Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black

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PB371A-06 PB371-Hintzen-v1.cls July 13, 2003 12:47 Char Count= 0 

6 

Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, 

Negro, Moreno, Mundele 

Kaki, Black, ... 

The Wanderings and Meanderings of Identities 

JEAN MUTEBA RAHIER 

I have no race except that which is forced upon me. I have no country except 

that to which I’m obliged to belong. I have no traditions. I’m free. I have only 

the future. 

Richard Wright 

I was born in 1959, in what was then the Belgian Congo, of a Congolese 

colonized mother and a Belgian colonial father. I grew up in Belgium. 

Belgian Explorations: My Father’s Congo 

The Congo Free State (C.F.S.) was created as a private property of the 

Belgian King Leopold II in 1884–85 at the Berlin Conference and lasted 

until 1908. It was succeeded by the Belgian Congo, which lasted from 1908 

until 1960, when the country gained its independence (see Vangroenweghe 

1986; Ndaywel è Nziem 1998; Hochschild 1998). During the short history 

of colonial rule, the organization and implementation of the colonial enterprise 

were conducted almost exclusively by males. There was a contingent 

development of the institution of the ménagères, wherein African women 

85

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86 . Jean Muteba Rahier 

and the male colonizers developed relationships of sexual intimacy. These 

relations occurred between female “housekeepers” (the ménagères) and the 

male colonizers whom they were serving. These relationships developed 

within the context of the absence of European women—an absence legitimized 

by their supposed biological unsuitability for the African tropical 

climate (Habig 1944, 10–11; Stoler 2002). The practice of sexual relations 

between the male colonizers and the colonized African women was universal 

and widespread, particularly outside the most important urban centers 

of Leopoldville, Elisabethville, and Stanleyville. Once in the Congo, 

many agents of the state and many employees of private colonial companies 

looked for the companionship of African women, who provided them with 

housekeeping, affection, and sexual favors. Usually, Belgian men kept their 

ménagères with them until the end of their tour of duty. 

State employees and agents of private companies were contractually employed 

for a three-year term. They would normally leave at the end of the 

term, usually spending six months’ vacation in Belgium, after which they 

had the option of returning to the colony for another three-year tour of service. 

This could continue indefinitely. Upon their return to the colony, it was 

customary for them either to retain the same ménagère in their “employ” or 

to choose another from among the “available African women.” Sometimes, 

the ménagère would become pregnant. If she did, she was typically sent back 

to her village with a small “financial indemnity” and material compensation. 

Usually, the colonial agent would then choose a new, young African woman 

to replace her in his house and in his bed. 

The number of children born out of the widespread practice of sexual 

intimacy forced the colonial administration and the Belgian Parliament to 

debate what they termed the problème des métis, “the mulatto problem.” The 

issue was the treatment of the mulatto offspring of these unions: whether 

they should endure the same status as the rest of the Congolese population 

or whether they should be considered an intermediate group above the latter 

but beneath the Europeans. Attempts at resolving the dilemma produced 

a series of contradictory policies, resulting in considerable ambiguity. This 

ambiguity came to characterize the lives of the growing population of métis 

throughout the entire colonial period (Jeurissen 1999; Stoler 2002). Usually, 

the status of the métis depended upon the degree of recognition and 

acknowledgment of parenthood by their fathers. Those who were not recognized 

were often abandoned by their mothers because of the ostracism that 

they faced when returning to their native villages. The abandoned children 

usually ended up living in Catholic and Protestant missionary boarding 

schools, which were created for this purpose. 

So pervasive was the institution of the ménagère that it received considerable 

attention in Belgian colonial fiction (see, among others, Brom 1960;

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Métis/Mulâtre, Mulato, Mulatto, Negro, Moreno, Mundele Kaki, Black, ... . 87 

Gaillard 1935; Geeraerts 1995; Halen 1993). The sexuality of the female 

natives is one of the major preoccupations of these authors. A song entitled 

“La Négresse” (The Female Nigger), popular at the beginning of the twentieth 

century in the Belgian Congo, reports about the ménagères in these 

terms: 

Chacun, ici, tout haut plaisante Everybody here notoriously ridicules 

La noire, qu’on n’estime pas, The black woman who is not esteemed, 

Cependant beaucoup s’encontentent... However many are satisfiedwithher... 

Jeune, elle a de charmants appâts When young, she is charming bait 

La nuit chat blanc ou noir est gris At night, a white or black cat is grey 

Et l’plus malin se trouve pris. And even the smartest one swallows the bait. 

(...) (...) 

Petit à petit on s’habitue Little by little we get used to 

Acettefemmecouleurdejus... Thiswomanofadarkcolor... 

Il semble q’ell vous est connue Itseemsasifyoufinally know her 

Et son teint ne vous effraie plus. And her complexion stops scaring you. 

Vous lui trouvez même beaucoup d’chien, You even find her attractive, 

Le noir, en somm’ lui va fort bien. The black color, in fact, suits her well. 

(...) (...) 

Après trois ans, l’instant arrive After three years, the moment arrives 

Où le blanc doit s’en retourner, When the white man must go back home, 

Sa peine cachée est souvent vive; His hidden sorrow is often deep; 

Quant à la noire, sans s’étonner. As for the black woman, she is not surprised. 

Elle recompte dans son esprit She mentally counts and counts again 

L’argent don’t elleauraprofit. The money left that she’ll enjoy. 

(...) (...) 

My Mother was a Ménagère 

(Song “La Négresse,” in Anonymous 1922, 

32–34) 

(My translation) 

The notion of the “intimate” is a descriptive marker of the familiar and the 

essential and of relations grounded in sex. Its Latin etymology (“innermost”), 

which it shares with its homograph “to intimate,” is more telling still. It is 

“sexual relations” and “familiarity” taken as an “indirect sign” of what is 

racially “innermost” that locates intimacy so strategically in imperial politics 

and why colonial administrations worried over its consequence and course. 

(Stoler 2002, 9) 

My father, whose first name is also Jean, is the oldest of seven children. 

When he was eleven years old, his father, a pharmacist in Brussels, died 

of cancer. This, combined with the economic crisis stemming from World 

War II, forced him to assume the responsibility of helping his mother to

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raise his younger siblings. He was unable to pursue an education beyond 

high school. In 1945, when he was eighteen, an older friend of his who was 

serving in the Congo raised in his mind the possibility of colonial service. 

As a result, he signed his first three-year term contract in 1947 with the Palm 

Oil Mill Madaíl, a company installed in the Belgian Congo by Portuguese 

migrants from Angola. He eventually became chef de zone or area manager 

for the company in the Bandundu region. His first few months were spent 

learning about the business of planting palm trees and producing palm oil. 

He also used the opportunity to learn the Kikongo language—the major 

African language spoken in the Bandundu region. He enjoyed his position 

enormously and became financially secure. When he returned to Belgium 

after his first three-year tour of duty was up, he was able to take his mother, 

who had never left Belgium, on a trip to Switzerland. When he returned to 

the Congo for a second term, he decided to leave his job at Madaíltobecome 

the field manager on a sawmill project funded by two of his colonial friends 

in the forest region around Yuki, in the northern part of the Kasai Province. 

At the end of about two years, for a series of reasons too complex to explain 

here, the project collapsed. My father found himself broke and without a 

job just before the beginning of his second six-month vacation period in 

Belgium. 

It was while he was in the forest region around Yuki that he met my 

mother, Muswamba. Her father, Muteba, owned a small store on the bank 

of the Kasai River, not far away from the forest concession that my father 

managed. He had five children with her. I am their fourth child, the last one 

born in the Congo. My younger brother was born in Brussels in 1961. 

My mother is a Luba or Muluba. Tshiluba is her first language. She always 

refused to teach it to my father. They usually spoke in Kikongo, a language 

in which they are both fluent. For his third and fourth terms in the Congo, 

which ended abruptly in January 1961 (seven months after Congolese independence), 

my father signed a contract with the Compagnie Africaine 

Cooreman (CAC), which specialized in the production and export of a series 

of different products including palm oil, vegetal fibers, and wood. 

In 1993, I recorded hours of conversations with my father about his life 

there for a book that I am writing on interracial intimacy in the Belgian 

Congo. Here are some excerpts from our conversations, which I have translated 

into English. 

