Laura Seay: Newt Gingrich Dissertation on Congo Sheds Light On His Jab that Obama is 'Anticolonial'

[Laura Seay is an assistant professor of political science at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who blogs at Texas in Africa.]

Newt Gingrich is in the news again, this time for picking up on Dinesh D'Souza's comment in a Forbes article about President Obama having inherited his father's"anti-colonial" Kenyan worldview and using it to get himself some attention.

Setting aside the question of when being"anti-colonial" became a bad thing (especially here in the US of - ahem - former British colonies), this whole kerfuffle is interesting to me because I'm pretty sure that I'm one of the few people out there who have actually seen Gingrich's dissertation, which is about Belgian education policy in colonial-era Congo. You can read the post I wrote about skimming it here....

Gingrich liked colonialism. Especially the Belgian variety, which limited the vast majority of Congolese to a sixth-grade education, taught children that God wanted them to obey the exploitative colonial authorities, and was the reason the country had fewer than 20 university graduates and no indigenous doctors at independence....