Sentence:  Ordinarily a father permits his children to grow up in due time - but when the colony received independence in 1960 the Congolese child , if one <WSD>imagines</WSD> him to have been born in 1908 , was 52 and had until then been treated as an infant . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  form a mental image of something that is not present or that is not the case