Jean Muteba: So, during all of these years of your first terms, you never had 

girlfriends or lovers? 

JeanSr.:Oh,... that’s another story! No, no.... Ihadsome;Ievenhadquitea 

few.But... 

Jean Muteba: They were always black women or you also had affairs with young 

(white) Belgian women? 

Jean Sr.: Black women, of course!

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Jean Muteba: So, our mother wasn’t the first black woman with whom you had 

an affair . . . ? 

Jean Sr.: No, no, no. She came into my life much later. I met her when I began 

the sawmill project along the Kasai River. No, obviously, I had girlfriends before. 

But it was without any consequence, no child, and no disease, nothing at all.... 

Jean Muteba: Yes, but how did you feel in these relationships with black women, 

in the context of the colonial society of the Belgian Congo, which was after all 

based on segregation? With these relationships you were trespassing a border, 

weren’t you? 

Jean Sr.: The border, you could trespass it temporarily if you had a ménagère, as 

we called them. A ménagère was a black girl who lived with you, generally. This 

was particularly the case for the Belgians who lived in a far away place in the 

bush, like us. We sometimes found them in the tribe in which we were working, 

or in a neighboring tribe, or in the family of one of our workers. 

Jean Muteba: How did you get these women to come to your place? How did 

their families react? 

Jean Sr.: It was exclusively for sexual intercourse that at firstwelookedforthem. 

Then, if you got along well with her it lasted longer. The families accepted that 

very well. The only problematic thing was to try to seduce the wife of one of the 

Africans. In that case, it could even become violent, or else they were going to 

complain to the agent who represented the Belgian state in the district in which 

you lived. Most of the time, that agent also had a ménagère. Then, he had to 

intervene. He had a lot of reasons for doing so. First of all, he had to administer 

justice. He played the role of mediator, let’s say.Tobeinconflict with a jealous 

husband who was living in one of the villages in which you worked was very 

bad for the job, even worse it if he was one of your workers. No, that, you had 

to avoid it at any cost. In any case, the choice of available African women was 

varied enough to be able to avoid that kind of situation. 

Jean Muteba: Yes, but... what kind of relationship did you have with these 

women? Was it really only sexual? 

Jean Sr.: Some of these women who were quite... let’s say... very attractive, 

were also not entirely stupid. That is why we chose more willingly girls who were 

in the process of evolution; that is to say that with these there were possibilities 

of contacts that did not exist with a savage girl who, for instance, didn’t know 

anything else than the customs of her tribe. In that case, the dialogues were quite 

poor. . . . They lived with their white man. Usually, they had, near the white man’s 

house, their small kitchen that the white man had had his boys construct, so that 

she could cook her own meals. But the white man, in general, and that was my 

case, had his boys to cook for him. It was a regime of separated kitchens! Why? 

Because... shecookedherownmeals. I bought her fish, game meat when there 

was some, and things of the sort. Some had already lived near or with a white 

man before and could, for instance; make bread and other things. But if not, 

that was it. The boys were there. The boys were guys who had gotten some style 

from previously working for another white man. But it was rare that you could 

find somebody like that in the bush. 

In another conversation, while he was explaining to me the circumstances 

of the birth of his first child—my brother Philippe—I went back to the issue

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of the ménagères. He had just told me about the gifts he had made to my 

matrilateral great grandfather, Kasadi (who was a “village chief”), with the 

aim of securing his authorization to take my mother as a ménagère. 

Jean Muteba: Let’s open a parenthesis. You told me once that when a white 

man got his ménagère pregnant, most of the time he sent her back to her village. 

. . . But you, as a white man, how did you feel in relation to all this? 

Jean Sr.: I felt that I was obligated towards her as if we had signed a contract. 

I thought that if I had children I had to take care of them. The fact that I took 

that responsibility upon myself in that way created some annoyances with other 

white men, but....You see, particularly when I was working for Madaíl, and 

even after, for other companies, you could have a ménagère. But if by any chance 

she became pregnant, the expectation was that you shouldn’t take care of them, 

that you should try to erase everything. That is to say that either you sent the 

mother back to her village with the baby, or else you had her go through an 

abortion. There were various local methods of abortion....Ididnotdothat. I 

assumed my responsibilities with my children. 

Jean Muteba: How old was Muswamba when you met her? 

Jean Sr.: In principle, she was sixteen; because, you know, they were not preoccupied 

with birth dates, and other things of the sort, with the same precision as 

we are. (...) 

Jean Muteba: So, it is very probable that she might have been younger. 

Jean Sr.: No, I don’t think so. No, no. As you know, I’m an atheist, but I received 

a Catholic education. I don’t know if it is because of the Catholic education 

I received, but I wasn’t like that. When Philippe was born, Muswamba, her 

parents, and her sisters were wondering how I was going to react, what I was 

going to say. But, I recognized him, just like I recognized each and every one of 

you. (...) 

Jean Muteba: Could you have married her legally, according to the Belgian law? 

Jean Sr.: Yes, why not? 

Jean Muteba: Why didn’t you do it? 

Jean Sr.: Because she didn’t stay in Belgium. 

Jean Muteba: You couldn’t have married her in the Congo? 

JeanSr.:TomarryherintheCongo....Thatwould not have been well received. 

It wasn’t legally forbidden, but it wasn’t legally encouraged either. (...) 

My father recognized his five children. Prior to 1960, my brother Philippe 

and my sister Annie were sent to primary school in Brussels, where they 

resided with my father’s mother. My father resolutely decided to spend the 

rest of his life in the Congo. On several occasions, he proudly told me that 

men like him were in fact the real “colonials,” unlike the other Belgians who 

went for a term or two and who planned to go back to Belgium with the 

money earned in the Congo. This explains why he remained at his post 

despite the proclamation of Congolese Independence on June 30, 1960. 

After the revolt of the soldiers of the force publique (the armed forces of 

the new state) and the general political unrest that followed (see Ndaywel è

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Nziem 1998, 561–664; see also the recent film by Raoul Peck, Lumumba), the 

situation became too dangerous for him to stay: some of his workers refused 

to accept his authority anymore. At the end of January 1961, the Compagnie 

Africaine Cooreman sent a helicopter with Belgian para-commandos to his 

rescue. He made the decision to take the rest of his family to Belgium. 

The helicopter took my father, my mother, my brother Guy, and me to 

Leopoldville, where we stayed for three days before departing for Brussels. 

Our presence in Belgium was fraught with enormous complications 

brought on by financial hardship, my mother’s inability to speak the French 

language, and the extreme racism that met us upon our arrival. My father’s 

mother died. We were forced to live in the home of two of my father’s sisters. 

All these factors combined to produce considerable tension that resulted in 

the breakup of my parents’ relationship. My mother, who was alone during 

the day with her younger children, felt alienated and rejected. According to 

my father, she began to suffer a series of psychological crises. Her behavior 

deteriorated to the point where “she had to be admitted to a psychiatric 

institution” in Brussels. It was there where their fifth child, my brother Yves, 

was born. A few months after his birth, my father made the decision to 

send my mother back to the Congo. She returned alone, without the children. 

According to my father, he made that decision in consultation with 

his brothers because her condition was not improving. Yves was six months 

old. I was two and a half years old when my mother left. 

Little Métis in Belgian Boarding Schools 

The departure of our mother left me, and my siblings, with a void in our 

life. This was compounded even further when my father decided, for financial 

reasons, to enroll us—as soon as we were “old enough”—in state and 

Catholic boarding schools. Unlike the expensive private boarding schools 

attended by the children of well-off American families, these schools were 

state-funded. As a result, tuition costs were extremely low. They were attended 

primarily by the children of the working and lower middle classes. 

Because of differences in age and gender, my eldest brother, Philippe, and 

my sister Annie went to separate boarding schools. Guy and I usually attended 

the same school. Yves (my younger brother) was taken care of by 

one of my father’s sisters, who enrolled him in a special education boarding 

school. This decision to enroll him in the special education system had to 

do, apparently, with the “special circumstances” of his birth. 

