Instead the vocational training had a dominant racial overtone which stressed African training for skills fitting with their assumed social and mental inadequacy. Notably, the Belgians under King Leopold prohibited access to higher education in their colonies whereas other colonial powers put in barriers in infrastructure or access such as limiting language of instruction to the language of the colonizer, limits on teaching curriculums, and ensuring the curriculum did not reflect any Afro-ethnicity. By demanding that communities create physical schools with strict curriculum, the foreign powers were able to dictate what the people learned, adjusting it to further their agenda.