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The earliest academic social science study of the industrial and urban basin of Katanga in the Belgian Congo was produced in the 1950s, at the same time as those of the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute and the Institut français en Afrique noire (the French Institute in Black Africa). Under what conditions did these studies and their formulation of social development in late Belgian colonialism emerge ? To what extent did they contribute to updating understanding of Congolese society ? How were they related to the decolonization process that would accelerate at the end of the decade ? This article proposes starting a new chapter in the history of the social sciences focused on studies of Katanga produced on the eve of independence. It presents this research through the initiatives of two urban university entrepreneurs and their teams, re-situating them in their political, institutional, social, and intellectual contexts of production.