I was four years old when I was enrolled in my first boarding school in 

the city of Namur (located in the francophone part of Belgium). The school 

was run by Catholic nuns of the order of Mont Saint Jean de Dieu. Guy— 

who was six years old—and I were the only nonwhite children enrolled at

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the school. I have vivid memories of our two years there. My father was 

struggling to rebuild his life in Brussels, and he could not afford to take us 

home on weekends. We were forced to spend long weekends in the empty 

corridors and huge dormitories of the school, enduring the charity of the 

nuns until the other kids returned on Sunday nights. We looked with envy 

at the presents of toys and sweets that they had with them from their homes. 

The nuns treated us with pity, as if we were orphans. They sometimes gave 

us sweets on Sundays, before the return of the other kids. My memories 

are of sadness and depression brought on by their pity. My father at the 

time was working at two jobs, so he rarely visited. Sometimes, when he had 

managed to get time off, he would pay us sudden visits for a few hours, 

usually arriving late at night. Even more rarely, particularly during special 

holidays, we sometimes made the trip to Brussels with him by train. He did 

not own a car. 

We inevitably spent the two months of summer vacation, July and August, 

in state-funded sleep-in vacation camps: one month on the Belgian coast, 

on the North Sea, and one month in the Belgian Ardennes. We changed 

boarding schools often from one year to the next, either because there were 

frequent conflicts between my father and the school administrators or because 

he had been able to work out better financial arrangements with 

another school. It must have been very hard for him, a wholehearted atheist, 

forced to turn to Catholic nuns, brothers, or fathers for the education of 

his children. We only met all together as a “family” for Christmas vacations, 

usually in the house of one of my father’s sisters. All of my father’s siblings 

are devoted Catholics. 

At one point or another, one by one, my brothers and my sister revolted 

against this situation, and against my father’s strict authority, by leaving the 

school system and beginning a life on their own. This usually occurred after 

each reached the age of fifteen or sixteen years. Although I also revolted, 

Ibenefited from the fact that I was a good student despite the affective 

void that was ours. This resulted in a degree of toleration in my father and 

saved me from the pattern of inflexible discipline that he exercised with my 

siblings. The fact that I was younger, as the penultimate child, also helped. 

The prior experience of revolt against his authority by my older siblings 

seemed to produce a softening of his attitude toward me. I attended my last 

boarding school in the city of Spa, near Liège, at the age of seventeen. I am 

the only one of my father’s children who finished high school. 

Whiteness as Trope of Belgian National Identity 

A long tradition of scholarship on nationalism emphasizes the “homogenizing 

processes” of the ideologies of national identity from the end of 

the eighteenth through the first half of the twentieth century. According to

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Benedict Anderson, “national cultures” help(ed) to accommodate and resolve 

differences by ideologically constructing a singular “national identity” 

(Anderson 1991). Too often, the scholars writing on nationalism have failed 

to recognize a contingent phenomenon of nationalism that elides a superficial 

reading and that contradicts the homogenizing ambition: the creation 

of one or various “Others” within and without the limits of the “national 

space.” Indeed, to secure unity and to make their own history, the dominating 

powers have always worked best with practices that differentiate 

and classify. Their ability to select or construct differences that serve their 

purposes has depended upon the possibilities for exploitation that emerge 

in the dangers contained in situations of ambiguity (see Asad 1993, 17). 

Discrimination against the colonized subject becomes refined as distinction 

based on excellence and as an ideology deployed against the former, socially 

constructed as inferior and different, if not repugnant. 

The Congolese population never enjoyed claims of belonging to Belgium 

through citizenship. Such exclusion typified the practices of the other 

European imperial powers. It was grounded on nineteenth-century “scientific” 

definitions of race, which reserved citizenship exclusively for whites. In 

1830—fifty years before the creation of Leopold II’s C.F.S.—Belgium became 

a parliamentary monarchy organized around the idea of a unitary state with 

centralized institutions. In the process, the idea of belonging progressively 

came to be centered around notions of a homogeneous, racially white national 

identity imagined in contradistinction to the “savage black Africans” 

living far away in the colonies. The Congolese population could not constitute 

Belgian citizens. Such distinction was inscribed juridically, through the 

enactment of special laws legislated to administer their distinctly secondary 

and inferior status as colonial subjects. It is out of this conceptualization of 

polar opposites, divided by a “color bar” existing in the colonial imagination, 

that conditions of ambiguity emerged. Such conditions applied to the 

métis or “mixed-race” individuals occupying a social location somewhere 

between the “civilized whites” and the “uncivilized blacks” (see Jeurissen 

1999). In the colonial metropole, this racialized construction of a unitary 

national/imperial identity was hegemonically imposed by a francophone national 

bourgeoisie. It rendered invisible the conflict-producing differences 

between the Dutch-speaking Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons 

that began to emerge on the forefront of the Belgian political scene soon 

after the Congo became independent in 1960. This conflict continues to underlie 

most of today’s “national” political debates, or what remains of them 

in a federalized Belgium (Lesage 1999; see also my critical description of the 

permanent exposition of the Royal Museum of Central Africa at Tervuren 

in Rahier 2003). 

I grew up during the 1960s and 1970s, at a time in Belgium when the ideological 

climate was still very much characterized by an “ethnic absolutist”

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(Gilroy 1990; 1991) narrative of national history, and national identity 

framed in terms of white supremacy. It was a narrative of racial unity deployed 

against the growing populations of Sub-Saharan and North African 

migrants, who were constructed as racialized Others. It rendered intranational 

differences in Belgium invisible as Flemings and Walloons rallied 

against the Africans. This had particular consequences for the children of 

black and brown immigrants. Their exclusion from notions of national belonging 

was underscored by legal fiat. Even those born in Belgium remained 

foreigners until they reached the age of eighteen. The path to citizenship was, 

even for them, paved with legal procedures legitimized in terms of a choice 

of either returning to their “original” homeland or retaining their status as 

immigrants while filing for Belgian nationality. Many became eligible for 

Belgian citizenship in the 1980s. Those who became citizens continued to 

suffer from the endemic discrimination and racism that characterized their 

daily lives as immigrants. Their legal claim of belonging continued to be 

judged as “false” and “illegitimate” by mainstream, white Belgian citizens. 

Whiteness continues to function as a trope for (real) Belgian citizenship. 

The Métis is not White, But He or She Ain’t Black Either 

The racial and national “Othering” of the immigrant was ever-present in the 

various boarding schools that my brothers, my sister, and I attended, and in 

the vacation camps where we spent most of our summers. White kids often 

called us by names that marked us as different. I specifically remember 

a song, whose lyrics I did not understand at first: “Bambouli, Bamboula, 

qui a volé quéquette à moi?,” which when translated means, “Theyearsare 

going by, who stole my penis?” The stealing of the penis is a reference to 

the widespread practice of the rite of passage of male circumcision in sub- 

Saharan Africa. The song ridicules the practice. Unlike most of the Belgian 

boys with whom we shared bathrooms in our boarding schools and summer 

camps, my brothers and I were circumcised. And this served as an inscription 

of our racial savagery. We were forced to endure their perpetual racial insults 

and their taunts of sale nègre (dirty nigger); and Negro (nigger), which they 

sometimes pronounced while touching their noses as if to mean nez gros 

(big nose). More rarely, the insults were directed at our métissage (race 

mixing), with terms such as métèque or bâtard (both are pejorative nouns 

for “hybrid”). 

Under the constant pressure of racial insult, we sought self-esteem any 

way we could. During my first year of secondary education (I must have 

been eleven or twelve), my brother Guy and I were enrolled at the Athénée 

Royal de Jodoigne. There were a dozen or so Congolese boys also enrolled 

at the school. One happened to be the son of the Congolese ambassador

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to Germany. He was treated with a great deal of respect, particularly by 

the “guards” (euphemistically called éducateurs, “educators,” to distinguish 

them from the “professors” who taught classes during the day). This was in 

recognition of the status of his father and the fear of diplomatic consequences 

stemming from his ill treatment. A driver in a Mercedes-Benz picked him up 

every Friday afternoon to spend the weekend in Brussels with relatives. All 

of us, the black kids, were very proud of him and of the status of his parents. 

His presence among us served as a contestation of our inferior status in the 

eyes of whites. 

