Metissen of Belgium: a poignant portrait – VPRO Documentary Guide

There stands Anne, as proud as a peacock. In front of a large building, in a white dress with white slippers and a blue hat on her head. Recently, Anne’s mother had dressed her and her brother in new clothes because they were going on a trip. They knock, a nun opens the door. A room full of playing children opens up. Curious as Anne is, she immediately walks through the door. Then she hears the gate closing. She turns around. Her mother has disappeared.

It is one of the many heartbreaking stories in the triptych Metissen of Belgium. Exactly sixty years after the independence of Rwanda and Burundi, the documentary series tells the history of more than three hundred ‘metis’ – illegitimate children of a black mother and white father – from the Belgian colonial period in Rwanda. They were sometimes literally torn away from their mother’s arms by the Belgian government because they did not fit into the colonial system.

In the Christian boarding school of Save (in the south of Rwanda), these ‘children of sin’ received a separate education according to white standards, far away from their ‘incompetent black mothers’ and the ‘inferior African society’. For example, Yvette says in the first episode: ‘If we did something well, we were white. If we did something bad, we would have been better off staying in the shacks with the blacks. And it was always our mothers who were whores, not the fathers.’

The children’s agony did not stop in Save. Just before independence, they were taken from boarding school and flown to Belgium: for the second time they were torn away from their familiar environment. There they ended up in a temporary or permanent adoptive family or an orphanage. The children will not have access to their official file until 2015. Metissen of Belgium follows the search of sixties Jaak, Paul and Jacqueline for their roots, while they tell their life stories.

“God created the white and the black man, the devil created the metis,” Joseph Pholien, later Prime Minister of Belgium, once said. Metissen of Belgium empathetically explains the effect of this idea on human life and how the resulting feelings of guilt and shame affect subsequent generations. Almost all Metis appeared to have decided early in their lives: ‘I’m going to be invisible, so they can’t hurt me.’ Or: ‘I will be the strongest.’ This triptych is downright shocking, but above all it shows the power of vulnerability. Because now she stands here, as brave as a lion. In front of the camera, with a tear-stained face. But with your head held high.