, fissuration and cortical histology of the African brain as compared to the European brain. While he notes that “no sweeping conclusions in regard to African mentality can be arrived at on the basis of these data,” his general conclusion was that Africans exhibit a “cortical sluggishness” due to under-use of the frontal lobes, which inhibited their ability to synthesize information (3).

With the frontal lobe hypothesis, Carothers claimed that cognitive or mental inferiority was an inherent state in the African. “With the Negro,” he writes, “emotional, momentary and explosive thinking predominates… dependence on excitement, on external influences and stimuli, is a characteristic sign of primitive mentality.” According to Carothers, the African’s “mental development is defined by the time he reaches adolescence, and little new remains to be said” (3). In this supposed child-like permanence, “above all, the importance of physical needs (nutrition, sexuality)” prevail (2). This belief was used as proof that Africans could not appreciate the Victorian moral values of hard work and education, the desire for which was said to have come in part through denial of the sexual drive. By extension, the African was denied the possibility of reaching a civilized state.

Carothers also claimed that the African exhibits an “impulsivity [that is] violent but unsustained, … an ‘immaturity’ which prevents complexity and integration in the emotional life” (2). Using this discourse of violence, he medicalized “mental illness” as a normal physical state in the African. When the British administration in Kenya called upon Carothers to assess the Mau Mau rebellion (1945-1952), ethnopsychiatry was “commandeered to clothe the political interests of the colonists in the pseudo-scientific language of psychiatry to legitimize European suzerainty” (4). After due investigation, Carothers reported to the British government that “the onus for the rebellion rests with the deficiencies characteristic of the native Kenyans and not with the policies of the British colonial desire” (3). (Carson, 1997)

In 1951, Carothers (1951: 47) argued for a cultural view to explain the “frontal idleness” of the African, while not discounting “the possibility of anatomical differences” in explaining it:

This frontal idleness in turn can be accounted for on cultural grounds alone, but the possibility of anatomical differences, is not thereby excluded.

Finally, a plea is voiced for expert anatomical study of the African brain and, in view of his resemblance to a certain type of European psychopath, of the brains of the latter also.

Carothers published a WHO report in 1953 where he stated that he would relate cultural factors and malnutrition and disease to mental development (Carothers, 1953). Carothers (1953: 106) stated that “The psychology of the African is essentially the psychology of the African child.” This claim, of course, seems to gel well with the Gordon-Vint claim that the brain growth of the East African seems to subside way earlier than that of the European brain. Carothers also reinterpreted Vint’s findings on the thinner cerebral cortex.

[Carothers] introduced an interpretation which permitted education to play a role in post-natal cerebral development. Noting the remarkable enhancement in interest and alertness “that comes to African boys and girls as a result of only a very little education… often comprising little more than some familiarity with written symbols in reading, writing and arithmetic;’ he raised the question whether,”it is not possible that the
maturation of those cortical cells in Europe is also dependant on the
acquisition of that skill” (Carothers, 1962, p. 134). (Prince, 1996: 237)

Though regarding the so-called thinner cortex of the African, Tobias (1979) stated:

Published interracial comparisons of thickness of the cerebral cortex and, particularly, of its supragranular layer, are technically invalid: there is no acceptable proof that the cortex of Negroes is thinner in whole, or in any layer, than that of Europeans. It is concluded that vast claims have been based on insubstantial evidence.

However, Cryns (1962: 237) stated that while there are differences in brain morphology between whites and blacks, there was no evidence that this accounted foe the alleged inferiority in intelligence in Africans:

With regard to brain fissuration and the histological structure of the cortex, both Carothers (14, p. 80) and Verhaegen (49, p. 54) state that there is no scientific evidence sufficient to assume that mental capacity is in some degree related to the surface or structure of the cerebral cortex.

The general conclusion, then, to be drawn from the above anatomical and physiological brain studies is that there is sufficient empirical evidence indicating the existence of morphological differences between White and Negro brains, but that there is no sufficient evidence to indicate that the morphological peculiarities found in the African brain are of functional significance, i.e., account for an alleged intellectual inferiority.

Gordon and Vint’s works and conclusions in the modern day

Reading the works of these two men, we can see that what they are saying is nothing new—since contemporary hereditarians argue for almost similar conclusions. Rushton was one of the main hereditarians who argued that biological reductionism was true and he authored many studies with Ankney on the correlation between general mental ability (GMA) and the brain (Rushton and Ankney, 2007; 2009).

Rushton, however, aggregated numerous different measurements from different time periods, even from authors who did not subscribe the racial hierarchies that Rushton proposed—in fact, this “hierarchy” changed numerous times throughout the ages (Lieberman, 2001). The current hierarchy came about due to East Asia’s economic uprise starting after WW2, and the “shrinking skulls” of Europeans began in the 1980s with Rushton (Lieberman, 2001). Although Lynn, (1977, 1982) did speak of higher Japanese IQs, it is of course in the context of “Japan’s dazzling commercial success.” (See here for a refutation of Lynn’s genetic hypothesis regarding Asians.)