The black students attempted to assert their humanity and to combat the 

racism rampant in our school through racial solidarity. A group of white 

students, mostly comprising children of former colonial officials, organized 

a campaign of aggression against the nonwhite students in the school. Many 

of them were born in the Belgian Congo, where they had spent a significant 

portion of their childhood. With the advent of Congolese Independence, 

their parents were forced to move back to Belgium. This filled them with 

resentment against the Congolese population in general. Such resentment 

was expressed in a campaign of aggression directed against the Congolese 

and métis children of the boarding school. They mocked us by repeating 

the usual racist attitudes expressed against Congolese by Belgian adults of 

the time: “They’ve got their independence way too early!” “Yesterday they 

were still jumping up in the trees, and now they want to be presidents, 

ministers, and captains of enterprise!”“They’re going to destroy everything 

we’ve taken so long and so many efforts to build up.” “They’re just good to 

dance and party; they don’t know what work is,” and so on. One of their 

principal targets was the Congolese president, Mobutu. Most of them were 

able to speak Lingala and/or Swahili and sometimes would insult one of the 

kids in our group in one of these languages. This would always end up in a 

major fistfight—occasionally quite bloody—in which the educators had to 

intervene. 

The kids in our group would respond to their insults with statements 

that celebrated black pride and that vilified European colonialism. We made 

numerous uses of the slogans of the civil rights movements in the United 

States as well as of the mouvementpourleretouràl’authenticité (movement 

for the return to African authenticity) of President Mobutu, whom we were 

then defending as one of our heroes. Mobutu’s authenticité had led to the 

adoption of a series of nationalist measures: the renaming of the Congo 

as Zaire; the renaming of cities whose names were celebrating the Belgian 

colonial enterprise with Zairian names; the prohibition of using Christian 

first names; the adoption of the rule forbidding the use of ties that had 

become the symbol per excellence of the European; the replacement of the 

Western style suit by the Abacos (term taken from the French expression à

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bas le costume, “down with the suit”)—a kind of suit very much inspired 

by Chinese fashion that Mobutu wore until the end of his career as one of 

Africa’s worst despots. 

Guy and I had an ambiguous relationship with the group of Congolese 

kids attending Jodoigne’s state boarding school. On the one hand we felt 

very much part of the group; on the other, there were times when we felt 

estranged from it. This was particularly the case when members of the group 

would speak in one of the Congolese languages, none of which we could 

understand or speak. They would share, mostly in Lingala or Swahili, their 

memories about specific places in the Congo, typical dishes, and popular 

songs, bands, and singers, all of which were unknown to us. 

Our marginalization was especially dismaying when, during periods of 

calm between the white Belgians and the Congolese, some of the kids of 

ex-colonials would join the latter in conversations conducted in Lingala or 

Swahili. On these occasions, we would stay on the sidelines, consumed by a 

deep and awkward loneliness. Sometimes, the group of kids of ex-colonials 

would refer to Guy and me as “fake Africans” (that is to say “fake blacks”)or 

“métis who were more Belgian than they were” because of our inability to 

speak any African language. When they called us bâtard or métèque (insulting 

term for “hybrid”), it would highlight and underscore the “unnaturalness” 

of our liminal condition. These were times when I particularly wished that 

my mother were still around. Indeed, in the Belgium where I grew up, to be 

black meant to be African; it meant to be “non-Belgian,” or foreigner. And 

for that reason, my brothers, my sister, and I were in many ways out of place. 

We were obviously not white, but we were also obviously not “black,” that is, 

not Africans. This is the context in which our self-identification was shaped 

as “métis” or mulatto. To be a métis was to be member of no group. Métis 

are depreciatively termed in Lingala mundele kaki (literally “kaki white” 

and figuratively “dirty white”) by the Congolese. As a “group,” the métis 

shared no specific cultural traditions, nor any particular national space. The 

métis in the Belgium of my childhood were dispersed throughout various 

locations without any particular link among them. 

During the midseventies, years after I had completed my studies at 

Jodoigne, I developed friendships with persons from a diversity of African 

countries living in Brussels. They were from Niger, Benin (which was then 

called Dahomey), Mali, Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), and of course 

Congo, which by then was called Zaire. It is with this transnational group 

of friends (who were mostly children of diplomats) that I learned how to 

dance and slide like James Brown, to the rhythm of “Sex Machine.” We hung 

posters of our idols Cassius Clay/Mohamed Ali and Angela Davis. The music 

we loved was mostly from the United States—the Jackson Five, Diana 

Ross and the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, James Brown, the Four Tops, the

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Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, and so on—but also from Africa and 

the African diaspora outside the United States: my friends’ parents listened 

to the Bembeya Jazz National Orchestra, and we enjoyed with a particular 

pleasure because they were from the third world Manu Dibango, Bob 

Marley, and a series of Zairian groups. We knew most of their songs. They 

were like our flag of black pride. We hated the music of white artists, which 

we called “white noise”: principally Lou Reed, the English group The Slades, 

Genesis, the Rolling Stones, and so on. We all wore Afros and bell-bottom 

pants. 

Our blackness was viewed with hostility and suspicion by the Belgian 

authorities. We were often stopped by police officers asking to see our identity 

cards. They would shout, Papiers! (Documents!), indicating that they 

wanted to check whether we had a legal immigration status. Everyone else 

in our group would show the policemen a valid foreigner’s identity card 

or a diplomatic passport. I would always be the only one to show a Belgian 

identity card. The reaction of the cop was always the same: “You’re Belgian?” 

was the inevitable question. Every time, this would upset me deeply. I always 

responded defiantly: “Yes! You cannot read?” My attitude would invariably 

irritate the cop, who would respond by calling up on the radio to check the 

validity of my identity card. This was always profoundly humiliating. My 

friends already knew my story, that I did not know my mother; that I was 

basically living in boarding school, and meeting with my father and siblings 

only occasionally; that despite the way I looked I was Belgian from birth, 

by paternal filiation. The fact that I was unable to signify my “blackness” 

by speaking an African language sometimes provoked (well intentioned) 

surprise or pity. I silently hated it. 

Around 1976, my preoccupation with antiracism led to sympathetic involvement 

with Belgian, leftist political organizations. In July 1978, I was 

one of the ninety-member Belgian delegation of Christian Democrats, social 

democrats, communists, anarchists, and so on, who participated for three 

weeks in the 11th World Youth and Students Festival in Havana, Cuba. I 

did not speak Spanish at the time. I was eighteen years old, one of the two 

youngest delegates, and the only nonwhite. On the day of the festival’s inauguration, 

some of us had to parade behind the Belgian flag in the stadium 

in which the celebrations took place, before going to our respective seats in 

the area reserved for our delegation. The following December 31, during 

the New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s house in Brussels, I was approached 

by two Cuban engineers who had gone to Belgium for a year to learn about 

Belgian techniques of beer making. When they saw me arrive at the party, 

they jumped up and down and spontaneously hugged me. I welcomed their 

warm enthusiasm and embraced them as well. Then, I asked them whether 

we had met before. In halting French, they told me that they were in the

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stadium the day of the festival’s inauguration in Havana a few months before, 

and that since they already knew at that time that they were going to be in 

Belgium for a year, they paid special attention to our delegation during the 

parade. They spotted me right away, wondering who the hell I was, saying 

to one another that I looked very much like a Cuban, not like a Belgian. We 

all laughed. I was not surprised by their comment. 

I remember returning to Brussels’s airport from my first trip to Kinshasa 

in January 1994. The gendarmes in charge of the verification of the passports 

asked the passengers to form two lines, one for the holders of a Belgian 

passport, and one for the non-Belgians. As always in these circumstances, 

I felt odd to be the only “black person” in a line of white folks. While the 

line of non-Belgians was waiting for their turn to move on, the gendarmes 

asked the Belgians to show their passports by holding them high in their 

right hand and then proceeded to have them walk through the gate without 

even checking their documents. When it was my turn to pass in front of the 

gendarme standing near the gate, I was not taken aback—on the contrary— 

to hear him call me to the side. He inspected every single page of my passport, 

passing it under a purple lamp to check its validity, before asking me where I 

was living. I was then a resident of the state of Louisiana in the United States 

of America. My response did not satisfy him. He wanted to know why I was 

traveling to Belgium. I responded that his question was out of place; that as 

a Belgian citizen, I did not have to justify my going to what was supposed to 

be “my country.” He called two of his plain-clothes colleagues on the phone, 

and my luggage was thoroughly inspected, before they finally let me go, filled 

with an unforgettable frustration. I felt that I had been treated worse than 

the people in the line of non-Belgians. Or perhaps, they—unlike me—were 

really not expecting anything better. 

