"Forbidden for dogs and blacks" was written on a dance club entrance in Belgium, where then 18-year-old Georges Kamanayo was stopped from entering. He had not seen the post, and his other 11 friends had entered before him. "Not you. Can't you read what is mentioned here?" the doorkeeper asked. His friends would never find out because of how loud it was inside, so he decided to go back home.
As he walked home in the dark, Kamanayo, who was born to a Rwandan mother and Belgian father, kept wondering if he was Belgian or not. He decided to believe he was not Belgian at that very moment, in the rain. He would do whatever it would take to go back to Rwanda.
But how did he get to Belgium in the first place? In the run-up to independence in the early 1960s, children born from mostly African mothers and Belgian fathers were taken from their African families by the Belgian government. They believed a child of European descent wouldn't be properly raised by a black mother.
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But before this, the children were placed in exclusive boarding schools across the Congo-Belge and Ruanda-Urundi (DR Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi) where they would be taught about Belgium. The children's mothers were discouraged from visiting them.
"They taught us things about Europe, showing us pictures of cities; Brussels, Antwerp, and more," Kamanayo said.
In Rwanda, Save mission, which was located in present-day Huye District, was one of the schools. It was run by the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady of Africa. At least 300 children were taken from the school, adding to thousands of others including those from Burundi and DR Congo.
Kamanayo's father was a mining engineer who had different mines in the neighbourhood where his mother lived. He knew his father, everyone knew he was the father, but they had never spoken, as he never acknowledged him. He was taken to Belgium when he was 13 years old.
What was the process like?
Ornella Rovetta, a researcher at the State Archives of Belgium in the Resolution Métis Project, aimed at researching the history of people of mixed European-African descent born before independence in the former Belgian colonial territories (Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi), explained to The New Times that there was an administrative process in the 1950s to make it possible to take those children to Belgium and to obtain authorisation from their African families, especially their mothers.
"But of course, if you only look at it from the legal point of view, you do not get the full picture. You have to take into account what it means to explain to someone that their child is going to go to Belgium, what is the understanding on the other side, is it just studies, is the child going to come back and so on," Rovetta explained.
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Since sexual relations between Europeans and Rwandans were not admitted, the children who were born as a result fell into the category of abandoned children and orphans. They were considered "bastards" because their parents were not married.
"It was a sort of legal basis to say that those children had to be "protected" -- this is the vocabulary used in the sources, one that must be criticised, obviously. They were placed under "tutelle" which is a guardianship, an administrative supervision," Rovetta said.
As the children were torn away from their families, only a few were truly "adopted". Many were put in orphanages and foster families, who did not always take good care of them. This was combined with the suffering of forced separation, as they were even prevented from searching for their families when they grew up.
According to the Métis Resolution research, administrative supervision was practiced until they became adults, and even sometimes until they got married.
Some of the children were able to trace their roots, but others have not and may never be able to, because of limited data. Although the father was known in the neighbourhood, he was most of the time not willing to recognise the child.
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"So, if the child was not recognised then, they mostly did not have a birth certificate, for instance. It's mostly the European population that was registered in the traditional sense of the term used in Europe at the time. But where we can find traces is also, for instance, in parochial archives, baptism, church, and so on, because the children were also mentioned. On the other hand, the colonial administration itself also tried to register just to have an idea of the number of those who were under supervision or not of the state, to better know those children and to know how many of them they were," Rovetta noted.
As of December 2023, the Métis Resolution had received 360 requests to trace families and origins, of which at least 75 per cent were forwarded with concrete material from the archive. According to Rovetta, although some may deem this a small figure, among the remaining 25 per cent are also cases that were falling outside the scope of the project (in terms of date for instance), which made it more difficult to answer the demands.
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"And then for some people, there are these documentary inequalities which explain that sometimes, even though we are conducting a very thorough search in the archive, we cannot find it because maybe the document has never existed, because it was lost or just because it was not identified up until now," Rovetta added.
Kamanayo's reconnection with mother 22 years later
Life was not easy for Kamanayo in Belgium, although he was adopted by a kind family. From the weather and food to everything that mattered to him, including not seeing members of his family, not speaking his native language, and missing his home.
As he grew up, his life revolved around coming back to Rwanda to see his mother. He eventually became a TV journalist and after his first documentary in 1974, he made it clear to his employers that he wanted to cover not just Rwanda, but Africa in general. He was hoping to use the chance to see his mother again.