Gordon’s and Vint’s works were cited favorably by Rushton and Jensen (2005: 255) and Rushton and Jensen (2010) while Rushton referenced Vint many times (Rushton, 1997; Rushton and Ankney, 2009). These works were cited as being in agreement with Morton’s studies on cranial capacity (see Gould, 1996; Weisberg, 2014; Kaplan, Pigliucci and Banta, 2015; Weisberg and Paul, 2019). Although in a recent paper, Salami et al (2017) showed that the average brain weight of Africans has been underestimated and came to a value of 1280g with between 1015g and 1590 g (a mean of 1334g was found for the brain’s of males) while no statistical difference between groups was found. This was also replicated by Govender et al (2018) in South Africa.

It is quite obvious by looking at how contemporary hereditarian research is trending, that the biological reductionism of Gordon and Vint is still alive today in fMRI and MRI studies. Contemporary hereditarians have also implicated the frontal lobe as being part of the reason why blacks are “less intelligent” than whites, and as we have seen, this is a decades-old claim. These beliefs were held due to outdated and outright racist views on the “quality” of the greatest “resource”, according to Gordon: The population.

Conclusion

Eugenics in Kenya—as it was in America—wasn’t a scientific movement; it was a social and political one. Eugenic ideas were practiced all over the world from the time of antiquity all the way to the modern day. The biological reductionism espoused by Kenyan eugenicists is still with us today, and instead of using post-mortem brains and crude skull measures, we are using more sophisticated technologies to try to show this reductionism is true. However, since mind doesn’t reduce to brain, this is bound to fail.

As we can see, the kind of gross biological reductionism hasn’t left us, it has only strengthened. The mental and physical reductionism inherent in these theories have never died—they just quieted down for a bit after WW2.

What is inherent in such claims is that there are not only racial brains, but racial minds. What Gordon, Vint and Carothers tried arguing was that it wasn’t due to the rule of the British and the society that they attempted to create in Kenya, the capacity for rebellion was inherent in the Kenya native. This seems to me to be like the “drapetomania” craze during slavery in America: pathologizing a normal response—like wanting to escape slavery—and create a new psychological diagnosis to explain why they act a certain way. The views espoused by the scientific racists in Kenya were not new, since earlier in the 19th century the inferiority of the “black brain” was well-noted and discussed. Although I have found one (1) view from Tiedemann (1836: 504) who claims that his studies led him to the belief that “by measuring the cavity of the skull of Negroes and men of the Caucasian, Mongolian, American, and Malayan races, that the brain of the Negro is as large as thsg of the European and other nations.”

Campbell (2007: 219-220) explains that although most probably still held their eugenic beliefs, the changing intellectual climate in Britain was a main reason why the eugenics movement in Kenya was not sustained.

By the late 1930s, although there had been no radical change in settler attitudes to race and no upheaval in the policy or personnel of the colonial administration the Kenyan eugenics movement petered out. We must assume that individuals retained their eugenic beliefs, but its potency in Kenya’s lore of human biology was lost. The causes of the demise of Kenyan racial eugenics lay in the financial retrenchment of the 1930s and responses in the metropole at a time when scientific racism was being increasingly undermined on both political and intellectual grounds. Without metropolitan support, Kenyan eugenics could not be sustained as a social movement. The size and composition of the Kenyan European community was such that there were not enough individuals with the intellectual and scientific interests and authority to establish an independent, self-sufficient organisation. Kenyan eugenics was forced to look to the metropole for financial, intellectual and institutional legitimacy. The demise of Kenyan eugenics is therefore intimately linked with a changing intellectual climate in Britain.

The views espoused by Gordon, Vint and Carothers have not left us. After Arthur Jensen revived the race and IQ debate in 1969, searches for the cause of why blacks are less intelligent than whites began coming back into the mainstream. Rushton and Jensen relied on such works to argue for their conclusion that the cause of lower intelligence and hence lower civilizational attainment and academic performance was due to genes and their brain structure. Such antiquated views, it seems, just will not die. Lieberman (2001) showed how the racial hierarchy in brain size has changed throughout the ages based on current social thought, and of course, this has affected hereditarian thinking in the modern day.

Although some authors in the 18 and 1900s proclaimed that brain weight had no bearing on one’s mental faculties, quite obviously the Kenyan eugenicists never got that memo. Nevertheless, there are a few studies that contradict Rushton’s racial hierarchy in brain size, showing that the brain’s of blacks are in range with those of whites.

Discussions on the “quality” of brains of different groups of course have not went away, they just changed their language. It seems to me that, like with most hereditarian claims, it’s just racists citing racists as “consensus” for their claims. Gordon (1934) asked why the brain of the Kenyan does not develop in the same way as the European’s. Since the reductionism they held to is false, such a question isn’t really relevant.