From Métis to Negro Fino 

When I enrolled at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, for the equivalent of 

my undergraduate studies in social sciences, I was quickly attracted to a 

specialization in social and cultural anthropology. Although most of the 

professors were Africanists who specialized in Central Africa, I developed 

a special interest in the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. I 

tended to identify with their greater displacement vis-à-vis Africa than with 

the African immigrants in Europe. I read the work of Melville Herskovits and 

Roger Bastide and began preparing myself to go to Northeastern Brazil to 

conduct fieldwork that would allow me to write my mémoire de find’études 

(the equivalent of a thesis). I took classes in Portuguese and read most of 

Jorge Amado’s novels. Chance sent me instead to Ecuador for the first time 

in the summer of 1984.

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In Ecuador I did most of my fieldwork in the province of Esmeraldas, 

on the coast, and ended up writing my thesis on the Afro-Esmeraldian oral 

poetry called Décimas—a form of oral poetry associated with blackness 

that has for its origin a written poetry that was popular in Spain during the 

Renaissance (see Rahier 1987; 1999). I also visited the black community of 

the Chota-Mira Valley on numerous occasions. After obtaining my degree 

from the University of Brussels, I went back to Ecuador and spent the years 

between 1985 and 1991 doing doctoral dissertation research. I defended my 

dissertation at the Université de Paris X, at Nanterre (France), in 1994 (see 

Rahier Forthcoming). 

In Ecuador, as elsewhere in Latin America, national identity has been 

officially constructed around the notion of mestizaje (race mixing) out of 

the imagination of the white and white-mestizo elite. This elite has reproduced 

an “Ecuadorian ideology” of national identity that proclaims 

the mestizo (mixed-race individual who has both European [Spanish] and 

indigenous or Indian ancestry) as the prototype of modern Ecuadorian 

citizenship. 1,2 It is an ideology based on the idea of the inferiority of the 

indigenous or Indian population, and on an unconditional—although 

sometimes contradictory—admiration and identification with Occidental 

civilization (see Whitten 1981, introduction; Stutzman 1981; Silva 1995). 

Despite its obvious attempt at racial and ethnic homogenization, this 

Ecuadorian ideology of national identity results in a racialized geography of 

national territory: rural areas are conceptualized as places of racial inferiority, 

violence, backwardness, savagery, and cultural deprivation. These are the 

areas inhabited mostly by nonwhites or nonwhite-mestizos. They are seen as 

representing major challenges to full national development toward the ideals 

of modernity. In this way, Ecuador resembles Peter Wade’s representation of 

Colombia in his book Blackness and Race Mixture, where he argues: “There 

is a distinctive spatial pattern to the overall structure of...nationhoodand 

its racial order” (Wade 1993, 58). Thus, national identity is complicated by 

rural-urban racial differentiations. This is precisely the point made by the 

editors of Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy in their 

introduction to the volume: “The utility of the countryside as a locus of 

national essence is more complicated in plural societies where rural populations 

are ethnically or racially marked, hence hardly a national unifier. In 

these cases, rural/urban differences often qualify ethnic and/or racial ones, 

demanding that all three be examined in tandem” (Ching and Creed 1997, 

25). 

Mestizaje, as Norman Whitten explained, does not mean that the 

white indianizes himself or herself but that, on the contrary, the Indian 

whitens himself or herself “racially” and culturally. The official imagination 

of Ecuadorian national identity “[is] an ideology of blanqueamiento

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(whitening) within the globalizing framework of mestizaje” (Whitten, personal 

communication). In this official imagination of Ecuadorianness, in 

which white supremacy is barely hidden, there is logically no place for blacks: 

they must remain “invisible.” Afro-Ecuadorians—who represent around 

5 percent of the national population 3 —constitute the ultimate Other, some 

sort of a historical accident, a noise in the ideological system of nationality, a 

pollution in the Ecuadorian genetic pool. The best example of “noncitizenship,” 

“they are not part of Mestizaje” (Stutzman 1981, 63; see also Rahier 

1999b and 1999c). 

The national development plans of the Ecuadorian elite see the cities 

(mainly Quito and Guayaquil) as the epicenters from which civilization radiates 

to the rural and frontier areas. Thus, Ecuadorian society, spatially 

constituted, is organized in a racial/spatial order within which the various 

ethnic and racial groups (indigenous peoples, blacks, mestizos, whitemestizos, 

and whites) occupy their “natural” places. Blacks and Indians are 

found at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy and in the periphery 

of national space, and the two “traditional” regions of blackness (both developed 

during the colonial period), the province of Esmeraldas and the 

Chota-Mira Valley, are looked down upon by the white and white-mestizo 

urban citizenry. The results of research I have conducted on representations 

of black people in the Ecuadorian press show this racial/spatial order to be 

at work transnationally: black people from the United States are not represented 

as negatively as Ecuadorian or African blacks (see Rahier 1999b; 

1999c). 

As an “Afro-European” man, I had more than once, during my six years 

of residence in Ecuador from 1985 to 1991, the opportunity to experience 

the existence of the racial order, and the spatial dimensions within which 

it is constituted. On numerous occasions, in Quito, white, white-mestizo, 

and mestizo persons, after learning about my Afro-Ecuadorianist research 

interest, spontaneously shared with me their negative views of blacks—of 

Ecuadorian blacks, that is—as “uncivilized people living in remote areas 

outside of the scope of modernity, where hot climates gave shape to their innate 

laziness and violence, which they bring with them when they migrate to 

urban areas.” They did so without ever thinking that their statements could 

offend me. The idea that I, a black person from the “developed world,” 

could identify with Ecuadorian blacks never entered their minds. Such an 

identification was simply not possible since, in their scale of ethnic and cultural 

respectability, and within the framework provided by the Ecuadorian 

“racial/spatial order,” my Europeanness supposedly erased my blackness. 

Why would I want it to be otherwise? It was thought that I should be proud 

of this. When I would then inquire whether they had realized to whom 

they were talking, that I was myself a black person, they would invariably

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respond, sometimes interrupting my question, with something to the effect 

that I was perhaps black, but that I was primarily a “fine black,” un 

negro fino, an “educated black.”“How can you compare yourself with these 

people?,” un negro educado. ¿Como así se va a comparar con esta gente pués? 

My outsiderness (Europeanness) was a powerful source of prestige. Race is, 

indeed, a floating signifier: it means different things, at different times, in 

different places. While in Belgium I have always been treated, in one way 

or other, as an outsider, as a foreigner. Strangely enough most Ecuadorians 

have been unable to think of me without locking me up into Belgianness, 

despite the fact that—unlike Paul Gilroy (see Gilroy 1993, 1)—I have found 

myself unable to embrace fully or claim Europe as my own. 

For Afro-Ecuadorian political activists, my birth in the Congo and my 

Congolese mother—whom at that time I did not know—became essences 

of my reified being. In the summer of 1987, Benoît,oneofmywhiteBelgian 

male cousins, went to Zaire with one of his friends. During the trip, Benoît— 

who is five years older than I am and who remembered very well my mother’s 

presence in Brussels in 1961—went out of his way to try to find her, and 

he did. When he returned to Brussels, he sent to each one of his métis 

cousins a series of photographs taken in Kinshasa. One of them was taken 

of my mother, sitting on a chair within the compound where she then 

lived in Kinshasa. I had kept a copy of this picture and showed it to the 

Afro-Ecuadorian political activists of the Grupo Afro-Ecuatoriano, in whose 

offices I then resided, and with whom I sometimes collaborated. Juan García, 

their leader, who was also the oldest in the group, decided to put the picture 

on a wall by the side of a relatively famous map of the world indicating the 

fluxes of the slave trade, with various arrows going from West and Central 

Africa to the Americas. I was surprised and puzzled by his reaction, but I 

silently let him do it. 

From Métis to Black 

In May 1991, I arrived in the United States in preparation for my marriage 

to an American woman, which took place in July in the Abyssinian Baptist 

Church in New York City. While in New York before the wedding, I got 

in touch with a group of black intellectuals. One of them invited me to 

a barbecue on a Sunday afternoon. During the barbecue in the backyard 

of the host’s house, while I was engaged in a conversation about South 

America with three black historians, a young African American woman— 

who, I found out later, had just graduated from Harvard—walked toward 

our group and suddenly asked me where I was from. With a generous smile, 

she justified her question by indicating that she thought I had a nice accent. 

