Abstract

In the early twentieth century, 200,000 chimpanzees allegedly lived in French Guinea. This made it an ideal location for the bacteriologist and Pastorian Albert Calmette to found a laboratory based on the primate model. So the Pasteur Institute in Kindia, also called “Pastoria,” was established in1922. In Calmette’s eyes, apes were also a bargaining chip to attract foreign scientists and funding. Robert Yerkes and Henry Nissen, two major figures of American primatology, set foot in Pastoria in 1929 and 1930. Yerkes used it both as a platform to study chimpanzees in the wild and as a supplier for his laboratories in the US. This chapter explores the interactions between theories and practices of biomedical and psychological experiments on chimpanzees, while it sheds light on the ways in which the appropriation of knowledge on chimpanzees intermeshed with questions of race and colonialism. It also argues for an animal-centred history of science and seeks to reconstruct the lives of chimpanzees using the traces that they left in the archives. With the examples of Rose, subject of BCG (Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccination trials at Pastoria and Kambi, shipped to the US for psychological and toxicological studies, I argue that making animals visible in history helps to rethink the relationship between humans and animals and cast a different light on the history of colonial science.