The White Sisters of Africa posing with Métis boarders at the Save institute in Rwanda.

Métis: the colour of sin

24H01 · June 2016

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Belgian colonisation in Africa? What springs to mind straight away is a missionary in white clothes and a white helmet, posing beside half-naked Black natives. It is a widespread image that leaves out a third category, one that is almost never mentioned: the Métis. These children, born of often adulterous relationships between European colonists and African women, troubled the Belgian authorities: neither Black nor white, they upset the social order of the colony. Torn from their mothers and disowned by their fathers, they were hidden, isolated and moved around throughout their childhood, then gathered onto charter flights to Belgium in 1959, on the eve of Congolese independence. Today, still bearing the scars of their youth and weary of the silence that surrounds their story, Belgium’s Métis have decided to speak out. One association will even meet Brussels parliamentarians next October1 to plead their cause. Life stories from Luc, Eveline, Charles and François, who bear “the colour of sin”.

  1. 1 20 October 2016, Les jeudis de l’hémicycle.

“There are white people, Black people, and then me, in between…”

From early childhood, Métis children were taught that they were worth more than Africans but remained inferior to Europeans. Discriminated against by both groups, they struggled to find their place. A journey into the past of Eveline Schmit, a Métis woman who never really found her way.

Eveline Schmit.
Eveline Schmit.

“My father worked for the Belgian state as a territorial agent in the colonies. He met my mother during a posting in Rwanda, and they married according to local custom. I was born in 1952.” Eveline Schmit, like many children born in territories under colonial rule, is the product of an encounter between a European coloniser and an African woman. Around 10,0001 Métis children were born in the Belgian colonies of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi (then known as Ruanda-Urundi) between 1908 and 1959. These children troubled the Belgian authorities, who saw them as a threat to the social order of the region. Half white, half Black, they blurred a racial distinction that was the very foundation of how the colony worked. They also raised the question of colonial prestige: with European blood running through their veins, they could not be regarded as “mere natives”. The words of Pierre Nolf, a Belgian scientist of the first half of the 20th century, illustrate the concern stirred up by the Métis Question: “These unions [between a white man and a Black woman, Ed.] are generally not happy for those who enter into them. They produce Métis who, belonging to neither of the two races, form an unstable and discontented social element. They are a serious threat to the future of the white race, which will remain capable of fulfilling its civilising mission only on condition that it preserves the quality of its blood.”2

“My father took me away by force”

“When I was two and a half, Pierre Schmit, my father, came and tore me from my mother’s arms,” Eveline recalls bitterly. “He had waited until I was toilet-trained so that he could place me in a special boarding school for Métis children. He had to try several times to find me, because my mother hid me every time he came. In the end he took me away by force. Most white fathers did not want their Métis child to grow up in African culture. They wanted us to have a Western upbringing: to dress, eat and speak like white people.” The boarding school her father took her to in 1955 was in Ndoluma, near Goma in the Congolese region of North Kivu, 200 km from her homeland. Her mother lived near a boarding school for Métis children in Butare, Rwanda, yet her father preferred to send her far away to make sure her African family would not come looking for her. She ended up at a North American Protestant mission with some thirty children, all of them Métis. Most had been brought there by their fathers or by colonial administrators who had found them in the countryside. At the time, when a white man saw a little Métis child in a village, custom had it that he would take the child away and leave them at a religious mission, sometimes without even bothering to tell the mother. Sarah Heynssens, a Belgian historian, explains the reasoning behind this policy: “Colonial officials were instructed to follow a set of very strict rules concerning children with European ‘blood’. The Recueil à l’usage des fonctionnaires et des agents du Service territorial, a practical handbook for colonial officials, asked agents in the field to persuade African mothers to send their Métis children to the missions.”3

Life at the institute

At the Protestant boarding school, Eveline learned English and quickly forgot her mother tongue, Kinyarwanda. The missionaries did not allow any native language to be spoken at the school. It is a recurring problem among the Métis: when they reconnect with their African families years later, they cannot rebuild ties because they cannot understand one another.

“Most white fathers did not want their child to grow up in African culture. They wanted us to dress, eat and speak like white people.”

“I prefer to call it an orphanage rather than a boarding school because, even though we were not orphans, that is what it amounted to. We were unwanted children. Neither my father nor my mother ever visited me. In fact, no parents came to see the children; we were left entirely to the missionaries. Years later, I asked my dad why he had never come. He apologised and told me that ‘it was too far’.”

The religious missions gave the children board and lodging along with a rudimentary religious education. They dressed them in second-hand clothes from the United States and made them live in the Western manner. The children had to wear shoes, for example: an ordeal for those who were not used to them. “The missionaries taught us to read and write. In the end we saw little of them; we young Métis were always among ourselves. We played, we comforted one another: we were like one big family. I remember we often wondered why we were so far from our parents. What had we done to be set apart? We concluded that it was because of the colour of our skin. There were white people, Black people, and then there was us.” The Métis did not reach this conclusion on their own: the missionaries often reminded them that their skin bore “the colour of sin”. Later, Eveline’s American adoptive mother would tell her over and over that she must repent and devote her life to atoning for her parents’ sin.