I responded with the same old story, as I usually do when faced with this

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question: “I was born in what was then the Belgian Congo from a Congolese, 

colonized mother and a Belgian, colonial father. I grew up in Belgium.” 

Because I was then unaware of the heavily charged semantics of the term in 

the United States, and because I was arriving from Belgium, via Ecuador, 

where such an identific term is used without carrying the same stigma as 

it does in the United States. I ended my response to her with “I guess, I’m 

a mulatto.” Mulatto was the best translation I had found for the French 

métis. 

Her rather positive disposition toward me and my accent rapidly disappeared, 

and quite brusquely she almost shouted: “Do you have a problem 

with your blackness?” I stayed frozen for a few seconds. I did not understand 

what her question was about, although it was then clear to me that I 

had disappointed her by saying something she strongly disagreed with. One 

of the persons with whom I was in conversation before her interruption 

came to my rescue and explained that because I had grown up in another 

environment I identified differently than people in a similar situation might 

identify in the United States. Although still puzzled, I was relieved when the 

host called everybody to eat. Our group dissolved. 

That night, I told my fiancée that I wished she had gone with me and 

then proceeded to recount the incident. After a burst of laughter, she went 

on to explain the American “one drop rule,” adding that in some black 

circles in the United States, the acknowledgment by mixed-race individuals 

of their partly white ancestry was taken as “racial treason.” She pursued her 

explanation by making reference to the house slaves on plantations of the 

American South, who very often were “mixed-raced” and who sometimes, 

for that very reason, felt superior to the darker skinned field slaves. It all 

became clearer, and I felt some embarrassment over my performance that 

afternoon. If I had known all of that before, I would not have used the term 

mulatto for my self-identity. This was in fact the first and only time I have 

used it, in the United States, to explain who I am. 

I would have liked to clarify to my interlocutor at the barbecue that 

where I grew up, I was left with no other choice but to self-identify as a 

métis, that in order to claim “blackness” for myself, that is to say, to claim 

“Africanness,” I would have been expected to demonstrate—in addition to 

having a darker skin—the particular cultural knowledge that goes along 

with such an identity. In a way, her reaction to my answer was generous 

in the sense that it included me—forcefully indeed—in her definition of 

“blackness.” That actually made me feel good. 

After the wedding, 4 my wife and I traveled across the country and lived for 

a year in San Francisco. I went to the University of California at Berkeley and 

introduced myself to Percy Hintzen and Barbara Christian, in the Department 

of African American Studies. I had received their names and phone

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numbers from people who attended the barbecue in New York City. We very 

quickly became good friends. 

In San Francisco, I remember being amazed by the summer uniform of 

the mail carriers. These summer uniforms include a blue shirt and shorts, as 

well as a white hat absolutely identical to the very uniquely shaped colonial 

hats that European colonials wore in Africa. I could not believe it when I saw 

a black man wearing this hat nonchalantly. I commented upon the wearing 

of these hats by black men to my wife. She did not really understand my 

outrage at what I saw as an innocent and ignorant manipulation of one of the 

most visible symbols of European colonialism. Then, I thought about the 

young African American woman at the barbecue and felt as ethnocentrist 

as she had been with me. Why should a symbol of European colonialism in 

Africa be particularly meaningful to an African American mailman? 

While in San Francisco, I pursued the writing of my dissertation while 

applying to various universities that had open assistant professor positions. 

I was offered a job in the Department of Geography and Anthropology at 

Louisiana State University (LSU), in Baton Rouge. My wife and I moved 

there in August 1992. At LSU, I immediately became a member of the Black 

Faculty and Staff Caucus. Great was my surprise when I attended the first 

meeting: it began, as it always does, with a prayer. Given my background 

in political activism in Belgian leftist organizations, I was shocked at the 

practice of a Christian ritual at the opening of such a meeting. I had been 

used to the idea that leftist politics did not go hand in hand with religion. 

This introduction to African American religiosity compounded my culture 

shock. Although I remain an atheist, I made it a point to understand the 

important role played by African American Christian churches in the history 

of black resistance in the United States (see Taylor 1994, 2002). 

A Mundele Kaki in Kinshasa 

In December 1993, one week after the birth of my first daughter, Nadège, I 

embarked on a journey to go find my mother in Kinshasa. In retrospect, it 

seems that the birth of Nadège had triggered in me an urgency to finally do 

everything necessary to reopen a link with my own mother. Here are some 

passages from what I wrote in my diary at the time. 

Wednesday, December 22, 1993 

I am now in messy Kinshasa, after months of preoccupations and anxiety that 

came along with the preparation for this trip. 

I left Baton Rouge and my small family on December 15th. I arrived in Brussels 

on the 16th at noon. At my arrival, my father and my brother Philippe tried to 

discourage me from making this trip. My father, who had insisted repeatedly 

while we were growing up that we should not go to Zaïre because our relatives

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there would kidnap us to make him pay a ransom, was now referring to the lack 

of security and the growing chaos in Kinshasa to try to dissuade me. Philippe 

was asking me how I could embark on such a crazy project and “abandon my 

wife and my daughter one week after the delivery?”—adding that he could never 

have done that after the birth of his own daughter. He was in fact suggesting 

that I was a bad father. Their criticism abated once they realized that I would 

not change my mind.... 

The Sabena night flight to Kinshasa unfolded without problem. As soon as the 

plane touched down, I got a taste of the institutionalized disorder of (the last years 

of) Mobutu’s Zaire. The captain informed us—the passengers—that “duetoa 

litigation between Sabena and Air Zaïre, our plane could not go to the terminal 

area!” The plane was immobilized for an hour. I took the opportunity to talk 

to a young Zairian passenger, who gave me some advice on how to get to the 

city without having to pay too much money. (...) The disembarking was quite 

chaotic. The passengers were asked to form a line on the tarmac, beside the plane. 

Employees with and without uniforms took the passports and disappeared. A 

bunch of people in plain clothes came close to us and offered their services to 

retrieve our luggage for a small fee. I quickly understood that I had no other 

choice but to make a deal with one of them. They were off-duty soldiers who 

had not been paid for years. The one I hired was called Jean-Marie. He helped 

me through the process for retrieving my luggage and my passport. (...) 

At one point, Jean-Marie led me to an obscure office where I was interviewed, as 

every passenger was, one by one, by the airport chief of security. After exchanging 

a few words with Jean-Marie in Lingala, the chief suddenly turned towards me 

and asked in French, while scrutinizing my Belgian passport: “Why are you 

coming to Zaire?” I responded that as he could see in my documents, I was born 

here, that my mother was living in Kinshasa, that I had not seen her for 32 years, 

and that I was coming to try to find her and spend my Christmas break with 

her. I spoke with obvious emotion. After a few seconds of silence, he said that 

everything was fine and that I could go. He did not ask me for any money. Before 

we left his office, he said a few words in Lingala to Jean-Marie. Once back in the 

chaos of the airport, Jean-Marie told me that I would have to give him a little bit 

more money, because the chief of security had indicated to him, right before we 

left his office, that if Jean-Marie wanted to continue “working” at the airport, he 

would have to give him something. At first, I resisted what I interpreted as Jean- 

Marie’s attempt to get more money out of me. He vehemently responded that the 

chief had not dared to ask me for money because of the story I had told about my 

mother. I finally acquiesced and gave Jean-Marie what he wanted. Jean-Marie 

then helped me to leave the airport, take a taxi, and reach the apartment of my 

aunt Charlotte (the only relative of mine for whom I had the address). She lives 

in downtown Kinshasa. (...) 

