Illegal children come in all shapes, sizes, and apparently colors. “God created the black and the white, the devil a metis.” Statement by a former Belgian prime minister, not even that long ago. Metis, or mulatto, was the name for a child conceived by a white father with a black mother. And just over sixty years ago, such an illegitimate creature in Rwanda, Burundi and Congo posed a threat to colonial relations. The Belgian ruler took 300 of these “children of sin” from their mothers and placed them in a nun-run boarding school in Save, Rwanda. But when the struggle for independence began in Rwanda, the children were “kidnapped” for the second time. Now to Belgium. Again in an orphanage, or with a foster family.
Ken Kamanayo and Laura Uwase made the triptych for the Belgian channel Canvas Metis of Belgium about three of these children, now in their sixties. Rarely do you see the devastating brutality of the past so close. In 2015 (!) the “colonial children” got access to their personal files, and then they read their life story. The first episode, Tuesday, is about Jaak. Lies have been told, he says. He has been given a false name, his identity has been taken from him, the traces leading to his mother, his origins, his native village have been erased. Jaak worked as a police detective in the Flemish Kempen. In his file he reads, on page one, that his parents do have a name. He shows his son Johan the scrap on which his mother officially renounced him. Below it is her thumbprint. Johan was six, and was taken by a police officer and two soldiers in a Jeep. He remembers.
Jaak and Johan go to Rwanda together. And that, the father who finds himself and shows his son who he could have been, shows how sneaky suffering seeps through to the next generations. Johan, who always thought his father was “absent” and “closed”, at first seems unmoved by his father’s tears, as if he is not yet ready to forget his own “injuries” and witness his father’s.
They visit the boarding school in Save, still a cross between monastery and prison. They are received in Johan’s native village, where a childhood friend recognizes him and also remembers his name from then: Shuma. rascal. They see the house of his father, once the owner of this African land, and the house where his mother lived.
They stand in front of Villa Bombina, the orphanage in Schoten, Belgium. A beautiful villa, but Johan shivers at the memory of what happened behind the walls. On Saturday viewing day for candidate foster parents. All children at their best. Johan cannot count the families he was allowed to visit. And was brought back because he didn’t like it anyway.
Lost caress
Children are often ground between government and law. So woe betide the parents who expose their children to the perils of flight. How their lives will turn out is uncertain and whether their parents did the right thing is uncertain. Photographer Marieke van der Velden and advertiser Philip Brink made Children of the Labyrinth (BNNVARA), a series of five-minute films in which refugees read a letter addressed to their child. Monday evening: the Afghan Latifa who took daughter Mohzda on “an inflatable boat on the bloodthirsty water”. Tuesday evening: Nazir-Ahmad writes to daughter Yasna that he “blames himself a thousand times a day” for spending her childhood in a camp. These children, like Johan, have lost their land and carefree. One bright spot: they were allowed to keep their parents.