A change of hemisphere

In 1959, the excitement in the Belgian Congo became palpable. Groups of young people danced in the streets, the atmosphere grew heated and one word was on everyone’s lips: independence. Missionaries, colonial administrators and other muzungus (white people, in Kinyarwanda) hurried to pack their bags and go home. As the Congolese Métis children were considered the “property” of Belgium, they were repatriated to Brussels.

“At the institute, we often wondered why we were so far from our parents. What had we done to be set apart?”

The young Rwandans and Burundians were sent back to their homelands, as Ruanda-Urundi still belonged to Belgium. An American missionary accompanied Eveline to Bujumbura, in Burundi, to find her biological father. “He wanted me to be sent to Europe with the others. I was 7. When we arrived, we were placed in a Protestant boarding school in Uccle, under the guardianship of a Swedish pastor. None of us went through the Belgian adoption services.”

The boarding school wanted to find them Protestant adoptive families, which were hardly thick on the ground in Belgium. After about a year, the pastor found a family in Boston, in the United States, willing to take Eveline in. A few letters were exchanged and the matter was settled: she was sent across the Atlantic. All this without the involvement of a social worker or a psychologist, and without any enquiry into the family in question. “This third turning point in my life was a disaster. My new American family consisted of a young nurse and her disabled mother. They belonged to a cult around which they organised all their activities. I could only go to the schools and see the members of their group; it was an unhealthy environment. But what broke my heart even more was the thought that my mother would never be able to find me after all these moves.”

“Neither my father nor my mother ever visited me. No parents came to see the children: we were left entirely to the missionaries.”

Sadly, what followed proved her right. Yet Eveline searched relentlessly for her mother for years. “I did a huge amount of research through embassies, but it never led anywhere. I ended up telling myself she was dead. I later discovered that, when my father took me to the orphanage in Ndoluma, he changed my first name, my date of birth and my mother’s name, to make sure she would not find me. My searches were completely in vain.” Many Métis had their papers falsified in this way. In Eveline’s case, her biological father wanted to make sure her African family would not come looking for her at the boarding school. In other cases, the colonist had a family in Belgium and did not want his wife to learn of the existence of an illegitimate child who was, on top of that, half Black. Only a tenth of the 10,000 Métis children were legally recognised by their fathers. White men feared being dismissed from their posts if they revealed the existence of their offspring. That was the case with Eveline’s father, who chose to wait until he had retired before signing a proper birth certificate.

Healing the wounds

Eveline moved back to Belgium at 29. Her father never agreed to help her identify her mother. He wanted her to start a family in Europe and shed her African roots completely. “My father had been asking me to come back for several years. When I arrived, I no longer spoke any French, so I struggled to find work. I started studying medicine at UCL, which I gave up five years later when I was offered a job in a laboratory. I got married and never thought about moving again.” Eveline went back to Rwanda for the first time at the age of 60. She was terrified of the Land of a Thousand Hills: all she imagined of her native country was violence, murder, abduction and corruption. She discovered a healthy society, welcoming people and breathtaking landscapes. She never found anyone from her African family, however.

“Our terrible story deserves to be known. It is time to break the silence.”

There are as many different stories as there are Métis. That does not stop Eveline from feeling bound to all children of mixed blood: “There is something that made all of us suffer and that forged our shared identity. It is the feeling of not belonging to any group. Of always being seen as the outsider. In Africa, people pointed at me in the street and sometimes made fun of me. In Belgium, parents would not let their children play with me because of the colour of my skin and because I was an orphan. In the United States, people in the African-American community rejected me when they found out my father was white. Everywhere I lived, the same pattern repeated itself: there were Black people, white people, and then me, there, in between.” The traumas of her childhood and adolescence have marked Eveline for ever. Today she is finally able to put her past pain into words: she is writing a book that she hopes to publish one day. “Our terrible story deserves to be known. By reading about my life, other Métis may find the courage to tell their own stories too. Writing about my misfortunes has eased my anger. It is time to break the silence.”

  1. 1 This figure, from the African archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels, is fairly approximate, as many Métis children were not registered at birth.
  2. 2 Remarks dating from 1930, quoted in Assumani Budagwa’s book “Noir, Blanc, Métis. La Belgique et la ségrégation des Métis du Congo belge et du Ruanda-Urundi (1908-1960)” (2014), p. 84.
  3. 3 Quoted from the article “Entre deux mondes. Le déplacement des enfants métis du Ruanda-Urundi colonial vers la Belgique” (2012), Sarah Heynssens. Read it in full here.