Aunt Charlotte helped me find my mother. I met her that evening around 

10:00 p.m. in aunt Charlotte’s apartment. I recognized her right away from 

pictures that my father had shared with us. None of us cried. (I did so, 

profusely, a few days later.) We embraced and kissed three times. I remember 

feeling awkward when, for the third kiss, she looked for my mouth. I

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remember thinking: “I did not have a mother for so long, and now, here 

she is, kissing me on the mouth...!” That night, I gave her my presents, 

my brothers’ presents, photographs, and letters, which I read to her: she 

does not read or write. Aunt Charlotte and one of my cousins translated 

our conversation. My mother could understand most of my French, but she 

did not want to speak in French. When I asked her why, she responded—as 

my cousin translated—that although she could speak it a little bit, she did 

not want to do it in front of me, because she was somehow ashamed for not 

speaking it well enough. We drank the bottle of champagne I had brought. 

We all slept at Aunt Charlotte’s. When Mama and I kissed, our hands also 

touched. I was horrified to feel that she lost the small finger of her left hand. 

For a few minutes, I wondered how she had lost it, what had happened. This 

was in fact the subject of one of my first questions. She responded that she 

had hurt her finger at the market one day, and that to avoid the spread of 

gangrene, a doctor had decided to cut the finger off. My mother earned a 

small income by selling beignets (“fritters”) at the market every day. 

The next morning, I progressively began to understand that Mama was 

quite poor. I also met my brother Kalonji: my mother had four other children 

with four different men (from the oldest to the youngest, Kalonji, 

Chantale, Bernard, and Bienvenu). Kalonji had arrived to meet with us at 

Aunt Charlotte’s apartment. He stayed with me for the entire duration of 

my trip. He speaks French very well. He had graduated a few years before 

with a law degree from the University of Kinshasa. At various occasions, we 

even shared a bed—something I do not remember ever doing with any of 

my siblings in Brussels. 

After meeting, Mama, Kalonji, and I left Charlotte’s apartment together. 

We went to Bumbu, a peripheral neighborhood of Kinshasa where my 

mother and her parents lived, to meet my grandparents, my other brothers, 

and a series of cousins, uncles, and aunts. Very few of them could speak 

French. I am so thankful to Kalo for volunteering to stay with me every step 

of the way and be my translator. 

Although it is impossible to recount everything that happened during this 

trip, I must express my considerable pleasure at meeting my grandfather, 

Muteba. He died a few weeks after I left. During the long hours I spent with all 

of them in Bumbu, talking and listening, I was told why my first name was the 

same as my father’s—to whom everybody was referring with the respectful 

expression (inherited from the colonial period) of Monsieur Rahier, “Mister 

Rahier.” When I was born, my father was on vacation in Belgium. Since my 

grandparents had previously obtained my father’s approval that my brother 

Guy (who was born two years before me) be given the name Kasadi, after 

my great grandfather, as a middle name, they wanted to give me the middle 

name of Muteba, after my grandfather. They thought that if they named me

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Jean after my father, he would consent to their choice of a middle name. 

Of course, given the colonial context in which I was born, my mother and 

her parents were not allowed to file my birth papers in the absence of my 

father. When my father returned from Belgium, he objected absolutely to 

the name of Jean Muteba and filed my birth certificate with the name Jean 

Rahier, omitting the middle name. After hearing the story I promised my 

grandfather that I would put Muteba back in my name. 

Before I left Kinshasa, in January 1994, my grandfather—in a brief ritual 

during which he used a chalk to trace signs on my arms and legs—gave me 

the protection of my ancestors. Kalonji wrote the words in my diary: 

Esika nionso oyo yo okokende nzambe abatela yo na bakoko, asunga mosala na yo 

etambola malamu. Yo na libota na yo nzambe abatela bino. 

This means: 

Everywhere you’ll go, I ask that God and the ancestors protect you, they will 

make your work prosper, they will make your work be better. God will protect 

you and your family. 

In February 1994, a few weeks after my return to the United States, when 

my grandfather felt that the end of his life was near, he requested of his wife 

and daughters to be buried in the shirt I had given him as a present. 

Here are some passages of a long recorded conversation I had in Bumbu 

with Mama, my grandparents, and Kalonji: 

Jean Muteba: How did the grandparents and the other Baluba of the region 

around Yuki react when Monsieur Rahier asked to take Mama with him? 

Muteba: My father had already said, way before Monsieur Rahier made his 

proposition, even before Monsieur Rahier came in the region, that Muswamba, 

because she was very pretty, would surely end up with a white man. At that 

time, white men were looked at as being superior, in a way. Because she was very 

pretty, my father thought that she could not have but the best. 

Mbelu (my grandmother): Muswamba’s grandfather was saying at the time that 

he had given various women to Baluba men. With many of these unions, there 

had been problems, so he welcomed the idea that a white man was interested in 

Muswamba. 

Jean Muteba: What kind of problems happened with Baluba men? 

Mbelu: There had been complications after some of the marriages that he had 

allowed to take place before Monsieur Rahier came by for Muswamba. Some 

of the Baluba husbands had repudiated their wives, and other problems. That’s 

why he was saying that if a white man insisted on taking Muswamba, he would 

allow it to happen. 

Jean Muteba: What did Kokoyamwasi, “Grandmother,” say when the white man 

asked for Muswamba? 

Muswamba: Monsieur Rahier did not come asking for me right away. At first, 

he was coming in your grandfather’s store as a friend, just to chat and spend

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some time. His goal was more or less hidden. (Laughter) One day, he came by 

and asked for water to wash his hands. I filled the dish with water and brought 

it to him. He was outside. When I was near him, he gave me a ring, a necklace, 

and some cloth to make a wrap-around (pagne). I still have the necklace. 

Jean Muteba: After that, what happened? 

Muswamba: (Laughter). There are things that you may not ask your mother 

to talk about....(Laughter) Monsieur Rahier had a good relationship with my 

sister, Mala. They were friends, in a way. At the beginning, he used her to communicate 

with me. 

Mbelu: Monsieur Rahier wasn’t the first white man to try to seduce your mother. 

There had been another one who had tried before. He was an agent of the state. 

Kasadi, your great grandfather, did not allow it to happen. That other white man 

was the guy in charge of making the census. To make the census, the white man 

with his Congolese soldiers arrived in a village and asked everybody to regroup 

in a central area. On that day, while he was making the census, he said: “That 

girl (pointing towards your mother) should not marry a black man. She is too 

pretty for that!” At the end of the census, the white man called your grandfather 

and asked him to be shown the woman with whom he had had your mother. 

When your grandfather showed me, the white man refused to believe that I was 

her mother. He thought I wasn’t pretty enough to be your mother’s mother. 

(Laughter) At that time, your grandfather had a lot of things. He had many 

goats. The white men of the area always came to his store. 

After that, the conversation went on to another subject. During my stay, 

Mama found a way to tell me that when she was sent back to the Congo, 

in the early 1960s, she was not crazy. She said that my father had sent 

her back because he wanted to get rid of her. She also said that my father 

and his brothers had lied to her. She remembered making a deal with my 

father: although their three older children—Philippe, Annie, and Guy— 

would remain with Monsieur Rahier in Brussels, the two younger ones— 

Yves and I—would leave Belgium with her. She said that when she left the 

institution where she was kept, they gave her pills (probably Valium) that 

“made her feel tired.” When they arrived at the airport, she said that she was 

escorted to the plane’s cabin, where she had been told Yves and I were waiting 

for her. She said that when she realized that we were not going with her and 

that the plane took off, she had felt profoundly wounded. She explained that 

it had been terrible for her to live without any of her five children for so 

long. 

In August 1994, I arranged for Mama to come live with my wife, Nadège, 

and me for a while in Baton Rouge. She helped a great deal by taking care of 

my daughter, Nadège, during the day. We took care of her in many different 

ways, with her health and well-being in general. She stayed in Louisiana, in 

my house, for four years. To live with Mama was the source of great pleasures. 

We, of course, both learned a lot about one another, and I am very glad to 

have been able to have this experience with her. Her presence also allowed

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both of us to understand the depth of the cultural gap that separates us. Since 

Kalonji was not there to translate anymore, she had to reveal what she had 

called her imperfect French to me. I began learning Lingala with books I had 

bought in Brussels. Our relationship progressively became more intimate. 