However, he was worried that his mother may not be still alive, given the post-independence insecurities targeting the Tutsi population, and in particular, that in 1959. In fact, when he got to his home area, he discovered that many people from his family had been killed, and others had fled to Rwanda's neighbouring countries.
When he went to where they lived before he was taken, his mother wasn't there, and no one could tell him where she could have gone or if she was still alive.
He had gotten married to his wife of almost 50 years now, had two children, and his family's wish was to meet his mother and show her her grandchildren when someone who knew where she lived contacted him in 1982.
"She was in the same neighbourhood, but in a different place, and she was completely alone. She had also become blind because of a disease she had contracted," Kamanayo narrated.
"Seeing my mother again was something very difficult to explain. The smell of your mother, you don't forget it," he added.
Unfortunately, his mother couldn't see him after 22 years of worrying and wondering why he never came back home. She thought he hated her, hence cutting her off, and that he had been with his father. On the other hand, Kamanayo used to wonder why his mother gave him away. It was an emotional reconnection. They didn't speak much though, Kamanayo had forgotten his mother tongue.
He tried to seek medical attention for her in Belgium, where he was based, but the doctor told him that she was in no condition to travel.
Nevertheless, there was a big party to receive Kamanayo and his family back to his community.
He eventually also searched for his father, who had migrated to France, and who finally acknowledged that he was indeed his father.
Today, Kamanayo lives in Shyogwe, a small town located in Muhanga District in Rwanda's Southern Province. He works with the locals in agriculture, on the land that was previously owned by his father.
During Rwanda's liberation struggle, he met the then RPF representative in Brussels and was lamenting how he had been told by an official at the Rwandan embassy that he was not Rwandan, after laughing at him that he could even come up with such a conclusion.
"He told me that if they ever liberated the country, I would inherit my father's land," Kamanayo explained. And as soon as they did, he took over everything smoothly.
He also owns a community library, Pourquoi Pas, where the young and old can read, mostly in French.
Mothers of abducted children
In their article "Re-centring the Mothers of Rwanda's Abducted "Métis" Children", Alice Urusaro Uwagaga Karekezi and Nicki Hitchcott discuss the absence of the voices of the Rwandan mothers of stolen children that have been erased from official history.
Citing different research, they portray that the cases of gender-based violence cannot be ruled out, as it has been effectively silenced through colonial mythology and taboo. "Sexual relationships between a colonial man and a colonised woman always involved an imbalance of power whether consensual or not," they argue.
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Indeed, we may never know the stories of those mothers and their families, whose children were legally referred to as "abandoned" and later forcefully taken away from them, some never to be seen again.
Kamanayo, who is among the few to reconnect with his family, recalls that his grandmother named him, and always expressed her love for him and how she would always protect and take care of him. How could he have been abandoned?
Post-colonial métis children
Antoinette Uwonkunda was born to a Greek father and a Rwandan mother in Butare, present-day Huye District in 1961. When she was a teenager, she decided to search for her father whom she heard was living in Burundi at the time. However, she was shocked to hear from the local leader in charge of providing identification cards that she was not Rwandan.
"He said there was no way I would be Rwandan, so he wouldn't help me. He then gave me a certificate of stateless persons, which I used for my travel," Uwonkunda explained in an interview.
She would later meet her father who would then tell her she was not his child. She moved on. Her bitter experience would later inspire her decision in 2020 to found Métis du Monde, a non-profit organisation based in Belgium, which supports mixed-race people all over the world in their needs, especially by providing school fees for children. They also give support in other means to mothers of mixed-race children, such as therapy, seed capital, and legal support when needed.
Uwonkunda is concerned with how even today, many workers from across the world come to Rwanda and have children with Rwandan women but later abandon them.
"We need an archive on these people where children can always trace their parents. Embassies should also do the same," Uwonkunda added.
On March 29, 2018, the Belgian parliament unanimously adopted the "Resolution relating to the segregation suffered by mixed-race people from Belgian colonisation in Africa", whose aim is to create a collective database of backgrounds of mixed-race people from colonisation, as well as a detailed historical study on the role of civil and religious authorities in their segregation, among others.
Decades after Belgian colonial atrocities, the question of justice for victims-- any or all--hangs heavy with unanswered questions.