The cultural gap between us was not, of course, limited simply to linguistic 

skills. We held two different worldviews. In many ways, the United States 

constituted for her an unfriendly environment for which she had not been 

prepared at all. She was used to navigating within an extensive social network 

and felt quite lonely in Baton Rouge and later in New Orleans. What so many 

people assume to be instinctive in the relationship between a mother and her 

son was not a given for us. The culturally determined expectations I had for 

a mother did not meet her culturally determined expectations for a son. On 

several occasions, she complained to me that I was not respecting her, that I 

was treating her as if she were my grandmother, and that I should stop doing 

that. At first, because I did not understand her premises, I patiently asked her 

to explain to me what she meant. I came to understand that, in fact, she was 

upset because I sometimes approached her jokingly although with affection, 

just as so many children would approach their parents in the “West,” by 

teasing them. I learned that among the mostly patrilineal ethnic groups of the 

Congo, a son could have what anthropologists call a relation à plaisanterie— 

that is to say, a relationship within which teasing is allowed—only with his 

grandmother or grandfather, never with his mother or his father. With his 

mother, a son has to maintain a more formal relationship, which does not 

allow joking and teasing. I was appalled to reach that understanding and 

to find out that what were for me genuine demonstrations of affection had 

been interpreted as disrespect. At one point, I felt completely disappointed 

by the whole situation. Mama and I talked about it a lot. We reached the 

conclusions that both of us needed to make special efforts to establish bridges 

of communication and understanding. 

I remember calling my father in Belgium, the first day my mother arrived 

in Baton Rouge. I was excited and told him, “Mama is here, and we’re going 

out right now to buy her some shoes.” She had only one pair of bad shoes 

with her. I was appalled when my father interjected: “Be careful, son, with 

them; it’s always the same thing. It begins with a pair of shoes, and it will 

end up with you being broke. She’s going to abuse your wallet. Be careful!” 

I did not know what to say. I felt the need to sit down. I hung up on him. 

He was talking to me about my mother, insinuating that she was a parasite, 

or an Other to me—and to him—and that he and I were on the same side 

of “his story.” After that phone exchange, the relationship I had with my 

father—which had been relatively good until then—came to a total stop. 

With the exception of one other phone call, we have not spoken since the 

summer of 1994.

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Mama went back to Kinshasa in the summer of 1998, when I left LSU for 

Florida International University, in Miami. 

Confrontation with Afrocentrism 

One of the courses I taught at Louisiana State University was entitled “African 

diaspora Cultures.” Many African American students in a variety of majors 

enrolled in that course. Together, we explored the great diversity of African 

diaspora cultures in the Americas, the very different socioeconomic and 

political contexts within which black communities live, the different approaches 

adopted by scholars through time in their study of these cultures. 

I, of course, emphasized my own approach, which consists of understanding 

that there is a great diversity of black subjectivities out there; that blackness 

should be conceptualized as a series of personal, social, economic, and political 

processes taking place in local, regional, national, and transnational 

dimensions. The very nature of this course, at least as I was conceiving it, led 

to a logical critique of essentialist and “Afrocentric” understandings of the 

African diaspora. Some of the African American students were profoundly 

annoyed by the choice of some readings, by the content of our discussions, 

and by the criticism addressed to Melville Herskovits, Roger Bastide, and 

Afrocentric thinkers. In our discussions, I adopted an antiessentialist position. 

My perspective always provoked some of the students to drop out of 

the course altogether. 

I remember one particular in-class discussion, during which a student was 

voicing the usual Afrocentric rhetoric. He was talking of “Our true identity”; 

“We, American blacks, are all Africans!”; “Africa is our Fatherland and many 

of the things we do today are in fact of African origin”; “Herskovits was right; 

African diaspora studies should focus on the discovery of our African roots”; 

“We must fight to give an Afrocentric education to our children in America, 

so they will know who they really are”; and so on. 

I then spontaneously chose to respond by disclosing to the class the 

processes that Mama and I were going through at the time. I explained that 

I had reconnected with my Congolese mother, after a separation of thirtytwo 

years, a few months before. I told them that she was now living with 

me, and that we were going through tough times because of the cultural 

gap that separated us. I insisted on explaining that both of us, Mama and 

I, would actually have preferred for things to be happening differently, that 

it would have been easier if indeed we did share a similar worldview and 

cultural background, and that we would probably have been so happy if our 

relationship were not an intercultural one. I concluded by going back to a 

point I was making prior to the beginning of the discussion, which was that 

the reality was such that differences did exist between black peoples and

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black cultures, that nothing was wrong with that, that black subjectivities 

were beautifully diverse, that no one should try to determine what “blackness 

really is” and then try to impose his or her views on others by telling them 

what their true identity is, that such an enterprise was a very oppressive 

one that no one should have to endure, that a course on African diaspora 

cultures had no other objectives but to make sure that the students enrolled 

in it would learn a great deal about different realities of blackness in the 

black Atlantic and beyond. I always made a point of stressing my hope that 

pan-Africanism be a movement based on the celebration of the diversity of 

black subjectivities instead of attempting to justify erasures of differences. 

I am now living in the Miami metropolitan area, where the diversity of 

blackness is basically an integral component of the surrounding landscape, 

to the point that here Afrocentric discourse cannot rally the same support 

that it gets in other locations of the United States. Cultural gaps characterize 

the daily interactions between African Americans, Jamaicans, Bahamians, 

Haitians, African-born immigrants, and members of the African diaspora 

from Cuba, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and so forth. 

The cultural and ethnic diversity of blackness in Miami provides my own 

wandered blackness with a comfort I have never found in the other U.S. 

locations where I lived before. Here, my relatively strong French accent does 

not make of me an exotic Other as it did in New York, Louisiana, and San 

Francisco. Very few ask me where I am from. Many, in fact, think that I must 

be from Haiti, and that is fine with me. I plan to, one day, take the time to 

learn Haitian Creole. 

At this point, it is not my intention to produce generalizations on the basis 

of the events and processes I have described here. Obviously, behind my selfethnographic 

narrative is the intent, as the title of the volume indicates, to 

problematize “blackness.” However, after rereading this self-ethnography 

from a distance, it appears that this narrative is about marginalization in 

arenas where identity is racially and culturally essentialized (Belgium), in 

arenas where hybridity and blackness are constructed in ways that exclude 

my self by either locking me up in notions of Belgianness or by idealizing 

Africanness (Ecuador), and in arenas where a particular understanding of 

blackness cannot accommodate notions of difference (the United States). 

Although blackness is a fundamental component of my identity, I am marked 

for exclusion in all the arenas that I participate in, in Africa and in the 

African diaspora. I have no claim of “belonging” anywhere really, but to this 

abstraction that is the transnational or postnational black world. 

I think that my self-ethnography is a story of self-realization that has 

unfolded in such a way that it points to the interstices, the liminal spaces 

between the insides and the outsides, as the most naturally comfortable 

places for me to be. I do not conceive these intersticial places as Tejumola

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Olaniyan conceptualizes them (in this volume), as a sort of transitory or 

purgatory stage, wherein one is in waiting prior to entering into a newly 

centered blackness. Postnationality, or nomadic citizenship (Joseph 1999), 

is a condition within which more and more of us locate ourselves, as a result 

of our diverse international trajectories. 

Acknowledgment 

Many thanks to my friends and colleagues, Percy Hintzen and Robin Sheriff, 

for reading and suggesting changes to a previous draft of this chapter. 

Notes 

1. In the dialogues I transcribe here, the three dots that are not inside parentheses indicate a 

pause by the speaker, whereas “(...)” indicates that a section of the dialogue has not been 

included because it is not relevant or necessary for the point I am trying to make. 

2. Different kinds of race mixing are referred to by different terms in Ecuador. Whereas the 

mestizo is the product of European and Indian ancestry, the mulato is the result of European 

and African mixing, and the zambo the result of Indian and African mixing. 

3. Demographic estimations about the racial and ethnic composition of the Ecuadorian population 

vary quite a lot. National censuses do not inquire properly about racial and ethnic 

identity. Here is the estimation I work with: of 10 million Ecuadorians, around 5 percent are 

Afro-Ecuadorians, around 40 percent are indigenous people, around 50 percent are mestizos 

and white-mestizos, and around 5 percent are whites. The term white-mestizo is very much 

in use in Ecuadorian society and among social scientists. The people called mestizos tend to 

have darker skin than the white-mestizos and usually present physical features that clearly 

indicate indigenous ancestry. Most of the white-mestizos are included in the local middle 

classes and in the national elite of entrepreneurs. 

4. We divorced in May 2001. 

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